Profile

Lori Kruckenberg is a professor of musicology. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on medieval and early modern music as well as specialty courses in musical paleography. Past graduate seminars have dealt with non-Gregorian monophony (sequences, tropes, ‘nova cantica’), concepts of compositio and musical authorship, and early musical practices in England. She has co-taught interdisciplinary seminars on “Performing Medieval Pilgrimage” with Prof. Gina Psaki (Romance languages) and “Music and Lyric of Medieval Iberia” with Prof. David Wacks (Romance languages). The musical practices of women religious, i.e., cantrices, have been the focus of several seminars. A seminar on liturgical drama is planned for 2020.

Kruckenberg was a Fulbright scholar to Germany (1992–94) and she continued her doctoral research at the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg through 1996. Prior to her arrival at the UO, she held positions at the University of Iowa and University of Louisville. She returned to Germany during part of 2008–2009 as a senior Fulbright scholar at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg, Germany. She also was a visiting professor at the Universität Basel during 2008–09.

Her research and publications have especially concentrated on the liturgical sequence and proper tropes of the mass, and issues related to the reception history, transmission, and performance practices of these types of music.  Other work delves into the musical lives of women religious. Her articles have appeared in a number of journals, conference proceedings, lexicons, and series including Revue bénédictine, Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, Cantus Planus, Berichte des Internationalen Kongresses der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), Journal of the Alamire Foundation, and Beiträge zur rheinischen Musikgeschichte. Her chapter on the liturgical sequence appears in the two-volume compendium The Cambridge History of Medieval Music (2018). Other major studies include “Neumatizing the Sequence: Special Performances of Sequences in the Central Middle Ages” in the Journal of American Musicology (2006) and “Music for John the Evangelist: Virtue and Virtuosity at Paradies,” in Harvard’s Houghton Library Studies (2008). Her work on the musically-informed chronicler Ekkehard IV appears in Medieval Music in Practice: Studies in Honor of Richard Crocker (2013) and Medieval Cantors and Their Craft (2017). A chapter on the education on medieval women religious is forthcoming in Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen (ed. by Jennifer Bain) and a study on medieval discourse on women’s voices in the ecclesiastical tradition for a volume on Female-Voice Song in the Middle Ages (ed. by Anna Kathryn Grau and Lisa Colton) is underway (Brill 2021).

Her volume New Sources for Proper Tropes: 11th to 16th Centuries will be published by Bärenreiter in 2019. Previously she edited and produced chapters for The Sequences of Nidaros: A Nordic Repertory and Its European Context (2006). She is currently preparing a monograph the traditions of the medieval German cantrix, and is also the volume editor of sequences for Corpus monodicum.

Awards include the 2012 Noah Greenberg Prize from the American Musicological Society, the Oregon Humanities Center, Williams Council, UO Center for the Study of Women in Society, and the Oregon Community Credit Union Research Fellowship.

Kruckenberg has lectured and presented papers at universities in Würzburg, Dublin, Cambridge, Oxford, Southampton, Basel, Erlangen-Nuremberg, Jena, Trondheim, and Boulder, and various conferences and symposia at Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame (IN), London, Bangor, Utrecht, Antwerp, Basel, Cologne, Mainz, Paderborn, Weimar, Tübingen, Weingarten, Munich, Regensburg, Niederaltaich, Venice, Salzburg, Graz, Vienna, and Lillafüred. She regularly presents at meetings of the American Musicological Society, International Musicological Society’s Cantus Planus, and the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo as well as at the International Med-Ren Music Conference, the Medieval Association of the Pacific, Mid-America Medieval Association Conference the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, the Medieval Academy of America, and the International Medieval Congress at Leeds.

She currently serves on the editorial boards of Plainsong and Medieval Music and of Corpus monodicum.

• PhD 1997, University of Iowa
• MA 1991, University of Iowa
• BA 1985, Bethany College, Kansas

HONORS 

• 2017, Oregon Humanities Grant
• 2014–15, Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS) Faculty Research Grant
• 2012–14, Williams Council Award
• 2012, Noah Greenberg Prize, American Musicological Society
• 2008-09, Fulbright Scholar
• 2007, Oregon Community Credit Union Research Fellowship
• 2005, Oregon Humanities Grant
• 1992–94, Fulbright Scholar