Rate My Professor Aaron Ziegel

Dr. Aaron Ziegel serves as Associate Professor and Division Leader of Music History and Culture in Towson University's Department of Music, a position he has held since joining the faculty in 2013. He instructs a variety of courses including music in the United States of America, the full chronological span of Western art music, opera studies, symphonic literature, and writing about music, engaging music majors, non-majors, and graduate students. Ziegel earned a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, a Master of Music in Music History from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 2006, and a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance, summa cum laude, from the same institution in 2004. His principal musicology teachers included Gayle Sherwood Magee, bruce d. mcclung, Jeffrey Magee, Katherine Syer, and William Kinderman. He studied piano with Elizabeth Pridonoff, Richard Fields, and Michael Chertock, and harpsichord with Eiji Hashimoto and Charlotte Mattax.

Dr. Ziegel's central research focus examines American operas of the early twentieth century, with publications including articles in Music and Politics (2019) and The Opera Journal (2009), and a book chapter in In Search of the “Great American Opera” (Waxmann Verlag, 2016). Key works also feature an article on Arthur Nevin's career during World War I in American Music (2016), Vernon Duke's compositional style and career in American Music (2010), and a comparison of alternate film scores for Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête by Georges Auric and Philip Glass in Music Research Forum (2011). Contributions to music history pedagogy appear in Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy (2014) and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy (2018). His research has been presented at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, College Music Society, Nineteenth Century Studies Association, and National Opera Association. In public musicology, Ziegel is Scholar in Residence with Opera Baltimore, designing and presenting lecture series for each opera production. He also lectures for Pro Musica Rara, the Handel Choir of Baltimore, and Opera Delaware, and collaborated with Towson University student singers on a program of forgotten scenes and arias from Romantic-era American operas.