Elisabeth Le Guin, Violoncello

One of the foremost and internationally respected Baroque cellists in the United States, Elisabeth Le Guin has been praised for the vigor and sensitivity of her ensemble playing. Music dates back to her early childhood. First introduced to the world of classical music in elementary school, LeGuin's musical choices were the violin, the clarinet or the cello. "Everyone played the violin or the clarinet, and I was in this phase of wanting to be different, so I played the cello." From this desire-to-be-unique decision emerged the cellist of the award-winning Artaria String Quartet, founding member of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, cellist of Trio Galatea and a key player in Foundling, "a full of surprises, unexpected twists and turns" all-female string group with a social mission of bringing public awareness to issues affecting women and children. She appears in numerous recordings on the Koch, Virgin, Harmonia Mundi, and Klara labels. LeGuin received a doctorate in historical musicology at Berkeley in 1997 and currently teaches at UCLA where she is an Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her academic interests are eclectic but connected by an over-arching interest in music as an embodied practice. She has published on Luigi Boccherini (online,in ECHO: a music-centered journal); on New Age music (in repercussions and in the New York Times); on Debussy (in Beyond Structural Hearing?, California, 2004); and on the relations between 17th-century riding and music-making (in Kingdoms of the Horse, Palgrave, 2004). Her 2002 essay on Luigi Boccherini, published in JAMS, won the 2003 Einstein Award for Best Journal Article from the American Musicological Society. It is said that LeGuin is "a joy to read." Her book Boccherini’s Body: an Essay in Carnal Musicology, published by the University of California Press appeared in May 2005, just in time for the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death. Martha Feldman praised LeGuin's book saying "it is an adventure in new forms of musical analysis, with a beguilingly passionate, yet rigorous style of philosophical introspection. Her book explodes old analytical paradigms, attending to the technologies and erotics of musical performance in ways some have wanted to do but none have achieved. This book will catapult Le Guin to stardom." Professor LeGuin’s recent historical research has focused on music and culture in 18th-century Spain. She has received a Fulbright grant for 2005 to conduct archival research in Madrid, and her first article in Spanish will appear in the Revista de musicología in early 2005.

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