University of Southern California

USC Thornton School of Music

Leah Morrison
Thornton School of Music > Faculty Profiles > Leah Morrison

Leah Morrison

Adjunct Professor of Musicology


Instruments/Expertise: Plainchant Theory and Medieval Music, Late-19th Century German Music

(213) 740-7416 phone
(213) 821-1865 fax
lmorriso@usc.edu
MUS 304

Biography

Leah Morrison, adjunct assistant professor of musicology, holds a PhD in musicology from the USC Thornton School of Music and specializes in medieval music and liturgical practice.  Her dissertation, an edition of a fifteenth-century Carthusian plainchant manual, was supported by a Huntington Library Mellon Fellowship.  She received a Heckman Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, St. John’s University, for related work on Carthusian liturgy and comparative chant dialects.  Her publications include articles in Studia Musicologia, Notes, and the Opera Journal, and she has given papers at annual meetings of the International Musicological Society, the Western Association of Women Historians, the Medieval Association of the Pacific, and at the International Congress of Medieval Studies.

Professional Experience

Research Interests:

Selected Papers:

  • "Wives, Bars, and Little American Girls: Modernism and the Search for Relevance in European Music after World War I;" 
  • "Cum Bona fit Concordia Maxime in Choro: Carthusian Liturgical Practice at Valle di Pesio in the Mid-Fifteenth Century." 
  • "‘Stick to the Opinions Held in Your Church’: A Carthusian’s Advice on the Applications of Plainchant Theory." 
  • "More Greenery! More Foliage!: German Set Design 1813-1883 and Wagner’s Quest for Illusion."
  • "The Conductor as Interpreter: Wagner’s Programmatic Approach to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony." 
Publications:
  • "Constructing Cantus securus: Reaping Advice from Cantor cartusiensis." Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 45/1-2, 2004, 189-200.
  • "Scenography, Reality and Gesamtkunstwerk: Nineteenth-Century Operatic Set Design in Germany." The Opera Journal (27) 1994, 14-22.

    USC Thornton School of Music