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Research areas

Music Librarianship; Information Literacy; Plagiarism; Maurice Abravanel; Recorder; Traverso; Early Music Performance and Pedagogy

Profile

As a child, Lisa spent many happy hours in the public library in the rural town of Glocester, Rhode Island, dreaming of becoming a librarian when she grew up. She landed her first professional library position twenty-one years ago at the J. Willard Marriott Library on the University of Utah campus. Lisa quickly moved up through various library departments, receiving an excellent foundation in what it takes to make an academic library great. Lisa joined the School of Music in June 2013 as the new Director of the McKay Music Library. She brings her interests and expertise in music, languages, academic libraries, digital libraries and preservation; data curation, and instruction to her current position of leadership. Blossoming out of the old listening lab in 2001, the McKay Library has expanded its collections and facilities through Lisa's dedication and perseverance. The library has grown into a scholarly and inclusive space designed to foster success for all students in the School of Music. As a music librarian and scholar, one of Lisa's early projects in the School of Music has included digitizing Maurice Abravanel's Mahler symphony scores. See the digital collection portal here. Lisa has presented on various aspects of this project and Abravanel at several regional and national conferences (MPMLA 2015, awarded Best in Chapter;  CODA 2016; MLA 2018; and MLA 2022, plenary session). Additional scholarly work includes study of the Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun's portrait of the Russian composer and salonnière, Natalia Kurakina. This work has been presented at the University of Utah and the University of Nevada, Reno.

In addition to her work as a music librarian, Lisa is an active early music performer and concert curator. She began her musical studies as a flutist in Rhode Island and discovered early music and the recorder while an undergraduate at Wellesley College. Her training in Medieval/Renaissance Studies and Musicology inform her work as a performer and teacher of early music. Lisa's early music mentors include Dutch recorderist Saskia Coolen and Baroque flutist Suzanne Stumpf. Lisa has directed the University of Utah Early Music Ensemble since 2014 and seeks out collaborations from members of the local and national early music community to provide exciting musical opportunities for her students. A recent ensemble collaboration, featuring the villancico "Xicochi conetzintle" by Gaspar Fernandes (c. 1565-1629), is a wonderful example of collaboration at work.

As a performer, Lisa has been praised for her "remarkably vibrant" playing, performing frequently as a soloist and chamber player with local early music groups and with musicians in the School of Music. Lisa plays primarily early music; however, she has traveled into the realm of new music, premiering Miguel Chuaqui's Arioso for Recorder and Live  Electronics at several festivals; and most notably in June 2014 at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. In the past few years, Lisa has returned to her first instrument (in its ancestral form), and performs on the traverso as well as the recorder. She has taught traverso to undergraduate and graduate flute students through the Early Music Ensemble. Lisa is also the co-founder and co-director of heArt Music, an early music group that performs music several concerts a season for underserved populations.

As a public speaker in the community, Lisa has given pre-concert talks for the Salt Lake Chamber Music Society and has been the invited Women in Music speaker for the Tau Beta Sigma Western District Conference (Idaho State University, 2017) and its local chapter, Omicron (Salt Lake City, 2019). Her presentation,  "To the Unknown Goddess": Hear our Voices! , is rich with details that bring her own personal musical history and the history of women in music—from Hidegard von Bingen (1098–1170) to Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001)—together.

 

Courses Taught

• Music Bibliography (Graduate)
• Early Music Ensemble (UG/Graduate)
• The Historical Bassoon (UG independent study)
• Baroque Flute Performance and Literature (Doctoral independent study)

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