Cathy Ann Elias
BIO
Education
BA State University of New York: Stony Brook University
MA State University of New York: Binghamton University
MA University of Chicago
PhD University of Chicago
MDiv Catholic Theological Union
Courses Taught
Music and Culture I and II
Popular Brazilian Music
History of Italian Popular Music
The Beatles
Baroque Seminar
Music Research
Early Music Notation Seminar
Music in the Material and Spiritual World
Music in the time of Plagues, Wars, Peace
About
Cathy Ann Elias’s work grows out of a lifelong engagement with performance, theory, literature, and theology. She began her serious musical studies at the Preparatory Division of the Juilliard School, simultaneously spending summers studying theory at the Manhattan School of Music. She earned her undergraduate degree in viola performance from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and completed a Master of Arts in Music Theory at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where her thesis examined the String Quartet No. 3 by Béla Bartók. She holds a Master of Arts in Library Science and a PhD in Musicology from the University of Chicago.
Her scholarship bridges music, literary culture, and theology, with particular focus on compositional process in sixteenth-century Franco-Flemish masses and performance practice informed by medieval and Renaissance Italian literary sources. She explores how music functions within lived human experience—during times of plague and displacement, within devotional movements, and in intimate gatherings away from home. Her publications include “Musical Performance in 16th-century Italian Literature: Straparola's Le piacevoli notti” in Early Music; “More on Imitatio and Mid-16th-Century Chanson Masses: Erasmus on Christian Reflections and Lying Mirrors” in The Journal of the Alamire Foundation; “Mid-Sixteenth Century Chanson Masses, A Kaleidoscopic Process” in Early Musical Borrowings; “Sercambi's Novelliere and Croniche as Evidence for Musical Entertainment in the Fourteenth Century” in The Italian Novella; “Music on the Run in the Italian Novella: Plagues, Devotional Movements, and Intimate Gatherings Away from Home” in Ingrid Brainard Gedenkschrift; “A New Look at Cantus Firmus Process in Crecquillon’s Missa Kein Adler in der Welt so schön” in Uno gentile et subtile ingenio Studies in Renaissance Music in Honour of Bonnie J. Blackburn; “Claudio Baglioni, The Apollo of Musica Leggera” in Musica pop e testi in Italia dal 1960 a oggi; “Pietro Aretino and his Musical World” in The Brill Companion to Pietro Aretino; and “Liberation Theology: Affirmation and Homage in Three Brazilian Masses” in Christian Sacred Music in the Americas. She is currently completing an edition of the madrigals by Antonio Buonavita, Nobile Pisano Cavaliere.
She recently received a Master of Divinity and has been working on the reworking of Biblical narratives in oratorios and other smaller genres, examining how sacred stories are reshaped to fit the needs of the times. An active painter, Elias was featured in DePaul University Newsline Online in the lead article titled, “Faculty art keeps Ukrainians top of mind as war enters second year.” She also maintains a strong interest in popular music, bringing early music, contemporary culture, and theological reflection into sustained dialogue.