Giulia Accornero
Specializations:
History of music theory; media studies; early Arabic music theory and its reception; global history; music and climate theory; music analysis (contemporary and popular music, ASMR); vernacular music theory; music theory and new media; musical notations, inscriptions, and visualizations; kinesthesis; proxemics.
About:
Giulia Accornero is a music theorist who specializes in media theory and the global history of music theoretical practices. Her research focuses in particular on early Arabic music theory and the ways in which it has shaped past and present discourse in Europe and North America. Recent articles also examine how new and old media—from music notation, to amplification techniques, to music production software—as well as audile techniques predicate new modes of listening to music and identifying its elements.
She is currently working on her first book, Tools of the Trade: Measuring Music in the Greater Mediterranean (850-1350), which investigates the cultural, cognitive, and material practices through which medieval music theorists from Baghdad to Paris made sense of musical time. Her second book-length project, Theorizing from the Temperate Zone: A Tale of Music and Climate Theory, takes the musical discourse of premodern Islamicate authors as a springboard for tracing the genealogy of ‘climatic determinism’—the ideology that climate determines the physical attributes and mental characteristics of individuals, giving rise to racial difference. In 2022, she co-founded (with Ginger Dellenbaugh) the AMS Notation, Inscription, and Visualization Study Group, which she still co-chairs, and was recently elected co-chair of the AMS History of Theory Study Group (effective November 2024), for which she has served as Blog Editor since 2021.
Giulia also spearheads the project project Tartīb, a digital resource that aims to lower entry barriers to the study of Arabic music theory (750-1300 CE), which was awarded grants by the AMS and the Medieval Academy of America and will be published in 2024. In 2022, her paper was awarded the Graduate Students Prize by the Medieval Academy of America.
Before arriving at Yale, Giulia obtained her PhD in Music Theory at Harvard University (2022) and served as a Graduate Fellow (2020) at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa i Tatti. Prior to that she completed a Bachelor and Master of Arts in Musicology from the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi of Milan, and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Università Bocconi in Milan.
Selected Publications:
2022. “What Does ASMR Sound Like? Composing the Proxemic Intimate Zone in Contemporary Music.” Contemporary Music Review 41 (4): 337-357.
2022. “Was 1974 The End of Music History? Universalism, Cybernetics, and the International Conference of New Music Notation.” In F. Schuling & E. Payne, ed. Material Cultures of Music Notation: New Perspectives on Musical Inscription, 14–30. London: Routledge.
2021. “Shocking Intimacy: Techniques, Technologies, and Aesthetics of Amplification in Clara Iannota’s ‘Intent on Resurrection.’” Sound Stage Screen 1 (2): 5–33.
2018. “Un’Organologia Critica per una Nuova Liuteria.” Quaderni del Conservatorio 7: 13–24.
2016. “La fenomenologia musicale di Sergiu Celibidache.” Quaderni del Conservatorio 5: 86-138.