Kathryn Libin

Kathryn L. Libin specializes in music of the long eighteenth century, particularly Mozart and his contemporaries, music in the lives of Jane Austen and her circle, and the history and performance practice of early keyboard instruments. From 2013–19 she led a research team that catalogued the historically significant music collection of the Lobkowicz Library at Nelahozeves castle, near Prague; containing over 5,000 pieces of music from the 17th through 19th centuries, the collection is particularly rich in performing manuscripts of opera, oratorio, and orchestral music. She co-curated the new permanent music galleries, titled Portrait in Music, at the Lobkowicz Palace museum in Prague, and has authored two volumes—Highlights (2019) and Beethoven (2020)—in The Lobkowicz Collections Music Series (Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers). She is currently working on a third volume, Mozart, which will appear in 2024, as well as a book about the 7th Prince Lobkowitz, Franz Joseph Maximilian, one of the foremost musical patrons in Vienna and Bohemia during the period of Haydn and Beethoven.

Ms. Libin also studies and interprets music in the life and writings of Jane Austen. She has given numerous presentations at national and regional meetings of the Jane Austen Society of North America, and served as musical director for JASNA’s 25th anniversary meeting in England in 2003, which included a choral evensong service near Austen’s grave at Winchester Cathedral, and for JASNA’s 2012 Annual General Meeting, for which two new choral works on Jane Austen texts were commissioned. In 2010 JASNA awarded her its International Visitor Program grant for research at the Chawton House Library, where she studied music books and manuscripts of Jane Austen and her family, along with writings about music in women's education. She has published several articles on Jane Austen and music in JASNA’s journal Persuasions, as well as “Daily Practice, Musical Accomplishment, and the Example of Jane Austen,” in Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony (Lehigh University Press, 2013). Her newest essay, “Music in Jane Austen’s Novels,” will soon appear in The Edinburgh Companion to Jane Austen and the Arts (2023).

Ms. Libin has taught at Vassar College for thirty years, and was chair of its music department for six years (2007–13). She served two terms as President of the American Musical Instrument Society (2003–07), was President of the Mozart Society of America (2007–09), and has served on the Board of Directors for both the Mozart Society and the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music. In 2017 she was invited to serve as scholar-in-residence for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Mozart Festival. Recently Ms. Libin has been participating in a collaborative series of “virtual conversations” bringing together the Boston Baroque Orchestra and The Lobkowicz Collections on topics of mutual interest, such as Haydn’s Creation and Mozart’s version of Handel’s Messiah.