Karen Painter

Karen Painter is Associate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she also teaches in the History Department, Jewish Studies, and the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch. She was previously a professor in the music departments at Harvard University (1997-2007) and Dartmouth College (1995-1997). In 2005-2006, Painter was on leave from Harvard to serve as Director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, overseeing a major study of classical music on public radio.

Painter has written on the relationship between music, listening, and ideology in the context of nineteenth-century Austrian and German social history, fin-de-si'cle cultural debates, World War I, Austro-German socialism, and Nazism. Her research interests include Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Hindemith and Orff. Painter has also remained committed to providing a public stage for musicology. She co-directed symposia with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2003 and 2005 and within the Ojai Music Festival in 2001-2003, from which resulted her Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work (Getty Research Institute, 2006), co-edited with the art historian Thomas Crow. Her Mahler and His World (Princeton University Press, 2002) appeared in a series associated with the Bard Music Festival. Painter has moderated panels with Pierre Boulez, Kurt Masur, Elliott Carter, and Christopher Hogwood, and organized the American participation in several German and Austrian conferences. In Salzburg, Painter collaborated with Thomas Hampson and the Mozarteum to organize a symposium on the European musical encounter with American poetry.