Elizabeth B. Crist
Chair of the Center for American Music
Assistant Professor of Musicology

University of Texas at Austin
School of Music
1 University Station, E3100
Austin, Texas 78712
Street address for express or package delivery: 25th and East Campus Drive

Phone: (512) 471-0777
Fax: (512) 471–7836
Email: ebcrist@mail.utexas.edu

Elizabeth Crist specializes in the music of the United States. Her research interests include 20th-century American concert music, African American music, the relationship between music and politics, and sketch studies. She received the doctoral degree from Yale University with distinction for her dissertation on Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony. She has continued to study Copland’s music as well as topics in eighteenth-century psalmody and American concert music during the thirties and forties. Numerous grants and fellowships have supported her work, among them a Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dena Epstein Research Award from the Music Library Association, an AMS 50 Fellowship from the American Musicological Society, and various research awards from the University of Texas Graduate School and College of Fine Arts.

As part of the Copland centenary in November 2000, she organized a symposium on the composer’s life and music presented under the auspices of the Library of Congress. She has presented papers at national conferences of the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, Society of Early Americanists, and American Studies Association. Her articles and reviews have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, American Music, The Musical Quarterly, Journal of Musicology, The William and Mary Quarterly, Music & Letters,and Notes. She has edited (with Wayne Shirley) a volume of Copland’s selected correspondence for Yale University Press and has a book forthcoming from Oxford University Press on Aaron Copland’s music from 1932 to 1946 as it relates to cultural politics and aesthetic ideologies during the Great Depression and Second World War.

Professor Crist teaches a variety of courses on the subject of American music, including general surveys of American and African American music. She is affiliated with the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas as well as the University of Texas Humanities Institute, frequently works with graduate students in American Studies, and has taught a seminar on race and class in American music for the undergraduate honors program.