Carmelo Comberiati, Ph.D. 

Professor, Music History

Mel Comberiati combines teaching duties with a continued focus upon research into transitional eras of music history and the development of new courses. Professor Comberiati holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a Masters of Arts in Music Theory from Binghamton University and a Bachelor of Science in Music Education from New York University. He also studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Vienna, Austria for two years while researching Renaissance Sacred Music in central Europe and completing a book length study of religious music in the late Renaissance.

An Active Scholar and Teacher

Comberiati has produced three books: Late Renaissance Music at the Habsburg Court: Polyphonic Settings of the Mass Ordinary at the Court of Rudolf II (1576-1612);Music from the Middle Ages through the Twentieth Century: Essays in Honor of Gwynn S. McPeek, in conjunction with Matthew Steel; and Special Issue: Gender and Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Vol. 14, in conjunction with Ralph Locke. He also served on the Editorial Board of The Journal of Musicological Research for 15 years, soliciting and editing articles and book manuscripts for the series Studies in Musicology. Recent research has produced articles for Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, the Journal of Musicology, International Publishers and Prag um 1600: Beiträge zur Kunst and Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II. His research also led to reviews and encyclopedia articles for The Grove Dictionary of Musi" and International Music Periodicals. Recently on sabbatical for spring semester 2011, his current research is focused on a complete edition of the settings of polyphonic music for the Mass by Carl Luython, a composer working at the Imperial court in Prague at the end of the Renaissance. The Manhattanville Women's Chamber Ensemble performed selected works from his research during the 2011-2012 academic year.

Comberiati's greatest joy comes from classroom teaching. He is currently a member of the Music Pedagogy study group of the American Musicological Society, and has taught the bulk of courses in music history at the College since 1983, trying to balance a curriculum of western and non-western courses and classical and popular traditions. He was selected by the Academic Committee of the College Student Government for the Faculty of the Year Award twice, in 1989 and 2004, and was selected for the Alumni Association Distinguished Faculty Award in 1987. In 1994, he took advantage of a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for College Teachers at Columbia University, to develop a course on Music and German Modernism and he used grants from the Westchester Consortium for International Studies and the New York University Faculty Resources Network, in 1989 and 1990 to develop a course on African and Asian Music. Comberiati was able to return to Vienna twice to further his Renaissance studies thanks to a Manhattanville College Junior Faculty Grant in 1987 and an American Council of Learned Societies Grant in 1988. During the spring 2007 semester, he met with a group of seven students to refine the syllabus for his course: The Beatles within the Context of the 1960s, a subject of long-term interest. That Beatles course is being offered as a seminar for the Castle Scholars Honors Program in spring 2012.