Susan McClary - Biography

Biography

McClary was born in St Louis, Missouri and received her BA in 1968 from Southern Illinois University. She attended graduate school at Harvard University where she received her MA in 1971 and her PhD in 1976. Her doctoral dissertation was on the transition from modal to tonal organization in Monteverdi's works. The first half of her dissertation was later re-worked and expanded in her 2004 book, Modal Subjectivities: Self-fashioning in the Italian Madrigal. She taught at the University of Minnesota (1977–91), McGill University (1991–94), University of California, Berkeley (1993), and University of California, Los Angeles (1994-2011), before becoming a Professor of Musicology at Case Western Reserve University. She has also held a five-year professorship at the University of Oslo (2007-12). McClary is married to the musicologist Robert Walser.