Music
School of Music
- Ph.D. Northwestern University, 2020
- M.A Northwestern University, 2016
- M.M. Colorado State University, 2011
- B.M. University of Northern Colorado, 2005
Research Areas
- Music and Politics in Early Modern Italy
- Music Printing and Circulation, 16th-17th centuries
- Music and Eroticism
- Elizabethan England
- Performance Practice
- Fluxus and American Experimentalism, 1960s-80s
- Jazz and the Civil Rights Era
Jason Rosenholtz-Witt joined the University of Kentucky in Fall 2024 as Assistant Professor of Musicology. Also a double bassist, he previously taught at Western Kentucky University, Oxford College of Emory University, and spent four years teaching English in Hiroshima, Japan. Dr. Rosenholtz-Witt specializes in music and politics in Northern Italy and Germany during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—especially in Bergamo. His secondary interests include Elizabethan England, historically informed performance practice, nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire, 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. See his CV, attached, for a full list of publications. 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.
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), and Orchestra Kentucky.