Date/Time
Fri, Apr 24, 2026
3:00 pm EDT - 4:30 pm EDT
Following the 200th anniversary of Antonio Salieri’s death in 2025, this session considers a variety of recent developments in scholarship on his life, works, and reception history. We are particularly interested in using previously underexamined sources and methods to consider the contextual and historical influences upon Salieri’s output, musical reputation, and source survival.
Ellen Stokes assesses Salieri’s instrumental manuscripts in a new light, reconstructing his works through close analytical and historical study. Stokes’ work considers how prior Salieri scholarship shapes both our longstanding understanding of his manuscripts and the subsequent implications on the survival of his works in modern archival settings.
Kristin Franseen focuses on the place of anecdote, gossip, and fiction in shaping Salieri’s posthumous reception history from the earliest biographies and reminiscences of former student through to the present day. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary research into historical fiction and misinformation/disinformation studies—as well as literary and multimedia case studies spanning the past two hundred years—she examines how dubious biographical claims have remarkable staying power in how music history continues to be (re)imagined in scholarship, criticism, and popular culture.
Registration
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Bios
Dr. Ellen Stokes was awarded her PhD in Musicology from the University of Huddersfield in 2025. Ellen’s research centers around the instrumental manuscripts of Antonio Salieri, reassessing his output in the light of musical and contextual study, alongside existing scholarly evidence. Her PhD work was funded by the Steinitz Scholarship in Musicology and supported by grants from the German History Society and Royal Musical Association.
She was the co-winner of the inaugural Royal Musical Association Research Students’ Conference Paper Award in 2022, has published work in The Musicology Review, written reviews for Eighteenth-Century Music and Early Music, and presented at conferences internationally.
Ellen’s other research interests include folk and traditional Celtic music, and music for film and theatre. She is an accomplished flautist and currently works in music tour management, whilst continuing her work on Salieri as an independent researcher.
Kristin M. Franseen is a postdoctoral associate in musicology at the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University, where her current project explores the intersections of anecdote, fiction, and misinformation in Antonio Salieri’s late biography and posthumous reception history. Her work has been supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, the Ora Frishberg Saloman Fund from the American Musicological Society, and the AMS 75 PAYS book subvention.
Franseen’s other research interests include the history of queer musicology, women’s participation in the development of music theory, and the role of celebrity culture and tech hype in early metronome advertising. Recent publications include Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023), the updated version of Grove Music Online’s article on Constanze Mozart (2023), and “‘Some Strange Temptation to Evil’: Salieri as Literary Type and the Queerness of Musical Crime in 19th-Century Fiction” (Journal of Musicological Research, 2025). As a public musicologist, she has published general-interest articles on biography, crime fiction on musical subjects, and musical misinformation in Contingent Magazine and VAN, and has appeared as a guest on various podcasts (including Her Music Academia and New Books on Music.).