Violinist, conductor, and historian, Robert Whitehouse Eshbach is Emeritus Associate Professor of Music at the University of New Hampshire (USA). His recent publications and invited papers have focused on nineteenth-century musicians: Joachim, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Robert and Clara Schumann, Reinecke, and Wilhelmine Norman-Neruda (Lady Hallé). He and Valerie Goertzen of Loyola University New Orleans are co-editors of The Creative Worlds of Joseph Joachim, (Boydell & Brewer, 2021). Eshbach’s journal articles have appeared in Die Tonkunst, Musical Quarterly, and Music & Letters, among others, and he has contributed chapters to volumes published by Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, Olms Verlag, Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, and Boydell & Brewer.
Tekla Babyak received her PhD in Musicology from Cornell University in 2014. Currently based in Davis, CA, she is an independent scholar and disability activist with multiple sclerosis. Recent publications have appeared in Journal of the Royal Musical Association; Bibliotheca Dantesca; Historians Without Borders: New Studies in Multidisciplinary History (Routledge, 2019); Current Musicology; and Rethinking Brahms (OUP, 2022). Her research interests focus on intertextuality, philosophical aesthetics, and hermeneutic approaches to nineteenth-century music. In addition to her musicological projects, she has given invited talks which offer strategies for the fuller inclusion of disabled scholars in academia. To this end, she is a member of the Society for Music Theory Committee on Disability and Accessibility, and a Modern Language Association Assembly Delegate representing Disability in the Profession.
Katharina Uhde, DMA, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Music at Valparaiso University. She is the author of The Music of Joseph Joachim (Boydell & Brewer, 2018) and has edited for Bärenreiter two compositions by Joseph Joachim (2018). She has written chapters, articles, and encyclopedia entries related to Joachim. As a violinist she has won prizes in competitions, released several CDs, and has recorded virtuoso violin works by Joseph Joachim with the Radio Orchestra Warsaw, released under the Soundset label in December 2020. She has received grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, and the American Brahms Society.
R. Larry Todd is Arts & Sciences Professor at Duke University. Among his books are Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (OUP, 2003), “likely to be the standard biography for a long time to come” (New York Review of Books). His biography of Fanny Hensel, titled Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn (OUP, 2010) was awarded the Nicholas Slonimsky Prize from ASCAP. With Marc Moskovitz, he has written Beethoven’s Cello: Five Revolutionary Sonatas and Their World (Boydell & Brewer). His introductory textbook Discovering Music (OUP, 2017) is now in its third edition.
He has appeared in two documentaries about the Mendelssohns; Mendelssohn, the Nazis and Me (2009) and Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn (2023). His recording of the Mendelssohns’ complete works with Nancy Green appeared from JRI Recordings in 2013. As a chamber musician he performs frequently with the violinist-musicologist Katharina Uhde, and is co-authoring with her Sounding Riddles: Tales of Ciphers, Sphinxes, and Other Musical Curiosities (forthcoming 2025, Boydell Press).
