Faculty Biography
Vitals:
Name: Carmelo Comberiati
Title: Professor and Music Director
Department: Music Department
Building: Music Building
Room: 114
Phone: 914-323-5252
Email: comberiatic@mville.edu
Degrees:
Ph.D. in Historical Musicology, University of Michigan
MA in Music Theory, Binghamton University
BS in Music Education, New York University
Carmelo Comberiati has been Director of Music at Manhattanville since 2002 and has overseen tremendous renewal and expansion within what has historically been among the strongest departments at the College. He combines his administrative duties with a continued focus on research into transitional eras of music history and the development of new courses. Professor Comberiati holds a Bachelor of Science in Music Education from New York University, a Masters Degree in Music Theory from Binghamton University and a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also studied as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Vienna, Austria researching Renaissance Sacred Music in central Europe for two years while 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 Music and International Music Periodicals. His current research is focused on a complete edition of the settings of polyphonic music for the Mass by Carl Luython, an Austrian composer at the end of the Renaissance.
Comberiati’s greatest joy comes from classroom teaching. He 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 used 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 is meeting a group of seven students as a seminar to refine the syllabus of a new course: The Beatles within the Context of the 1960s, a subject of long-term interest.