In the following interviews, Emily I. Dolan and Nicole Vilkner discuss their research published in the in the spring 2025 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (vol. 78, no. 1).
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Emily I. Dolan is Professor and Chair of Music at Brown University and serves on the AMS Board of Directors. Previously, she held positions at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. Dolan works on the music of the late 18th and 19th centuries. She focuses on issues of orchestration, timbre, aesthetics, and instrumentality, exploring in the intersections between music, science, and technology. She has published articles in Current Musicology, Cambridge Opera Journal, Eighteenth-Century Music, Studia Musicologica, Keyboard Perspectives, and 19th-Century Music. Her first book, The Orchestral Revolution: Haydn and the Technologies of Timbre, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Dolan is finishing her second book, Instruments and Order, which explores ideas of instrumentality and is working on a new project on timbre and “timbrelessness.”
Nicole Vilkner, Assistant Professor of Musicianship at Duquesne University, is a musicologist and singer whose research interests span salon culture, opera, architecture of performance spaces, soundscape, and the material cultures of music, focusing particularly on the social and sonic histories of nineteenth-century Paris. Her recent and forthcoming publications appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Musicology, Journal of the Royal Music Association, Cambridge Opera Journal, among others. Committed to public-facing scholarship, Vilkner launched the Soundwalk Projects—interactive, place-based exhibits that use sound to narrate the histories of Pittsburgh neighborhoods, including the Soundwalk at the Frick and the Soundwalk in the Hill District.
Jake Johnson is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. His writing and teaching explore the interweaving of music, literature, art, and media in American life. Jake is the author of Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America (2019) and Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (2021) and editor of the volume The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas (2023). He has three new books in 2025. The first, Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America, delves into film and television musicals of the 1960s to examine their place in networks of grieving in America. His contribution to the Oxford Keynotes series is Harline and Washington’s When You Wish Upon a Star, a biography of the well-known American anthem. Finally, and also with Oxford University Press, comes The Music Room: A Story of Art, Friendship, and Gathering in Betty Freeman’s Beverly Hills Home.
