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Sean Gallagher

Sean Gallagher

Education and Training

BM, MM Peabody Conservatory; AM, PhD Harvard University.

Awards and Recognition

Phi Beta Kappa Prize at Harvard for Excellence in Teaching, 2008

Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, 2002

Johns Hopkins University’s Society of Scholars, 2019 

Sean Gallagher

Division: College

Department: Chair, Music History and Musicology

Instrument: Piano

Sean Gallagher is a music historian and pianist whose research focuses on music and culture in Italy, France, and the Low Countries during the ‘long’ fifteenth century (ca. 1380–1520).

He has published articles on an array of subjects and is the author or editor of five books, ranging in topic from plainchant to Mozart: a monograph on the fifteenth-century composer Johannes Regis (Brepols, 2010); Secular Renaissance Music: Forms and Functions, editor (Ashgate, 2013); City, Chant, and the Topography of Early Music, ed. with M. S. Cuthbert and C. Wolff (Harvard, 2013); The Century of Bach and Mozart: Perspectives on Historiography, Composition, Theory, and Performance, ed. with T. F. Kelly (Harvard, 2008); Western Plainchant in the First Millennium: Studies in the Medieval Liturgy and its Music, ed. with J. Haar, J. Nádas, and T. Striplin (Ashgate, 2003). Active as a pianist, he regularly presents lectures/recitals on a variety of topics that span much of the history of Western music. 

He has worked closely with leading ensembles, including The Clerks (dir. Edward Wickham), for whose recording Johannes Regis: Opera omnia he served as advisor. He was the musicological advisor for Ockeghem@600, a multi-year project with the award-winning vocal ensemble Blue Heron (dir. Scott Metcalfe) to perform and record the works of Johannes Ockeghem. He is currently editing the chansons of Firminus Caron, to be published in the series Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the Alamire Foundation

Former faculty member of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard University. Visiting professorships at Boston University, Brandeis University, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Curriculum Vitae

BM, MM Peabody Conservatory; AM, PhD Harvard University.

  • Phi Beta Kappa Prize at Harvard for Excellence in Teaching, 2008
  • Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, 2002
  • Johns Hopkins University’s Society of Scholars, 2019 

Affiliated Departments and Programs

Music History and Musicology