Chantal Frankenbach, Musicology

Contact Information

Name: Chantal Frankenbach

Title: Professor of Music

Office Location: Capistrano Hall 127

Email: cfranken@csus.edu

Office Phone: (916) 278-7980

Office Hours: T-Th 12:00 - 1:00

Profile

Get to Know Me!

1. What inspired you to pursue music?

I pursued an advanced degree in music because I wanted to understand the structures that made music so meaningful to me. I wanted know where a musical composition got its emotional power. And then I got interested in what makes music meaningful in its cultural, intellectual, and political contexts. I wanted to know why music mattered to the people who heard it, and what its role has been in shaping human history.

2. What else do you do besides music?

My amateur vocations, in no particular order: gardener and weed puller, pie and cake baker, seamstress, foster kitten Mom, beach and creek walker, letter writer, home maker.

3. What has surprised you most about your career in musicology?

I had no idea that all the different occupations I stumbled through when I was young would prepare me for what I do now. Being a professional dancer, an elementary school teacher, a parent, and running a piano studio all gave me skills and experiences that shape my work as a scholar and a professor of music history. I didn’t know that life could be so messy and still end up making perfect sense. I think that can only happen when you trust your intuition about where your gifts lie and how best to use them, given the opportunities at hand at different times in your life. Over time, the seemingly scattered choices you make form a logic of their own that you can only see in hindsight.

Education

2012 Ph.D., Music, University of California, Davis. Dissertation: Disdain for Dance,

Disdain for France: Choreophobia in German Musical Modernism. Dissertation

director: Beth E. Levy

2007 M.A., Music, University of California, Davis

1985 B.A., Dance, University of California, Irvine. Magna cum laude

Courses I Teach

Graduate seminars

MUSC 201, Introduction to Graduate Studies

MUSC 206, Seminar in Historical Musicology

Special Topics: Music and Dance, Music and Modernism, Musical Humor, The Music of Joseph Haydn, Virtuosity in the 19th Century

Courses for undergraduate music majors

MUSC 10A - 10B - 10C, Survey of Music Literature

MUSC 110, Research in Music History (capstone writing intensive)

Special topics: Musical Premieres, Music in Times of War, Women in Western Music-Making, Music and Dance, Anthems

Courses for non-majors

MUSC 18, Music Appreciation (online)

DNCE 22, Music for Dancers

Publications

Books

Moving the Body Politic: Isadora Duncan and the German Public, 1902-1905. New York: Oxford University Press. Forthcoming, 2026.

A Cultural History of Dance, co-editor, vol. 5, “A Cultural History of Dance in the Age of Romanticism and Industrialization, 1789–1914.” New York: Bloomsbury Press. Forthcoming, 2026.

Journal articles

“Selling Orchestral Music in the Vaudeville Age: The Duncan-Damrosch Tours, 1908–1911.” Journal of the Society for American Music 15/1 (February, 2021): 60–93.

“Dancing to Beethoven in Wilhelmine Germany: Isadora Duncan and her Critics.” Journal of Musicology 34/1 (Winter, 2017): 71–114.

“Curricular Design and Institutional Support for Undergraduate Research in Music History.” CUR Quarterly (Fall, 2016): 20–25.

“Dancing the Redemption of French Literature: Rivière, Mallarmé, and Le Sacre du printemps.” Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts 38/2 (2015): 134–160. [Awarded the 2016 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, American Society for Aesthetics]

Book Chapters

“Hypnotic Dancing and the Science of Sleep and Dreams:The Controversial Case of Madeleine G.” The Articulate Body: Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Lynn Matluck Brooks, Serial Golomb, and Garth Grimball. University of Florida Press, 2025.

"Cakewalking the Black Atlantic: Wagner and Ragtime Cross the Pond." In The Routledge Companion to Choreomusicology, edited by Samuel N Dorf, Julia Helen Minors, and Simon Morrison. Routledge, 2025.

“Who Laughs Last? The Dancer in Haydn’s Concert Minuets.” In Music in Eighteenth-Century Culture, edited by Mary Sue Morrow, 48–85. Ann Arbor: Steglein Publishing, 2016.

“Waltzing around the Musically Beautiful: Listening and Dancing in Hanslick’s Hierarchy of Musical Perception.” In Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression, edited by Nicole Grimes, Wolfgang Marx, and Siobhán Donovan, 108–131. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013.

Book Reviews

Review of Marking Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic, by Susan Funkenstein. Central European History (December, 2022): 627–628.

Review of Balanchine and Kirstein’s American Enterprise, by James Steichen. Modernism/Modernity (September, 2020): 620–622.

Review of Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890–1930, by Samuel N. Dorf. Notes 77/2 (December, 2020): 299–302.

Review of Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History, by Rebecca Harris-Warrick. Notes 75/1 (September, 2018): 72–75.

Blogposts

“Isadora Duncan and her Collaborators.” Guest post for the New York Public Library. https://www.nypl.org/blog/2017/05/01/isadora-duncan-and-her-collaborators

Dissertation

Disdain for Dance, Disdain for France: Choreophobia in German Musical Modernism, University of California, Davis, 2012.