Blake Howe

Paula G. Manship Professor of Musicology

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Biography

Blake Howe is the Paula G. Manship Professor of Musicology at Louisiana State University. He teaches courses and seminars on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, film music, and performance practice for graduate students, and introduction and survey courses for undergraduates. Recent seminars have included Franz Schubert: Inside, Out; Ludwig van Beethoven; How We Listen; Music and Disability Studies; History of Film Music; and Music and Poetry of the German Lied. He has previously served as co-director of LSU’s Collegium Musicum.

With co-author Brett Boutwell, he has written a textbook titled The Musician in Society (W. W. Norton), based on a course that he helped to develop at LSU. The book is notable for its innovative structure. It features nearly 100 case studies of musicians throughout history and around the globe, and these musicians are grouped together by the roles that they played in their musical communities and traditions: for example, the roles of the instrument maker, teacher, composer, performer, patron, or facilitator.

His research interests are diverse and include nineteenth-century German song, Disability Studies, and film music. He is co-editor, with Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, and Joseph N. Straus, of The Oxford Handbook on Music and Disability Studies (Oxford University Press). His research articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, The Journal of Musicology, The Musical Quarterly, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and Music Research Annual, and he has contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body (Oxford University Press), The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s “Winterreise” (Cambridge University Press), and Schubert’s Late Music: History, Theory, Style (Cambridge University Press).

He has contributed book and recording reviews to the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music and Letters, Notes, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and his online essays appear on Musicology Now (American Musicological Society), The Avid Listener (W. W. Norton), Norton Learning Blog (W. W. Norton), and Discovering Music (The British Library). 

He served as editor of recording reviews for Nineteenth-Century Music Review (Cambridge University Press), chair of the American Musicological Society’s Study Group on Music & Disability, and president of the Southern Chapter of the American Musicological Society. 

In honor of his research, teaching, and service, he has been awarded the LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award, the LSU Foundation Distinguished Graduate Faculty Teaching Award, the LSU Alumni Association Rising Faculty Research Award, the Tiger Athletic Foundation President’s Award, and the Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award.