Recondite Harmony:Essays on Puccini's Operas
Deborah Burton is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Boston University, and has taught at Harvard University; University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Florida International University, Fordham, University of Michigan and Adrian College. Her research concerns opera analysis, counterpoint, and the history of theory, emphasizing Italian sources. Professor Burton was president of the New England Conference for Music Theory from 2006-2008, was a Junior Fellow of the Boston University Humanities Foundation in 2009-2010. Her recent monograph, entitled Recondite Harmony: Analytic Essays on the Operas of Puccini, will soon be published by Pendragon Press. Along with Giorgio Sanguinetti (University of Rome, Tor Vergata), Dr. Burton will edit the scholarly series, also for Pendragon Press, entitled Italian Theoretical Treatises as part of the Harmonologia: Studies in Music Theory umbrella. In December 2010, in honor of the centenary of Puccini s La Fanciulla del West, she moderated a special panel discussion on the opera at the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, and organized a symposium and exhibition in conjunction with Boston University s Howard Gotlieb Archival Center. In Spring 2008, she organized and presented at the interdisciplinary conference Opera and Society at Boston University, Dr. Burton collaborated with Gregory Harwood to write a prize-winning annotated translation of Francesco Galeazzi s 1796 Elementi Teorico-Practici, volume II, entitled The Theoretical-Practical Elements of Music, Parts III and IV as volume 5 of the Studies in the History of Music Theory and Literature of the University of Illinois Press (2012). She has recently been a guest lecturer at the University of Rome-Tor Vergata, at the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists Program, and at the Hartt School of Music. She gave two research presentations at the 2008 AMS-SMT national meeting in Nashville, and presented at the 2006 Fourth International Schenker Symposium, and the 2005 meeting of the New England Conference of Music Theorists. Co-editor of Tosca s Prism: Three Moments of Western Cultural History (Northeastern University Press, 2004), which won an AMS subvention prize, she has published articles and reviews in Music Theory Spectrum, Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale, Studi Musicali, Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana, Opera Quarterly, and others. Dr. Burton was an originator of and participant in the interdisciplinary conference Tosca 2000 in Rome, honoring the centennial of Puccini s opera, and the bicentennial of the events that inspired it.