Peter M. Lefferts is professor of music history in the School of Music of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where his teaching responsibilities span the broad range from introductory courses in listening for freshman non-majors, and courses in music history and theory for undergraduate majors, to doctoral seminars in performance practice. In the summer of 2006 he stepped down as head of the Division of History/Theory/Composition after serving in that role for seventeen years, and he has also recently finished serving a term as the Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at UNL. Dr. Lefferts was appointed in Fall, 2007 to be the Chief Adviser for UNL music majors on the BA and BM degrees. In the spring of 2008 he designed and taught for the first time a course on Music History Pedagogy, aimed to prepare not music historians but music performers with academic appointments who are assigned music history classes to teach.
Professor Lefferts has lectured and published extensively in North America and Europe. As an author and editor, Lefferts‘s areas of research specialization include medieval and Renaissance English music, the medieval motet, early music notation, early music theory in Latin and English, the tonal behavior of 14th and 15th century songs, and the relationship between church architecture and liturgy. He recently accepted an invitation to join the international advisory board of the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music based at Oxford University. Dr. Lefferts is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature at Indiana University. At UNL he directs the web-based project entitled Texts on Music in English from the Medieval and Early Modern Eras (TME), which is found on-line at http://www.music.indiana.edu/tme, and he also runs a project center of the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML). Dr. Lefferts was an associate editor for Medieval England: An Encyclopedia, with responsibility for writing or commissioning all entries on music and liturgy. He has also contributed articles to the revised The New Grove Dictionary of Music, the revised Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and new Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. He has contributed two chapters to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music.
A fresh research area for Dr. Lefferts since 2002 has involved a topic in local Nebraska history---the role of music at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition held in Omaha from June-October 1898, and at its 1899 offshoot, Omaha's Greater America Exposition. This project has spilled over into several other areas, one of the most interesting of which is the bands and bandmasters of the United States Government intertribal, off-reservation Native American boarding schools, especially at the Carlisle, Genoa, Flandreau, Haskell, Chilocco, and Phoenix schools. The bandmasters he is studying include Dennison Wheelock, James Riley Wheelock, and Nels S. Nelson.
Dr. Lefferts was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Rochester, New York. He holds the B.A., M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees, all from Columbia University. Before coming to Lincoln to join the faculty of UNL he taught at Columbia University and the University of Chicago.
Last update: August 11, 2008
