Kirsten Paige

Bio

Kirsten Paige is currently an Associate Teaching Professor of Musicology at North Carolina State University with gratis appointments in the NC State Coastal Resilience & Sustainability Initiative and Climate Solutions Collaborative. Prior to joining the NC State faculty, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University for three years and, in 2018, earned a Ph.D. in Music History & Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Paige earned her earlier degrees at the University of Cambridge (M.Phil. in Music Studies, 2012) and the University of Chicago (A.B. in Music History & Theory, 2011). She studied double bass at the Juilliard School of Music from the age of 13 to 18.

Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dr. Paige’s work asks how musical cultures formed, sustained, and disrupted regimes of scientific knowledge and attendant constructions of human difference. In her latest research, she examines the environmental and political lives of musical instruments in colonial contexts, with an emphasis on Southeast Asia.

Her first book, “Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology,” is forthcoming in 2025 with University of Chicago Press. This book explores Wagner’s development of his novel Germanic aesthetic paradigms around contemporary theories of climate, race, and human identity. It argues that this regime of knowledge entwines Wagnerian musical ideations with the intellectual impulses of anthropogenic climate change, and challenges musicologists to consider how disciplinary thought patterns continue to perpetuate unmarked Wagnerian ideas of nature, music, and “the human.” “Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology” has been supported by fellowships from Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities and Institute of International & Comparative Studies, and publication grants funded by the American Musicological Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Dr. Paige’s next monograph, “Keyboard Botany: Climate, Empire, and the Tropical Piano in Southeast Asia,” is equally concerned with the Anthropocene’s auditory genealogies. But, where her first book addresses Anthropocenic technologies and knowledge regimes, “Keyboard Botany” is concerned with its global systems and infrastructures. Focusing on piano production and circulation in India, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar between 1842-1912, “Keyboard Botany” exposes the centrality of local piano firms to imperial infrastructure, policy, and the propagation of liberal culture.

Dr. Paige has presented papers based on this work at Cornell’s Center for Historical Keyboards, the Royal Musical Association’s Annual Meeting, and American Musicological Society’s Annual Meeting. An essay based on this research is forthcoming in the special issue of Keyboard Perspectives on the global history of keyboard instruments that she is editing with Morton Wan. This project has been supported by a Visiting Research Fellowship from Merton College, University of Oxford, as well as by grants from Cornell.

Appearing in journals such as the Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Opera Quarterly, Dr. Paige’s work is defined by collaboration, boundary-crossing, and field-building, making a case for music and sound as planetary phenomena. Such projects include the special issue of 19th-Century Music (“Music and the Invention of Environment,” 2021) that she edited and contributed to by invitation of the Editorial Board, and Cambridge Companion to Music & the Environment (under contract, Cambridge University Press), which she is editing with ethnomusicologist Lonán Ó Briein. Committed to cultivating intellectual communities, she founded the Music Studies & the Anthropocene Research Network in 2021.

In the classroom, Dr. Paige emphasizes experiential learning, students’ ownership of course content, and, like her research, interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches. She considers her students to be collaborators and co-creators, the classroom a space to explore and solve problems together. Her course offerings at NC State have included courses on the history of music and science; sound studies; ecomusicology; the history of music, gender, and sexuality across genres and musical traditions; the history of music technology; and introductory courses in Western music history.

Area(s) of Expertise

Nineteenth-century music, opera, history of science and technology, environmental history, intellectual history, history of race, history of politics, media history and theory

Publications

• Echo , SOUND STUDIES (2022)
• Listening to Climate Change , (2022)
• Listening to Daily Life in the Bosavi Rainforest , (2022)
• Introduction , NINETEENTH CENTURY MUSIC (2021)
• On the Politics of Performing Wagner Outdoors: Open-Air Opera, Gesamtkunstwerk and the Third Reich’s ‘Forest Opera’, 1933–45 , Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2021)
• Sonic ecosystems of loss: Voices of the Rainforest at twenty-five , Sound Studies (2021)
• Tectonic Microphonics , NINETEENTH CENTURY MUSIC (2021)
• Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music, by Holly Watkins , Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020)
• Opera’s Inconvenient Truths in the Anthropocene Age: CO2 and Anthropocene , The Opera Quarterly (2020)
• “Art and Climate” and the Atmospheric Politics of Wagnerian Theater , The Opera Quarterly (2019)