Professor Emeritus

Entries in Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

The following information has been extracted from entries in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and the Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana.

Professor of Musicology, University of North Texas, Denton (1976-1999), awarded Emeritus status in 2000.  Executive Director, The Universe of Music project, a multi-volume history of world musics sponsored by the International Music Council (1996-); Editor, Music in the Life of Peoples (South America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean), a 4-volume collaborative survey of indigenous, folk, urban popular, and art music traditions in The Universe of Music series (in press, 2004).  

Studied composition with Alberto Ginastera in Buenos Aires (1954-1960); piano with Galia Schalmann, Gyorgy Sandor, Rosina Lhevinne, and Alexander Uninsky (1954-1964), receiving a Master of Music from Southern Methodist University (Dallas, Texas) in 1964; analysis of 20th-century music with Leonard Stein in Los Angeles (1966-1973); and musicology with Robert Stevenson, Gilbert Reaney, Frank D'Accone, Walter Rubsamen, Charles Seeger, and Klaus Wachsmann at the University of California at Los Angeles (1964-1976), where she received a Ph.D. in musicology with a dissertation on the process of change in the compositional assimilation of folk materials in operas by Argentine composers premiered at the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires between 1908 and 1972 (see 1976).  Concluding that only selected folk materials carrying maximum cultural density surface at structural compositional levels (see 1990), this approach was expanded to include representative operas by composers from Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (see 1992).  Inquiry into the diversity of compositional responses to the idea of incorporating materials perceived as symbols of identity called into question the viability of regulative concepts from the musicological canon (such as the use of the term "nationalism" [see 1998]) and led to the search for an etiology of colonized discourse in Latin American music historiography, and to proposals that, rejecting essentialisms, construct representations of historical processes and interpretations of compositional aesthetics based on culture-specific epistemological orders (see 1991, 1993, 1996, 2000, 2003).  

A specialist in 20th-century music, she is internationally recognized for her research on the music of Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983).  Closely associated with the composer for three decades, she has contributed analytical studies of the musical dramaturgy of his operas Don Rodrigo (1964) and Bomarzo (1967) (see 1976, 1980, 1984, 1987, 2002), and was invited in 1988 by the Paul Sacher Stiftung to identify sources and produce an inventory of the Ginastera Collection in this archive (see 1990).  

Kuss was elected Secretary of the Bibliography Commission of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centers for two terms (1984-1990), during which she published essays on Latin American music bibliography (see 1984 and 1987); at the invitation of the Scientific Committee, International Musicological Society, she chaired a central roundtable at the IMS Congress held in Madrid in 1992; she was the second recipient of the prestigious "Jesús C Romero" chair in musicology sponsored by Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (1997); served on the AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship Committee (1996-1999) and on one of its juries; and was elected Individual Member of the International Music Council by the General Assembly held in Amman in 1999.  

In addition to her dissertation, her professional output to 2003 comprises 51 published articles (1974-2003), a bibliographic monograph (1984), 25 entries in dictionaries and encyclopedias, 64 papers read at professional meetings in 14 countries, and the editorship of the 4-volume coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean in The Universe of Music series.  A Fulbright scholar, she has received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.