Education
- Ph.D., Musicology, Case Western Reserve University, 2018
- M.M., Double Bass Performance, Ithaca College, 2011
- B.A., Music (minor in French), The City College of New York, CUNY, 2008
John Romey is assistant professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. As a cultural musicologist, his research spans early modern French music, politics, religion, and spectacle; South American colonial and indigenous musics; and historical bowed bass instruments, instrumental technology, and performance practice. Employing interdisciplinary methodologies, he interrogates archival documents — and at times the nature of the archive itself — to reconstruct the musical cultures of those whose practices are only marginally represented in the documentary record of high culture.
Romey's current book project, "Madness and Utopias: Ludic Song and Social Disorder in Early Modern France," argues that singing in early modern France was never merely diversion but a potent instrument for negotiating power, asserting agency, and imagining alternative social orders. Developing the concept of ludic song cultures—dynamic arenas of musical and textual play ranging from street vaudevilles on the Pont Neuf and political songs of the Fronde to operatic song games in feminocentric literary salons—the book shows how marginalized voices exploited the ambiguity of playful performance to critique political, social, and gender hierarchies, even as authorities mobilized discourses of "madness" and "disorder" to silence them. Drawing on manuscript chansonniers and sustained archival research, the project reconstructs these ephemeral song cultures as tools of social change within — and against — an autocratic society.
His articles have appeared in Early Modern French Studies, The Journal of Musicology, the Yale Journal of Music & Religion, Cambridge Opera Journal (winner of the 2025 Nancy Lyman Roelker Prize), the Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America, and Early Music History. His research has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, two grants from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, a Holmes/D'Accone Travel Grant, the M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Fund, and fellowships from the Gotha Research Centre, the Herzog August Bibliothek (twice), and the Newberry Library.
Trained in historically informed performance at Case Western Reserve University, Romey is an expert on the history of the Viennese violone and performs professionally on violones and viols of all sizes. He directs The French Consort Project, a performance-based research initiative reconstructing a consort of French Renaissance viols. Prior to his appointment at IU, he served as assistant professor of musicology at Purdue University Fort Wayne.
Selected Publications
2026 “Literary Salons and Musical Conversations in the Seventeenth-Century France” in Four Centuries of Women's Musical Salons: A Cross-Cultural History, ed. Rebecca Cypess and Jacky Avila (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026), 27–40.
2025 “An Instrument ‘with which gentlemen, merchants, and other men of virtue pass their time’: The Viola da Gamba in Sixteenth-Century France” Early Music History 42 (2023): 235–275. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261127924000056
2024 “The Long Death of French Renaissance Viols” Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America 52 (2021–2024): 80–109. https://www.vdgsa.org/_files/ugd/d4b545_b8e9fe1590f7427db872af8f10445c8d.pdf
2024 “‘The pieces that are in the hands of everyone belong to the public’: Philippe-Emmanuel de Coulanges, Song Networks, and Operatic Artifacts in Seventeenth-Century Paris,” Cambridge Opera Journal 31, no. 2 (2024): 314–350. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954586724000053
2023 “Polluted Soundscapes and Contrepoison in Sixteenth-Century France: The Sonic Warfare Leading to the First War of Religion” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 9, no. 3 (2023): 51–79. https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1253
2020 “Songs that Run in the Streets: Popular Song at the Comédie-Italienne, the Comédie-Française, and the Théâtres de la foire,” The Journal of Musicology 37, no. 4 (2020): 415–58. https://doi.org/10.1525/jm.2020.37.4.415
2019 “Singing the Fronde: Placards, Street Songs, and Performed Politics,” in “Soundscapes,” ed. Nicholas Hammond and Tom Hamilton, special issue, Early Modern French Studies 41, no. 1 (2019): 52–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2019.1612563