Ginger Dellenbaugh is a music historian who has taught and written about music and politics, the cultural techniques of the human voice, and vernacular notation systems. Her research is focused on the historical development of music technologies, broadly construed, as a means to challenge traditional expectations of music practice and reception. In particular, her work focuses on the strategies and methods of musicians negotiating the limits of social, pedagogical, and legal structures, including notation inventors attempting to reform standard practice, deaf interpreters for live music, and composers addressing a fraught political topic like abortion and reproductive rights. Based on her background in cultural criticism and the arts, Ginger prioritizes an interdisciplinary approach that explores the relationship between music and other cultural networks to better understand music's role as a gauge for understanding social and political change.

Ginger holds a BMus in Vocal Performance, an MA in Liberal Studies from The New School for Social Research, and a PhD in Music History from Yale University. With the support of a Beinecke Library Jackson Brothers Fellowship and a Mellon Sawyer Seed Grant, Ginger completed a dissertation titled “Music Notation Patents of the USPTO: 1802-2022” based on an archive she constructed with over 220 patents of notation. This research envisions each patent as a data trace of music making outside the purview of formalized music education and practice, outlining an ongoing, dynamic, and as yet unaddressed, history of vernacular music and innovation in the United States.

Prior to her time at Yale, Ginger was a Fulbright recipient in Vienna where she researched and performed music of the Second Viennese School. As a classical singer and songwriter/composer, she performed for several years in Europe and the United States. Exploring the limits and affordances of her own voice through various genres and practices has been foundational in her subsequent research on vocal labor and reception. Her recent book, Maria Callas’s Lyric and Coloratura Arias (Bloomsbury, 2022), uses a 1954 album as a lens to examine the various aspects of vocalization and cultural reception of the feminized voice in both classical and pop culture. Her writing has appeared in, among others, Oxford American, The Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Journal for Interdisciplinary Voice Studies and Public Seminar. She has work forthcoming in The Journal of Music Theory on canntaireachd, a Scottish oral bagpipe notation and in Die Tonkunst on notation experimentation for the pedal steel guitar, as well as an essay on the afterlife of Maria Callas’s voice in the digital age to be included in a collection memorializing the 50th anniversary of the soprano’s death.   

In 2022, Ginger co-founded a new Study Group of the American Musicological Society dedicated to the study of music notation, inscription and visualization. The group aims to explore the significance of music writing not only as a fundamental element of music theory, ethnomusicology and music history but as a method of cultural inclusion and signification. Over the years, Ginger has also conceived and organized conferences on the phenomenon of conversion and disenchantment, the theater impresario Erwin Piscator, and theories of vocal manipulation and mediation. From 2014-2021, Ginger was a lecturer in Contemporary Music at Eugene Lang College, The New School in New York, where she taught courses about the voice, music as a political tool, and composing techniques for students not literate in standard notation. 

Her most recent talks include: “Counteracting Contrafact: Censorship, Virality and Musical Politics” at AMS Chicago, 2024; “Diva Redux: The Afterlife of Maria Callas in the Digital Age.” Maria Callas at 100: University of Torino, IT, 2023; “Interfaces for Special Cases: Music Notation Patents of the USPTO.” Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2023; “The New, The Useful, and the Non-Obvious: Music Notation Patents of the USPTO.” IMS2022, Athens, Greece. 

Ginger is currently an Edison Innovation Fellow at George Mason University researching the relationship between music writing and copyright and the implications of AI on creativity and authorship.