Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1982. The author of Haydn and the Classical Variation, Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony, and editor of Haydn and His World, she specializes in music, rhetoric, and aesthetics 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 monograph-length article on "variations" appears in the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music, and she is at work on studies of music and melancholy, of Don Giovanni, and of the opus-concept in the eighteenth century.

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 American Brahms Society, and is an editor of Beethoven Forum and associate editor of The Musical Quarterly and 19th-Century Music. Columbia has honored her with its Great Teacher Award and award for Distinguished Service to the Core Curriculum, and she is currently President of the American Musicological Society.