Stephen
E. Hefling received the A. B. in music from Harvard and the Ph.
D. from Yale, with a dissertation examining Mahler's Todtenfeier
movement from the dual perspectives of programmatic influence
and compositional process as documented in Mahler's surviving
sketches and drafts. Currently Professor of Music at Case Western
Reserve University, he has also taught at Stanford and Yale Universities
as well as Oberlin College Conservatory.
Prof. Hefling has written numerous articles and book chapters for 19th Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Journal of Music Theory, Performance Practice Review, the revised New Grove Dictionary, A Mahler Companion (Oxford, 1999), The Nineteenth-Century Symphony (New York, 1997), etc. He rediscovered Mahler's manuscript version of Das Lied von der Erde for voices and piano, and edited that work for the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Vienna, 1989). He introduced Der Abschied from the piano version which was performed at MahlerFest XI. His monograph on Das Lied appeared in the Cambridge Music Handbooks series in 2000, and he has written program notes for Mahler recordings by leading conductors including Pierre Boulez and Lorin Maazel. Recently he has both edited and contributed to the volumes Mahler Studies (Cambridge, 1997) and Nineteenth-Century Chamber Music (New York, 1998).
For his work on Mahler, Prof. Hefling has been awarded grants from The Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, as well as a Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship at Yale University; he has been a speaker at international conferences on the composer in Vienna, Paris, Hamburg, Rotterdam, New York, Montpellier, London, and Boulder. Also a specialist in baroque performance practice, Prof. Hefling has performed widely with early music ensembles in the northeastern US, and has served as director of the Yale Collegium Musicum and the Cleveland Baroque Soloists; his book Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Music (New York, 1994) is widely regarded as the standard reference on that topic. Prof. Hefling was one of our guest lecturers for the Symposium during MahlerFest XI, 1999.