In the following interviews, Joanne Cormac and Benjamin Ory discuss their research published in the summer 2025 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (vol. 78, no. 2).
Subscribers can access the Journal of the American Musicological Society through the University of California Press. This issue is temporarily available free of charge.
Joanne Cormac is Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, specializing in nineteenth-century music. She is the author of Liszt and the Symphonic Poem (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and editor of 30-Second Classical Music (Ivy Press, 2017) and Liszt in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her research has appeared in 19th-Century Music, 19th-Century Music Review, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, The Musical Quarterly, and the Journal of Musicological Research. She was guest editor of 19th-Century Music for the Fall 2020 issue. Her current project examines music making within the British Empire, funded by a £1.1m UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.
Benjamin Ory is an FWO Junior Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven. He received his PhD in Musicology from Stanford University in 2022, and has since served as a Harvard University Villa I Tatti Digital Humanities Fellow, as Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at Williams College, and as a postdoctoral fellow
at Stanford. He is the founder of The 1520s Project (https://1520s-project.org), an open-source repository of sixteenth-century music. Ory’s research focuses on sixteenth-century polyphony as well as the early history of Renaissance musicology.
Jake Johnson is Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Musicology at the Wanda L. Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Jake has written several books on musical theater in everyday life, including Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America (2019), Lying in the Middle: Musical Theater and Belief at the Heart of America (2021), and Unstaged Grief: Musicals and Mourning in Midcentury America (2025). His edited volume, The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas (2023), extends his work on the American musical to explore the city of second chances. Jake is also the author of two imaginative biographies: The Music Room: A Story of Art, Friendship, and Gathering in Betty Freeman’s Beverly Hills Home (2025), and Harline and Washington’s When You Wish Upon a Star (forthcoming), a biography of the song that originated in Pinocchio in 1940.
