Jason Rosenholtz-Witt
- Ph.D. Northwestern University, 2020
- M.A Northwestern University, 2016
- M.M. Colorado State University, 2011
- B.M. University of Northern Colorado, 2005
Jason Rosenholtz-Witt joined the University of Kentucky in Fall 2024 as Assistant Professor of Musicology. He specializes in music and politics in Northern Italy and Germany during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in Bergamo; music and visual art in Renaissance/early modern Italy; music printing and circulation; and music and Neoplatonism. His secondary interests include Elizabethan England, historically informed performance practice, organology, nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire, Fluxus and twentieth-century experimentalism, and jazz during the Civil Rights era.
Dr. Rosenholtz-Witt has published articles and book chapters on topics ranging from musical life in early modern Bergamo; English viol consort music; William Byrd, emblems, and Elizabethan court politics; the circulation of Italian music in Germany during the Thirty Years War; and avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman and her interpretation of John Cage. His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), the Newberry Library (Chicago), and a Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship. His book in progress is titled Between Innovation and Tradition: Musical Life in the Venetian Terraferma, 1580–1630 and is funded by the Delmas Foundation. Before coming to UK, he previously taught at Western Kentucky University, Oxford College of Emory University, and spent four years teaching English in Hiroshima, Japan. He is currently President of the South-Central chapter of the American Musicological Society and serves on the board of the Society for Seventeenth Century Music.
As a double bassist, Dr. Rosenholtz-Witt has performed with the Cheyenne Symphony, Fort Collins Symphony, Greeley Philharmonic, Steamboat Springs Symphony, Emerald City Opera, the Kure Orchestra (Japan), the Lakeview Symphony (Chicago), Orchestra Kentucky, and the Lexington Chamber Orchestra.