Paula Maust is a performer, scholar, and educator dedicated to fusing research and creative practice to amplify underrepresented voices and advocate for social change. She is the creator of Expanding the Music Theory Canon, an open-source collection of music theory examples by women and people of color. A print anthology based on the project will be released by SUNY Press in December 2023. Additionally, she is also collaborating with Auralia & Musition to curate a collection of worksheets to accompany the book that can be used in those platforms. Paula is also one of the early modern area editors for Oxford University Press’s women, gender, and sexuality revision of Grove Music Online.
Paula has published articles in Women and Music and the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, and she has presented her research at conferences of the Society for Eighteenth Century Music, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, the American Handel Society, the Indiana University Historical Performance Institute, and the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic.
As a harpsichordist and organist, Paula has been praised for combining “great power with masterful subtlety” (DC Metro Theater Arts) and as a “refined and elegant performer” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). As the co-director of Musica Spira, she curates provocative lecture-concerts connecting baroque music to contemporary social issues focused on women. Paula performs extensively as a continuo player with numerous ensembles in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. region, including the Washington Bach Consort, the Folger Consort, and Third Practice.
Paula is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. She holds degrees in harpsichord from Peabody (DMA ’19, MM ’16) and in organ from the Cleveland Institute of Music (MM ’12) and Valparaiso University (BM ’09).