2025 Cusick Fund Grantees

Mary Lucia Thaỏ Darst received her doctorate in music from Oxford University, where she was a member of St Hilda’s College. Her research focuses on the application of economic and sociological modeling and theories to music history, specifically exploring networks and networking as sources of musical success and advancement. She has received various grants, fellowships, and awards, including the Laura Bassi Scholarship, the Cameron Mackintosh Drama Fund grant, and graduate funding from Columbia University. Darst is actively engaged in the fields of film and music. She has directed, produced, and crewed several short films and music projects, showcasing her skills in directing, cinematography, editing, and production coordination. She co-founded ClefRights Music Publishing, a music and technology startup.

With her interdisciplinary background, research expertise, and creative pursuits, Mary Lucia Thaỏ Darst is a multifaceted scholar who brings a unique perspective to the study of music. In addition to managing ClefRights Music Publishing, she is editing a book on dramaturgy and eighteenth-century opera for Vernon Press, which is currently accepting contributions. Darst is also preparing her doctoral thesis for publication.

Elaine R. Fitz Gibbon is a historical musicologist with a focus on the intersections of experimental music and art from the mid-twentieth century until today. She received her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology with a secondary field in American Studies from Harvard University in 2024. Her dissertation explored the mid-twentieth century emergence of the genre of instrumental theater as a vehicle for social critique in the collaborative works of Mauricio Kagel and Ursula Burghardt, and the genre’s resurgence in the 2010s. Fitz Gibbon’s work on contemporary and experimental musicking in diverse media has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Opera Quarterly, Current Musicology, the Mitteilungen of the Paul Sacher Foundation and the edited collection Material Cultures of Music Notation. This academic year, she has held visiting positions at Haverford College, Bard College Conservatory, and The Ohio State University.

The monograph Inventing Theater, Making Community: Instrumental Theater and the Birth of a Genre explores questions of community, collaboration, structural inequalities, and marginalization in the postwar West German avant-garde. Drawing on archival and ethnographic methodologies, as well as perspectives from disability studies, performance studies, and mobility and diaspora studies, I articulate how instrumental theater became a space for the critique of the art music tradition and its weaponization by the Nazis in the hands of artists such as Mauricio Kagel, Ursula Burghardt, Benjamin Patterson, William Pearson, and Alfred Feussner. In emphasizing the fundamentally co-creative nature of instrumental theater, Fitz Gibbon demonstrates how these artist collaborations and communities were fecund, though not always easy, spaces in which artists and audience members alike were forced to reckon with imbalances of power and structural inequalities in conceptions of authorship and ownership.

Riccardo La Spina researches nineteenth-century music, vocality and recordings, enjoys membership in international study groups, and presents for scholarly societies (Sociedad Española de Musicología; Società Italiana di Musicologia; Society for Musicology in Ireland; American Musicological Society; IRCTP, Tbilisi; etc). He has received research awards, including the AMS’ 2014 Thomas Hampson Award for Research in Song, and visiting scholarships in Mexico, Spain, and Italy. Published and forthcoming contributions include Grove, RILM, and journals (Diagonal, PMM, Studies in Musical Theatre, Nineteenth-Century Music).

A concertizing tenor-soloist and composer, Riccardo also performs ethnic song, playing accordion and Georgian panduri. La Spina is preparing two articles accepted for publication, commissions and updates for Grove. Additionally, he has upcoming presentations at Theatrical Voices, the SMI Annual Plenary Conference, and the Early Recordings Association Conference.

Dr. Samuel T. Nemeth teaches the music history sequence and general education courses, such as Listening in Context and Music in World Cultures, at Ohio Wesleyan University. Nemeth completed a Ph.D. in Musicology at Case Western Reserve University in December 2023. His dissertation, “‘Ces Magnifiques Instruments’: Sound, Power, and Romantic Orchestral Technologies, 1789–1869,” examined intersections among instrumentation, politics, warfare, and trauma in military and orchestral soundworlds of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century France. Nemeth completed an MA in Musicology at Pennsylvania State University and graduated summa cum laude with a double major in Music and American Political Communication from The College of New Jersey, where he was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Nemeth has presented papers at several meetings of the American Musicological Society and at international conferences of the France: Musiques, Cultures, 1789–1918 network, the Galpin Society, and the Historic Brass Society. He has also held Research Assistantships at The Cleveland Orchestra and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At Case Western, Nemeth received the Graduate Dean’s Instructional Excellence Award for his service teaching History of Rock and Roll.

Nemeth is currently preparing two articles based on his dissertation research: the first investigates the violent meanings embedded in Hector Berlioz’s multilayered orchestration for the Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale, and the second examines the relationship between nineteenth-century French military weaponry and Adolphe Sax’s instrumental innovations. Additionally, his chapter focusing on Berlioz as composer-conductor is forthcoming from Brepols (2026). His longer-term project investigates how, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Franco-American connections and crossover between sound and military technology both fashioned American identity and undercut notions of American “exceptionalism.”

David Poile’s varied career in music began with his chosen instrument, the organ. He received his Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University, his Master of Music from McGill University and, returning to Northwestern, his Doctorate in Music. His dissertation concerned the problem of binary-against-ternary rhythms in the music of J. S. Bach. During and after his doctoral studies, he taught music to inner-city youth in Chicago, founding a choir of these children that was invited to perform at the prestigious Ravinia concert venue. While working as a music director at various Chicago-area churches, he began his research on the North American organ. For this, he has traveled to thirty states and three provinces of Canada to examine and play these instruments. To date, he has played over 1,300 organs for this study. Presently, he is focused on researching the music of the nearly forgotten American composer Arthur Bird, America’s first composer of ballet.

Arthur Bird (1856-1923) has been nearly forgotten within the annals of music history. Though American, he lived the majority of his life in Berlin, Germany. What is generally unknown is that Bird was a significant composer of great symphonic music and was America’s first composer of ballet. The goal of his research is to revive his stature as a noteworthy American composer. The majority of Bird’s orchestral music has never been published and exists only in manuscript. In his research, Poile has discovered four lost manuscripts of the composer and is in the process of locating other missing ones. In addition, Poile is editing and digitizing all of his manuscripts in order to make his music available for performance.