Virginia Lamothe

Biography

Dr. Virginia Lamothe is an Associate Professor of Musicology at Belmont University. Her areas of expertise include seventeenth-century opera, early musical theater, renaissance and baroque dance, online learning pedagogy, and sound studies.

Virginia teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of classical music and popular music, as well as specialty courses including First Year Seminar and History of Electro-Digital Music. She completed her dissertation, “The Theater of Piety: Sacred Operas for the Barberini family (1632-1643)” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the Direction of Tim Carter. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy as well as a first-prize winner of the Lemmermann Foundation award. She has given papers at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Seventeenth Century Music, international conferences in England and Italy, and specialized conferences on performance practice, pedagogy, sound studies, and music and esotericism.

Professor Lamothe is the founder and director of the Belmont in Rome study abroad program. She has published in Oxford’s Early Music, the Journal of Seventeenth Century Music, and other volumes. She is a co-author and co-editor of the book Curriculum Development for Online Education published by IGI Global (2018).

Professor Lamothe has trained in renaissance and baroque dance practice and performance with Barbara Sparti in Rome, Italy; Ken Pierce at Longy School of Music in Boston, and Carol Marsh at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She frequently teaches workshops on historical dance. Professor Lamothe has served on the boards of the South-Central chapter of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Seventeenth Century Music.

Publications: Books

Music at the Majestic Theater: Performing the Cultural Imagination, 1903–1913. Work in Progress.

Pedagogy Development for Online Music Education, eds. Carol Johnson and Virginia Christy Lamothe. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2018.

Publications: Articles

“Tommaso Campanella, The Barberini Palace, and the Soul’s Perception of Music” In Explorations in Music and Esotericism ed. Marjorie Roth and Leonard George. Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2023.

“A Tale of Two Entrate: Processions, Politics, and Patronage for the Habsburgs in Seventeenth Century Rome” In A Companion to Music at the Habsburg Courts in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries ed. Andrew Weaver. Boston: Brill, 2019.

“Martyr Saints on Stage and Papal Exhortations during the Thirty Years’ War.” Journal of the Society for Seventeenth Century Music 22 (2016).

“Fanning the Flames of Love: Hidden Performance Solutions for Claudio Monteverdi’s Ballo delle ingrate found in Renaissance Dance.” In Performance Practice, Issues and Approaches; (Proceedings of the Conference held at Rhodes College, Memphis TN March 4-6, 2007), 97–108. Ed. Timothy Watkins. Ann Arbor: Steglein Press, 2009.

“Dancing at a Wedding: Some Thoughts on Performance Issues in Claudio Monteverdi’s ‘Lasciate i monti’ (Orfeo, 1607).” Early Music 36 (November, 2008): 533–546.

Publications: Reviews

“Music, Healing, and Devotion: Musical Practice in an Early-Modern Hospital” Review of

Music, Medicine, and Religion at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Rome, 1550–1750 by Naomi J. Barker. Boydell Press, 2024.

The Ruined Bridge: Studies in Barberini Patronage of Music and Spectacle 1631 – 1679. By Frederick Hammond. Sterling Heights, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 2010. Reviewed for the Journal of Seventeenth Century Music. 20 (2017).