Rebecca Cypess Interview
Rebecca Cypess is a musicologist and historical keyboardist, as well as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Professor of Music at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Her latest project is Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment, a book that focuses on musical salons in Europe and North America between about 1760 and 1800 and the women who hosted them. But Rebecca’s interests extend far beyond that, as you can see below.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I am fortunate to have come from a family that truly values education, and my parents gave me countless opportunities to pursue my loves for music, history, languages, writing, and more. My high school music teacher, Donald Irving, introduced me to early music and period instruments. When I was ready to apply to colleges, a family friend who did her graduate work in musicology at Cornell directed me there. I went to Cornell knowing I wanted to study with the great pianist Malcolm Bilson, a specialist in period pianos, but the faculty at Cornell—James Webster, Neal Zaslaw, and others—also introduced me to the world of musicology. In one of my seminars I read Ellen Rosand’s book Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice, and I came to admire her work enormously—especially how the clarity and elegance of her writing reflected the elegance and beauty of the music she was writing about.
After a year-long master’s program in harpsichord performance at the Royal College of Music in London and another year of Jewish studies at the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education and Yeshiva University in New York, I entered the PhD program in music history at Yale, where I went especially to work with Ellen Rosand. While enrolled in the music history program at Yale, I had the opportunity to continue studying harpsichord at Yale School of Music. In the final year of my doctoral program, I taught music history at the YSM. That was the first opportunity that I had to teach musicology and performance practice to advanced performers, and that’s more or less what I’ve been doing as an educator ever since. I spent four years on the musicology faculty at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.