Faculty

Maria Cizmic

Associate Professor

CPR 370
mcizmic@usf.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Maria Cizmic is the author of Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press). In this work, Cizmic looks to trauma studies in order to analyze the ways in which music composition, embodied performance, and film music can be understood to represent trauma. By focusing on late-20th century composers in Eastern Europe, Cizmic argues that this generation of composers participated in a broader late-socialist culture focused on historical memory and cultural trauma. Her areas of research and teaching also include 20th- and 21st-century American experimental and popular music; film music; disability studies; embodied music performance, technology, and mediation. She has published in Twentieth-Century Music, American Music, and Music and the Moving Image. Dr. Cizmic teaches HUM 2250 The Twentieth Century; the Pro-Seminar and Senior Seminar on Arts & Technology; and courses on film music, trauma studies, and disability studies.

Selected Publications

  • Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Russian translation, Muzyka Boli: Obraz travmy v sovetskoī i vostochnoevropeīskoī muzyke kontsa XX veka, Academic Studies Press: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9798887195889/.

  • In Progress “’Story of an Artist’: Complex Embodiment, Psychiatric Disability, & the Music of Daniel Johnston."

  •  “The Sounds of Trauma Films: Alfred Schnittke’s Concert Music in International Compilation Soundtracks,” In The Global & The Liminal in Music for Cinema, edited by Joan Titus, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
  • Co-Convener with Jillian C. Rogers, “Colloquy on Music, Sound, & Trauma,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 77/2 (Summer 2024): 511-577, https://online.ucpress.edu/jams/issue/77/2.
  •  “Timbre & Vibration in Galina Ustvolskaya’s Composition No. 1, ‘Dona Nobis Pacem.’” In Analytical Approaches to Twentieth-Century Russian Music, edited by Inessa Bazayeva & Christopher Segall, 189-202. New York: Routledge, 2021.
  • Co-written with Adriana Helbig, “The Piano & the Performing Body in the Music of Arvo Pärt: Phenomenological Perspectives.” In Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred, edited by Jeffers Engelhardt & Peter Bouteneff, 177-194. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.
  •  “Empathy, Ethics, and Film Music: Alfred Schnittke and Larisa Shepit’ko’s Voskhozhdenie (1977, The Ascent).” In Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War, edited by Michael Baumgartner & Ewelina Boczkowska, 138-158. New York: Routledge, 2020.
  • “Empathy & Tintinnabuli Music in Film.” In Arvo Pärt’s White Light: Media, Culture, Politics, edited by Laura Dolp, 20-46. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
  • “The Vicissitudes of Listening: Music, Empathy, and Escape in Breaking the Waves,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9/1 (Spring 2015): 1-32.
  • “Embodied Experimentalism and Henry Cowell’s The Banshee.” American Music 28/4 (Winter 2010): 436-458.
  • “Transcending the Icon: Spirituality & Postmodernism in Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa & Spiegel im Spiegel.” Twentieth-Century Music 5/1 (2008): 45-78.
  • “Of Bodies & Narratives: Musical Representations of Pain and Illness in HBO’s Wit.” In Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, edited by Neil Lerner & Joseph N. Straus, 23-40. New York: Routledge.
  •  “Composing the Pacific: Interviews with Lou Harrison.” ECHO: a music-centered journal 1/1 (Fall 1999): http://www.echo.ucla.edu/.