David Kasunic, PhD
Musicologist
I am a musicologist whose principal area of research is the music of Fryderyk Chopin. I have also written on Eduard Hanslick's reception of Gustav Mahler, on "tubercular singing" in Verdi's La traviata, and on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's cat. I teach at Occidental College courses on Western music history, opera, music and disease, music and sense perception (especially where dining is concerned), and the aesthetics of music. I chaired the Occidental Music Department from 2014 to 2023. As of July 2024, I am the inaugural Director of the John Branca Institute for Music, dedicated to the study of popular music and the music industry.
Research Interests
The thread that runs through my work is an emphasis on human bodies making and listening to music, and the relationship between and historical and material contingency of these activities. Chopin has been my central case study, where I have been interested in how he navigated his sick body to play the piano, which is how he composed; how the contemporary music he heard was mediated by his reproducing it on the piano; and how that music makes its way into Chopin's musical vocabulary. And I am interested in how people listened to Chopin performing his music; how a new diagnostic pathology based on listening inflected a new mode of music listening and the emergent field of music analysis (as we understand it today); how that listening was a multi-sensory activity; and how perceptions of disease, gender, and nationality conditioned how that music was heard.
Publications
“The Jena Romantics, Chopin, and the Musical ‘Invention of Self’: Revisiting Robert Schumann’s Reviews of Fryderyk Chopin’s Music,” in Romanticism in Music: Poland in its European Context, ed. Jeffrey Kallberg. Warsaw: The Fryderyk Chopin Institute, 2025.—forthcoming
“The Role of Bellini in the Evolution of Chopin’s Approach to Nocturne Melody,” in The Oxford Handbook of Musical Variation, ed. Jeffrey A. Swinkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.—forthcoming
“Chopin as Philosopher,” in The Book of the Fourth International Chopinological Congress, eds. Jim Samon and Jeffrey Kallberg. Warsaw: The Fryderyk Chopin Institute, 2024.—forthcoming