Elizabeth Weinfield
Business, Music, and Belonging in the Salon of Leonora Duarte
Monday, February 21, 2022 at 7:00 PM EST on Zoom
In the seventeenth century, Antwerp’s merchant class was primarily comprised of Jewish immigrants from Portugal and Spain; they were business savvy, exploiting family connections and the familiarity of shared culture and language to facilitate deal-making as a means of survival – sometimes at the expense of remaining within the fairly compact network of the Judeo-Portuguese community. Elizabeth Weinfield will focus on the composer Leonora Duarte (1610–1678) and the intersections among women, Jewish identity, and music in the domestic space.
Elizabeth Weinfield is a professor of music history at The Juilliard School in New York whose research explores the relationships among gender, performance, and race in the early modern period. Her interests include music by women in the crypto-Jewish communities of Antwerp, music in the 17th-century Constantinople harem, performance practice, and historiography. She holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from the Graduate Center (CUNY), an MSt in Music from Oxford, and a BA in Art History from Rutgers. Director of the ensemble Sonnambula, her recording of the complete works of Duarte (Centaur Records, 2019), won the 2019 Jewish Studies Award at the American Musicological Society.