Dr. Paula Maust

Dr. Paula Maust is a performer-scholar whose work is focused on amplifying underrepresented voices and providing open access to educational resources. As a harpsichordist and organist, she has been praised for combining “great power with masterful subtlety” by DC Metro Theater Arts and as a “refined and elegant performer” by the Boston Musical Intelligencer. In her work as a co-director of Burning River Baroque and Musica Spira, Dr. Maust curates edgy lecture-concerts connecting baroque music to contemporary social issues. Recent concert programs have centered on climate change, refugees, and mental health. She has also recently performed with the Folger Consort, the BaRock Band, the Washington Bach Consort, Tempesta di Mare, the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and the Handel Choir of Baltimore.

Since 2016, Dr. Maust has been a faculty member at UMBC, where she teaches music theory, keyboard skills, harpsichord, organ, piano, and coaches students in the Collegium Musicum. Additionally, she teaches music theory at the Peabody Conservatory and the Homewood Campus of Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent publication is Expanding the Music Theory Canon  an open-source collection of music theory examples by women and BIPoC composers.This is the first open-source collection of this magnitude and scope, and it is aimed at concepts covered in the undergraduate core music theory curriculum. She has also recently submitted an article to the journal Women and Music and has blogged for Early Music America.

Dr. Maust is currently working on a book and performance project, The Ugly Virtuosa, which examines the pejorative language used to describe the first generation of professional female musicians in England, Italy, and France. Her work utilizes disability studies, performance studies, and critical race theory to evaluate the reception of Restoration singer-actresses, the enfreakment of the Venetian figlie del coro, the confusion surrounding the gender-bending French opera star La Maupin, and the ‘ugly Italian pigs and elephants’ singing Handel’s London operas. She has presented her research for the American Musicological Society, the Indiana University Historical Performance Institute, the American Handel Society, and the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.

Dr. Maust is also part of UMBC’s first-gen network and serves on the university’s Inclusion Council curriculum work group. More info can be found at www.paulamaust.com