Giulia Accornero

Giulia Accornero is a music theorist who specializes in media theory and the global history of music theoretical practices. Her research focuses in particular on early Arabic music theory and the ways in which it has shaped past and present discourse in Europe and North America. She is currently working on her first book, Tools of the Trade: Measuring Music in the Greater Mediterranean (850–1350), which investigates the cultural, cognitive, and material practices through which medieval music theorists from Baghdad to Paris made sense of musical time. 

Recent articles also examine how new and old media—from music notation, to amplification techniques, to music production software—as well as audile techniques predicate new modes of listening to music and identifying its elements. Her second book-length project, Theorizing from the Temperate Zone: A Tale of Music and Climate Theory, takes the musical discourse of premodern Islamicate authors as a springboard for tracing the genealogy of ‘climatic determinism’—the ideology that climate determines the physical attributes and mental characteristics of individuals, giving rise to racial difference. 

In 2022, she co-founded the Notation, Inscription, and Visualization Study Group of the American Musicological Society, which she still co-chairs, and was recently elected co-chair of the AMS History of Theory Study Group (effective November 2024), for which she has served as Blog Editor since 2021. Giulia also spearheads the project project Tartīb, a digital resource that aims to lower entry barriers to the study of Arabic music theory (750–1300 CE), which was awarded grants by the AMS and the Medieval Academy of America and will be published in 2024.