Dr. Aaron Ziegel is an Associate Professor of Music History and Culture at Towson University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2013. He teaches courses on music in the United States of America, Western art music history, opera studies, symphonic and choral literature, and writing about music. Dr. Ziegel engages widely in public musicology and is a familiar pre-concert lecturer in Baltimore, Maryland, and the surrounding region. He is the Scholar-in-Residence with Opera Baltimore, presenting multi-part lecture series that accompany every opera the company produces each season, all of which are published on the company’s “Opera Insights” webpage. In addition to his work with Opera Baltimore, he frequently lectures for Pro Musica Rara, the Handel Choir of Baltimore, and Opera Delaware. His published scholarship has traced the emergence of a nationalist style of opera writing during the early years of the twentieth century. In collaboration with Towson University student singers, he curated a program of long-forgotten scenes and arias from Romantic-era American operas. He received a Bachelor’s in Piano Performance, summa cum laude, and a Master’s in Music History at the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music, before earning a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
