Michael Carlson

Biography

Michael Carlson (he/him) is an Italian Renaissance and Baroque specialist whose research centers on the musical expressions of religious identity formation in the wake of the European Reformations (ca. 1500–1700). His current publishing projects focus on the collections of Lombardian spiritual contrafacts after the Council of Trent (1545­–1563) which provide new avenues for examining Italian responses to shifting dogmatic rigorism and to re-examine music with “historical ears.” His work examines the extensive contrafact project of early seventeenth-century Milanese priest, Aquilino Coppini (d. 1629), who largely re-texted the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi. Michael argues that these volumes demonstrate an approach to listening that embraced spiritualized eroticism. Informed by archival research and interdisciplinary approaches to music, literature, art, and religious studies, Michael’s intervention seeks new intertextualities that connect a network of Humanists linked by a highly elaborate form of syncretism between the sacred and the secular.

Michael is an engaged scholar who has presented his research at numerous international and national conferences including The American Musicological Society, The Renaissance Society of America, and The Society of Seventeenth-Century Music. Michael completed his Ph.D. at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to coming to Notre Dame, he was Lecturer of Musicology at Texas A&M University–Kingsville.