Simon Music Center, SM325E
Education
- Ph.D. in Music (Historical Musicology), University of Pennsylvania, 2023
- B.A., magna cum laude, double major in Music and History, Franklin and Marshall College, 2016
Bess Xintong Liu is assistant professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
She was previously visiting assistant professor of music at Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio). She earned a Ph.D. in historical musicology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023. Her main research interest lies in twentieth-century global music history, with an emphasis on Sino-Western musical exchange.
Liu’s current book project approaches this historiography from a feminist perspective. Drawing primarily on archives created by and for musicking women, this project traces circles that originated in Shanghai and expanded globally to metropolises such as Hong Kong and New York City, unpacking a gendered sense of musicianship by examining musicality in relation to motherhood, daughterhood, and sisterhood. respectively. By historicizing women’s transnational musicianship, her project demystifies several gendered racial stereotypes—for instance, the “Asian tiger mom”—and reconsiders Western art music as a fluid cultural practice.
Liu has presented her research at several conferences, including the annual conferences of the American Musicological Society, Society of Ethnomusicology, and Association of Asian Studies. Her research appears in journals such as Twentieth-Century Music.
As a practitioner of musical exchange, Liu has committed to different public-facing projects. During her internship with the Philadelphia Orchestra, she undertook several tasks in oral and literal translation during the “people-to-people” exchange between the American and Chinese orchestras. Most recently, entrusted by the Schnabel Music Foundation, she took part in the publication project translating Artur Schnabel’s Music and the Line of Most Resistance (1942) from English to Chinese.
Born and raised in Nanjing, China, Liu attended high school in Singapore before coming to the United States to pursue higher education. She owes her academic interests to various transcultural musical experiences: taking piano lessons during “piano fever” in China, becoming an aficionado of SATB choral practice in Singapore, and currently learning about her students’ musicking stories from different continents.