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The diverse professional activities of Colombian born conductor, musicologist, and pedagogue, Dr. César Leal, often intersect. His interest in interdisciplinarity and collaboration inform his scholarly and artistic projects and reflect his passion for teaching as well as his love for Liberal Arts education.

Leal’s research interests include music and culture during fin-de-siècle Paris, Franco-American artistic interactions, soundscapes, Jewish patronage and modernism, Latin American cultural identities in the U.S., and race, class, and gender relations in music. He received the prestigious Kennedy Fellowship, which supported his scholarly and creative projects between 2017-2019.

His musicological output involves scholarly (peer-reviewed) publications as well as interdisciplinary creative projects. He has presented scholarly papers in the U.S., Canada, Greece, Japan, Italy, France, England, Peru, Colombia, and Switzerland. In 2018, Leal was invited by Musikproduktion Hoeflich to join the project Repertoire Explorer Series, for which he produces introductory essays for new editions of works by Parisian composers of fin-de-siècle Paris such as Camille Saint-Saëns, Gabriel Pierné, and Camille Chevillard.

In 2018, Leal collaborated with Greg Pond (visual artist), Banning Bouldin (choreographer), Jessica Usherwood (soprano), and Charles Stehno (computer programmer) in the interdisciplinary project Guncotton, which received the 2018 ArtPrize award. His scholarly contributions include “Écouter le Scandale et la Transgression: Les Modèles Révisionnistes de l’Histriographie Musicale Basés sur l’Étude Du Paysage Sonore” (Nîmes: Lucie Éditions, 2015), and “Sponsoring and Constructing Modernism: Jewish Patronage, Entrepreneurs, and Cultural Mediation in Paris during Fin-de-siècle” (forthcoming—Ad Parnasum). Currently Leal and recognized musicologist Diana Hallman are editing a collection of essays entitled “America in the French Imaginary.”