Profiles

Stephen E. Hefling

Stephen E. Hefling

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). At MahlerFest XI, he introduced Patrick Mason and Terese Stewart's performance of "Der Abschied" from the piano version. 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 (New York, 1998). Hefling is currently writing a two-volume study entitled The Symphonic Worlds of Gustav Mahler (Yale University Press) and completing The Reilly Source Catalogue of Mahler's Musical Manuscripts, to be published in cooperation with IGMG.

For his work on Mahler, Prof. Hefling has been awarded grants from The Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, the Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship at Yale University, and the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve 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.

Professor Hefling has been a guest lecturer for MahlerFest nearly every year since his first appearance at the international symposium held in 1996, during MahlerFest XI.