Musicology and Music History

Bio: Megan Sarno is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Texas at Arlington. She was previously Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Carleton and St Olaf Colleges. She earned her PhD at Princeton University in 2016. Her research focuses on the cultural dimensions of early 20th-century French music. Dr. Sarno’s published work includes an article in 19th-Century Music on the music of little-known French composer André Caplet. Focusing on his final work, the song cycle Le Miroir de Jésus, Sarno uses archival materials, as well as literary and music analysis, to explain subtle layers of meaning in Caplet’s songs. Her 2018 article in Journal of Musicological Research investigates the 1911 stage music of composer Claude Debussy. The work, Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, has been long misunderstood. Using literary and music analysis, Sarno argues that Debussy’s music highlights the Symbolist poetic qualities of Le Martyre. Though her work is focused on French music, Sarno is broadly interested in the social and intellectual function of music—why composers write it and why listeners keep returning to it. Sarno has taught on a wide range of topics, from Baroque and Classical repertory through the music in Disney films. She enjoys teaching music majors and non-majors alike, encouraging students to draw on their own musicality to engage with assignments. Previous courses include American Musical Theater, Songs and Identity, Women and Music, Religion and Music, Disney Movie Musicals, Music of the Cold War, and American Music. Sarno has presented her work on French music and literary culture internationally and in the United States, at the Society for the American Musicological Society, the North American Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, Music and the Moving Image, and special meetings on Fauré, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, French Creative Women, and Musical Life in 20th-Century Paris. She has won numerous grants for pedagogical innovation. In 2016, she was the recipient of a Chateaubriand Fellowship, which funded a semester of archival research in Paris, France.