Carolyn M Gianturco

Carolyn Margaret Gianturco, née Dooley, is an American musicologist who spent much of her career in Italy, where she has devoted herself chiefly to research on the Baroque. She was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on 15 July 1934. Her work is significant for anyone studying Italian opera and cantata of the seventeenth century, as well as the musical historiography of Tuscany.

She first trained at Marywood College, where she took her bachelor's degree in 1955. In the years that followed she worked as an accompanist for singers in New York and, in 1961, was assistant music director of the Turnau Opera Company in Woodstock. She then pursued a master's degree in music at Rutgers University (1964), where she also served as teaching assistant and lecturer. She obtained her doctorate at Oxford in 1970 with a thesis on the operas of Alessandro Stradella, a subject that would shape much of her later output.

Following her doctorate, she was visiting lecturer at the University of Pisa from 1971 to 1973, then full lecturer from 1973 and associate professor from 1982. She has given lectures at Oxford, Harvard, Queen's University Belfast and Koç University in Istanbul. In 1987 she founded the Associazione Toscana per la Ricerca delle Fonti Musicali, which she presides over, and the series Studi Musicali Toscani, whose editorial board she directs. She has sat on the council of the International Musicological Society, serving as vice-president (1994–1997) and, from 1997, as president of the Società Italiana di Musicologia. In 2000 she was appointed president of the project, supported by the Italian Ministry of Culture, to publish the complete works of Stradella.

Her principal fields of study are Stradella, Tuscan music and Baroque vocal genres, especially the cantata. Her bibliography includes monographs such as Le opere del giovane Mozart and Claudio Monteverdi: stile e struttura, as well as an extensive biography of Stradella (1994) and a thematic catalogue of his compositions produced with E. McCrickard. As an editor, she reissued facsimiles of seventeenth-century Italian cantatas in a sixteen-volume collection published between 1985 and 1987. Her work has helped establish knowledge of the Baroque cantata and Italian opera beyond the major centres of production.