Lecturers
in order of appearance

Jan Swafford is the author of biographies of Johannes Brahms and Charles Ives, as well as the introductory Vintage Guide to Classical Music. He teaches composition, theory and musicology at the Boston Conservatory and writing at Tufts University. He earned his BA from Harvard College and his MMA and DMA from the Yale School of Music. His compositions have won a number of awards, including an NEA Composer Grant, two Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowships and a Tanglewood Fellowship. He is often heard as a musical commentator on NPR.

William McGinney earned his PhD degree from the University of North Texas in 2009. His dissertation focuses on science fiction films of the l960s and 1970s that appropriate the sounds and worldviews of twentieth-century avant-garde musical works as part of the films' bleak visions of the future. He is author of The Whole as a Result of Its Parts: Assembly in Aaron Copland's Score for The Red Pony.

Susan Youens has written several books on the German Lied, including Schubert's Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles, Schubert's Poets and the Making of Lieder, and Hugo Wolf: The Vocal Music, and she has also contributed to the literature on Mendelssohn's songs. She holds an undergraduate degree from Southwestern University and the M.A. and Ph.D degrees from Harvard. She is currently on the faculty of the Notre Dame Department of Music.

Kirsten Peterson holds a BM degree from Southwestern University, a master's degree in bassoon performance from Yale University School of Music, and a Ph.D. in Music History and Theory from the University of Connecticut. She is lecturer at Southern Connecticut State University, the University of Connecticut at Stamford, and Naugatuck Valley Community College, and is principal bassoonist in the Waterbury Symphony Orchestra.