Christa Pehl, Ph.D.

• Ph.D. Musicology, Princeton University, 2017 Dissertation: “Men, Women, and their Manuscripts: Musical Culture in Pennsylvania in the 1790s”
• Graduate Certificate, Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Princeton University, 2016
• M.A. Musicology, Princeton University, 2007
• B.M. summa cum laude, Flute Performance and Early Music Studies, Northwestern University, 2005

At FPU, I get to work closely with students in multiple aspects of their musical educations. We dive deeply into musical analysis, explore historical context, and woodshed technical passages to achieve the fluency on an instrument required to effectively express. Whatever we are studying, we are asking, "Why? How?" and exploring the interconnected web that underlies art. I spent many years in school leaving my spiritual self outside of the classroom, but at FPU, we come together academically and spiritually to play with music and reflect on the bigger, most important things in life.

Scholar and performer Christa Pehl Evans enjoys a colorful life that combines her varied interests. A lover of book history, her research centers on musicians and their manuscripts in late-18th-century Pennsylvania and has recently been published in Current Musicology. As a Baroque flutist, she has performed across the United States with early music groups, including Tempesta di Mare, Fuma Sacra, the Kingsbury Ensemble, and Newton Baroque. Christa earned a PhD from Princeton University in historical musicology with a certificate in women’s studies and completed her undergraduate degree summa cum laude in flute performance and early music studies at Northwestern University. A mother of three, Christa enjoys gardening, cooking, yoga, and riding horses.

• “The Politics of Music: Women’s Music Education in the United States in the Late 18th Century”. Current Musicology, no. 105 (March 1, 2020)
• “The Schaffner Manuscripts: Musical Commonplacing in an Age of Print,” American Musicological Society and Society for Music Theory, Vancouver, BC, November 3-6, 2016.
• “British Music and the Creation of American Musical Culture in the 1790s,” North American British Music Studies Association panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Pittsburgh, PA, March 31 – April 3, 2016.
• "Casper Schaffner and Musical Commonplacing,” Society for Eighteenth-Century Music panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Los Angeles, CA, March 19-22, 2015.
• “Power in Music: Gender and Music Education in the Early Republic,” Western Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, San Luis Obispo, CA, February 13-14, 2015.