SUNY Broome Music instructor Julia Grella O’Connell began her career as a professional opera singer, but ended up falling in love with research.
“It’s like falling down a really good rabbit hole,” said Dr. O’Connell, whose Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England was recently awarded the 2019 Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music by the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA).
Her performance career also reflects her research interests: A mezzo-soprano who has performed throughout the United States and Europe, she founded the Risorgimento Project, an ensemble based on her archival research into English and Italian 19th century song. She earned her bachelor’s from Sarah Lawrence College and her master’s and Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.
Published by Routledge, her 2018 book derives from her doctoral dissertation while at CUNY, under musicologist Barbara Russano Hanning, the author of the textbook Dr. O’Connell uses in her music history classes at SUNY Broome. Music iconography is interdisciplinary in nature, and O’Connell explores the depiction of music in 19th century English paintings.
“The Committee especially commends Dr. O’Connell’s interdisciplinary scholarship, which traverses visual art, literature, theology, and music in great skill, and is delivered in exceptionally fine and lucid prose,” NABMSA wrote in its decision to award her the McVeagh Prize. “Through her focus on the trope of the ‘fallen woman,’ Dr. O’Connell demonstrates – among other things – how images involving Saint Cecilia or Mary Magdalen informed Victorian perceptions of music’s moral agency.”
She continues to follow research down intriguing rabbit holes, and is currently working on her next book: an exploration of the pastoral tradition in 1920s-era British literature and music. The inspiration is Harold Fraser-Simson, an operetta composer and friend and neighbor of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne, whose children’s poetry he set to music.
She has performed those pieces herself many times, and describes them as art songs for piano and voice. They have an adult, classical sensibility to them, although they’re written in such a way that allows them to be performed at home.
“A.A. Milne was deeply affected by his experience in World War I,” she said. “In the 1920s, childhood became a sacred space in British literature. A.A. Milne is trying to create this ideal world based on the English landscape.”
Dr. O’Connell, who has also served on the faculties of Hunter College and The City College of New York, teaches 19th century and African-American music history at SUNY Broome. It’s a role she cherishes.
“I teach at a community college, not at a research university. I love teaching — the ability to light a fire in my students about a subject I’m so passionate about, music and music history,” she explained.
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