Angela Mariani
Email: angelamariani.smith@ttu.edu
Phone: (806) 834-3912
Office: School of Music, Room 216B
Personal Website
Harmonia Website
A scholar and performer of medieval music, Dr. Angela Mariani is Professor of Musicology and the founder and Director of the Texas Tech Historical Performance Ensemble (aka Collegium Musicum), performing medieval, Renaissance, and early Baroque music. She also established the
School of Music’s Graduate Certificate in Historical Performance Research and Practice
(2009-) and the Undergraduate Certificate in Historical Performance (2023-). In 2017,
Dr. Mariani received Early Music America's prestigious Thomas Binkley Award for “outstanding achievement in performance and scholarship by the director of a
university or college collegium musicum.” An elected member of the TTU Teaching Academy
since 2007, she is also a 2018 recipient of TTU's President's Excellence in Teaching Award, and in 2024 was the recipient of the Medieval Academy of America’s CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching Medieval Studies.
A native of the state of Massachusetts, Dr. Mariani began her professional music career
in the world of rock and folk. While an undergrad at the University of Massachusetts,
her performance activities alternated between local rock bands, folk music gigs, and
the UMass Collegium Musicum (much to the chagrin of her voice instructors). In the
decade that followed, she was a freelance musician in the Boston area, creating a
popular acoustic fingerstyle guitar course for Boston's Guitar Workshop and co-founding
the folk-rock band Reynardine with Chris Smith. Inspired by a growing interest in
medieval music, Dr. Mariani left Boston for the Early Music Institute (now the Historical
Performance Institute) at Indiana University's prestigious Jacobs School of Music,
where she studied medieval music performance practice with the groundbreaking early
music scholar and performer Thomas Binkley. She also studied medieval music with Benjamin
Bagby and Barbara Thornton of Sequentia. While still at Indiana, she co-founded Altramar medieval music ensemble, recording and touring internationally (7 CDs on the Dorian Group label and several tracks for the Norton Anthology of Music).
Education
DM (Doctor of Music), Early Music, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
MM (Master of Music), Early Music Vocal Performance, Indiana University; Certificate
in Medieval Studies, Indiana University
BA (Bachelor of Arts) in Music Theory, University of Massachusetts
Research
Dr. Mariani's main research area is medieval music, and in particular historical performance,
a discipline that involves extensive inquiry into historical instruments, early notation,
unwritten improvisatory and ornamental practices, and the historical context of particular
repertoires. As in other areas of Arts Practice Research, these products of scholarship manifest
not only in terms of scholarly writings, but also in the process of creating, producing, and directing regular performances. In 2017, Dr. Mariani's book Improvisation and Inventio in the Performance of Medieval Music was published by Oxford University Press; in that same year she also received TTU's
Barnie E. Rushing Jr. Faculty Distinguished Research Award (Humanities). In 2019,
the book received Texas Tech's First Place President's Faculty Book Award.
Since 1991, Dr. Mariani has also hosted the nationally-syndicated early music radio
program Harmonia, which is heard on over a hundred stations around the US and streams globally on the
internet. She maintains her interest in both rock and traditional folk music, performing and
recording traditional Irish music with the group Johnny Faa and European “balfolk” with the group Rattleskull. She has published and presented
on the topics of early music performance practice, public radio, and rock and roll,
and has appeared on National Public Radio, Deutsche Welle, Radio Netherlands, and
the CBC.
A secondary research area of Dr. Mariani's is Contemplative Pedagogy in Higher Education, an approach to pedagogy that seeks to integrate techniques of contemplation, meditation
and mindfulness into the process of teaching and learning at the university level.
A lifelong practitioner of meditation, she is also qualified through Brown University's Professional Studies program as a Level
1 Instructor of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).
In 2018, Dr. Mariani was named a TTU Integrated Scholar, an award that recognizes
faculty who “generate synergy” between the three areas of teaching, research, and
service.
Courses Taught
MUHL5322: Historical Performance Research and PracticeMUHL5331: Medieval Seminar: Musical Process and Performance in Pre-Modern Europe
MUHL5326: Music and the Contemplative Mind
MUHL2301: Music as Cultural History I: The Early Period (large enrollment first-year class)
MUHL 4322: Introduction to Early Music Performance Practice (undergrads)
MUHL5313: Composer Seminar, Hildegard von Bingen
MUHL5313: Composer Seminar, Claudio Monteverdi
She has also co-taught VPA5314: The Arts in Contemporary Context (a Fine Arts PhD Core course); and developed MUSI1300: Creating the Critical Listener, a large-enrollment core course for first-year music students that she taught for many years. In her first years of teaching at Tech, she also designed and inaugurated the original iteration of Tech's very popular, large-enrollment History of Rock and Roll course, and has served on dozens of Master's, Doctoral, and PhD thesis and exam committees.
School of Music
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Address
18th and Boston Avenue Box 42033, Lubbock TX 79409-2033 -
Phone
806.742.2274 | Fax: 806.742.2294 -
Email
schoolofmusic@ttu.edu