Sisman, Elaine

Full Name: 
Elaine Sisman
Position/Title: 
Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music
Office Address: 
604 Dodge
Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1982, serving six years as department chair (1999-2005). She has just completed a term as President of the American Musicological Society. The author of Haydn and the Classical Variation, Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony, and editor of Haydn and His World, she specializes in music of the 18th and 19th centuries, and has written on such topics as memory and invention in late Beethoven, ideas of pathétique and fantasia around 1800, Haydn's theater symphonies, the sublime in Mozart's music, and Brahms's slow movements. Her most recent publications, after the monograph-length article on “variations” in New Grove 2, concern biography (Haydn and his multiple audiences), chronology (Mozart’s “Haydn” quartets), history (marriage in Don Giovanni), Enlightenment aesthetics (Haydn’s Creation), and the opus concept (“Six of One”), and she is completing studies of Haydn’s Metastasio opera L’isola disabitata and of music and melancholy. Her most recent work concerns Haydn's "poetics of solar time."
Sisman studied piano at the Juilliard pre-college division and with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell, received her doctorate in music history at Princeton, and has taught at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and has received the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society for best article by a younger scholar. She serves on the board of directors of the Joseph Haydn-Institut in Cologne, the Akademie für Mozartforschung in Salzburg, and the Haydn Society of North America, and as associate editor of The Musical Quarterly. Columbia has honored her with its Great Teacher Award and award for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum.

Prof. Sisman Chaired the Department from 1999 to 2005.

Degrees: 
AB (Cornell 1972)
Degrees: 
MFA (Princeton 1974)
Degrees: 
PhD (Princeton 1978)
Selected Publications: 

Haydn and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)

Mozart: The "Jupiter" Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1993; Korean edition 2002)

Haydn and the Classical Variation (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1993)

Review of Tim Blanning, The Triumph of Music, in The New Leader, Nov-Dec 2008 (www.thenewleader.com)

"Six of One: The Opus Concept in the Eighteenth Century," in The Century of Bach and Mozart, ed. Sean Gallagher and Thomas Forrest Kelly (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 79-107

"Rhetorical Truth in Haydn’s Chamber Music: Genre, Tertiary Rhetoric, and the Op. 76 Quartets," in Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric, ed. Tom Beghin and Sander Goldberg (U Chicago Press, 2008), 281-326

"The Marriages of Don Giovanni: Persuasion, Impersonation, and Personal Responsibility," in Mozart Studies, ed. Simon P. Keefe, (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 163-92

"In Werken denken: Die Erzeugung musikalischer Bedeutung für Haydns vielgestaltiges Publikum“ (Thinking in Works: Making Musical Meaning for Haydn’s Audiences)," in Perspektiven und Aufgaben der Haydn-Forschung. Bericht über den internationalen wissenschaftlichen Kongress Koln, 23. – 25. Juni 2005. Haydn-Studien IX (2006), 13-32

"Haydn’s Career and the Idea of the Multiple Audience," in Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed. Caryl Clark (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3-16

"Observations on the First Phase of Mozart’s ‘Haydn’ Quartets," in Words about Mozart: Essays in Honour of Stanley Sadie, ed. Dorothea Link with Judith Nagley (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), 33-58

"The Voice of God in Haydn’s Creation," in Essays in Honor of László Somfai: Studies in the Sources and the Interpretation of Music, ed. by Vera Lampert and László Vikárius (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 139-153

"Haydn’s Solo Keyboard Music," in Keyboard Music of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Robert L. Marshall, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2003; 1st pub. 1994), 270-307

"Variations" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, rev. ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 26, 284-326 (35,000 words). Reviewed in New York Review of Books (Charles Rosen); Times Literary Supplement (Andrew Porter)

"Memory and Invention at the Threshold of Beethoven’s Late Style," in Beethoven and His World, ed. Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (Princeton University Press, 2000), 51-87

"The Spirit of Mozart from Haydn’s Hands: Beethoven’s Musical Inheritance," in Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, ed. Glenn Stanley (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45-63

"The Music of Rhetoric," in Musicology and the Sister Disciplines: Past, Present, and Future. Report of the XVI. International Musicological Society Conference, London 1997, ed. David Greer (Oxford University Press, 2000), 169-178

"Sinfonia teatrale di Haydn," in Haydn, ed. Andrea Lanza (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), 107-55

"Brahms’s Piano Variations op. 21, op. 23, and 24," in The Compleat Brahms, ed. Leon Botstein (New York: Norton, 1999), 167-72, 198-201

"After the Heroic Style: Fantasia and Beethoven's 'Characteristic' Sonatas of 1809," Beethoven Forum 6 (1997)

"Genre, Gesture, and Meaning in Mozart's 'Prague Symphony,'" in Mozart Studies 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)

"Pathos and Pathétique: Rhetorical Stance in Beethoven's Piano Sonata in C minor, Op.13," Beethoven Forum 3 (1994)

"Brahms and the Variation Canon," 19th-Century Music 14 (1990), 132-53

"Brahms’s Slow Movements: Reinventing the ‘Closed’ Forms," in Brahms Studies: Analytical and Historical Perspectives ed. George Bozarth (London: Oxford University Press, 1990), 79-103

"Haydn's Theater Symphonies," Journal of the American Musicological Society 43 (1990)

"Tradition and Transformation in the Alternating Variations of Haydn and Beethoven," Acta Musicologica 62 (1990), 152-82

"Haydn’s Baryton Pieces and His Serious Genres," in Haydn-Kongress Wien 1982, ed. Eva Badura-Skoda (Munich: Henle, 1986), 426-35

"The Main Forms of Orchestral Music," in The Orchestra: Origins and Transformations, ed. Joan Peyser (New York: Scribner, 1986; rpt. Billboard Books, 2000), 286-307

"Small and Expanded Forms: Koch's Model and Haydn's Music," The Musical Quarterly 68 (1982)