Claire Fontijn

Claire Fontijn holds the Barbara Morris Caspersen Associate Professorship in Music at Wellesley College, where she teaches courses on introductory music theory (Music 111), early music (Music 200), music, gender, and sexuality (Music 222/322), the German art song (Music 223/323), Hildegard of Bingen (Music 224/Religion 224), opera (Music 230), and seminars on specialized topics concerning Francesco Cavalli, J.S. Bach, Mozart, and Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn (Music 300). She earned a B.A. from Oberlin College, a certificate in baroque flute performance from the Royal Conservatory of the Hague (the Netherlands), and, from Duke University, an M.A. in Performance Practice and a Ph.D. in Musicology.

For her research on Antonia Bembo, a Venetian noblewoman who composed music for Louis XIV in France, Prof. Fontijn has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the French government, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for Research in Venice. Fontijn's research on women composers and performers in Louis XIV's France was supported by a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment from the Humanities in 2001. She has published articles on flute-playing techniques of the eighteenth century and on creative women of the Baroque period. Her first book, Desperate Measures: The Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo, published by Oxford University Press in 2006, received subventions from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the Dragan Plamenac Fund of the American Musicological Society. The book was awarded the Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography from the American Society of Composers, Publishers, and Authors (ASCAP) and honorable mention in the competition for the Pauline Alderman Award for Scholarship on Women in Music, in 2007.

Current scholarly projects include an edited volume of essays in honor of Alexander Silbiger, to be published by Harmonie Park Press; a critical edition of vocal works by Francesco Corbetta; and an article on Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo virtutum for Performance Practice Review.

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Profile last updated: 7/08