In the following interviews, Catherine A. Bradley and Helmut Reichenbächer discuss their research published in the spring 2025 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (vol. 78, no. 1).
Subscribers can access the Journal of the American Musicological Society through the University of California Press. This issue is temporarily available free of charge.
Catherine A. Bradley is Associate Professor in Early Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John’s College. She currently leads the project BENEDICAMUS: Musical and Poetic Creativity for a Unique Moment in the Western Christian Liturgy c.1000–1500, funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant. Bradley received the 2023 Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association and the 2019 Early Music Award of the American Musicological Society for her first monograph, Polyphony in Medieval Paris: The Art of Composing with Plainchant.
Helmut Reichenbächer is Associate Professor at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada, holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and degrees from the University of Cologne and Musikhochschule, Cologne, Germany. Formerly with the Canadian Opera Company and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he researches music theater and opera censorship during the Third Reich. Funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, he applies methodologies from the digital humanities, musicology, theater studies, and archival research. His work has been published in The University of Toronto Quarterly, Essays in Theatre, The Oxford Companion to Music, and Adapting Margaret Atwood. He is a Senior Fellow at Massey College in the University of Toronto.
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.
