A. Zayaruznaya

AZ (A. Zayaruznaya) received their Ph.D. in historical musicology from Harvard University in 2010 and taught at New York University and Princeton before coming to Yale in 2014. Bringing the history of musical forms and notation into dialogue with medieval literature, iconography, and the history of ideas, AZ’s publications have focused on French and northern Italian music of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their first book, The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet (Cambridge, 2015), explored the functions of monstrous and hybrid exempla in the compositional imaginary of fourteenth-century French motets. Their second book, Upper-Voice Structures and Compositional Process in the Ars nova Motet (Routledge, 2018) explores the compositional procedures and emic music-theoretical understandings that undergird the phenomena that modern scholarship has called “isorhythm” and “isorhythmic form.” And for the last decade AZ has been at work on The Making of Philippe de Vitry, which will be the first book-length study to focus on poet, composer, music theorist, and public intellectual Philippe de Vitry (1291–1361).

AZ has published articles in venues including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicology, Early Music History, and Digital Philology, and has served on advisory and editorial boards for the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Music Theory, and Speculum. Their publications have received prizes from the Medieval Academy of America, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, the Yale Humanities Advisory Committee, and the MacMillan Center at Yale.

Selected Publications:

The Monstrous New Art: Divided Forms in the Late Medieval Motet. Music in Context. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Upper-Voice Structures and Compositional Process in the Ars nova Motet. RMA Monographs. Routledge, 2018.

“Old, New, and Newer Still in Book 7 of the Speculum musice,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73, No. 1 (Spring 2020): 95–148.

“Intelligibility Redux: Motets and the Modern Medieval Sound,” Music Theory Online 23 no. 2 (2017). link

“Hockets as Compositional and Scribal Practice in the ars nova Motet—A Letter from Lady Music,” Journal of Musicology 30 (October 2013).

“What Fortune Can Do to a Minim,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 (2012): 313–81.

“‘She has a Wheel that Turns…’: Crossed and Contradictory Voices in Machaut’s Motets,” Early Music History 28 (2009): 185–240.

“Annotating Taruskin and How it Went.” Post on Teaching Music History, the blog of the Pedagogy Study Group of the American Musicological Society. 13 October 2023. link