Ellen Exner

Music Historian, New England Conservatory

Ellen Exner is a specialist in music of the eighteenth century, specifically music of the Bach family. After receiving undergraduate degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in Music History as well as Russian Language and Literature, Exner went on to receive an MA from Smith College and then a PhD in Historical Musicology from Harvard University. Her current book project re-examines the eighteenth-century roots of Mendelssohn’s famous 1829 Berlin performance of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Exner is actively engaged with Baroque repertory as both a scholar and a performer on historical oboes. She has published critical editions of music by Gottfried August Homilius with Carus-Verlag (Stuttgart) and is finishing work on Emanuel Bach’s 1779 Passion According to St. Luke for the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Complete Works Edition. Her research has also appeared in the journals BACH, Eighteenth-Century Music, the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and in German-language publications dedicated to the most recent scholarship on Georg Philipp Telemann and his contemporaries. Dr. Exner is a member of the Editorial Board of the American Bach Society and serves as Editor of its official newsletter, Bach Notes. She has taught courses on baroque music as well as the history of art song by invitation at Boston University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Following three years as Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Music, she joined the full-time Music History faculty at New England Conservatory in fall of 2015.