Department of Music Faculty and Staff

Dr. Jason Rosenholtz-Witt is a Visiting Assistant Professor of musicology and double bass at Western Kentucky University. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from Northwestern University (2020) and earned degrees in double bass performance from the University of Northern Colorado (BM, 2005), and Colorado State University (MM, 2011). He has taught at Oxford College of Emory University, Northwestern, Colorado State University, and spent four years teaching English in Hiroshima, Japan.

Dr. Rosenholtz-Witt specializes in music and politics in Northern Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extending into German-speaking lands and England. His research explores the ways musicians and composers made a living amid turbulent geopolitical conditions, including religious strife, war, and plague. He is particularly invested in tracing how their influences and peripatetic lives built networks outside the most populous cities, thereby uncovering overlooked commercial, religious, artistic, and social ties that shaped musical life. His secondary interests include American experimentalism (1960s-80s) and jazz during the Civil Rights era. 

Dr. Rosenholtz-Witt’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Delmas Foundation, the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), the Newberry Library (Chicago), and the Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship. He has published on topics ranging from musical life in Early Modern Bergamo, English viol consort music, printed Italian music circulating in seventeenth-century German manuscripts, and avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman and John Cage. His book-in-progress, Between Innovation and Tradition: Musical Life in the Venetian Terraferma, 1550–1650 is funded by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. He has presented his research at numerous national and international conferences, and his archival work has taken him to libraries and archives in England, Poland, Austria, Germany, and Italy. As a double bassist, Dr. Rosenholtz-Witt has performed with the Cheyenne Symphony, Fort Collins Symphony, Greeley Philharmonic, Steamboat Springs Symphony, Emerald City Opera, the Kure Orchestra (Japan), and the Lakeview Symphony (Chicago).