Chanda VanderHart, PhD is a pianist and researcher based in Vienna whose work lies at the intersection of music performance, reflection and explication. Her broad, interdisciplinary foci span song history, artistic research, digital musicology, Musikvermittlung, institutional critique, popular music(s), historically informed performance practice, and gender studies.
She publishes prolifically in both English and German and has created articles for Cambridge University Press, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg Centre for Popular Culture and Music, the Elfriede Jelinek-Forschungszentrum, and the the Sorbonne, and authored the lexicon article on Ernestine de Bauduin for MuGI (Musik und Gender im Internet). An extensive digital/print hybrid publication for Routledge/Francis & Taylor, ‘Accompaniment in America: Contextualizing Collaborative Piano’ is forthcoming, and a monograph, ‘Lieder & Performance in 19th Century Vienna; Contexts and Perspectives’, has likewise been contracted by Oxford University Press.
Her performance career has taken her to the Musikverein in Vienna, the Malmö Opera, the Banff Centre, Kala Mandir in Kolkata, City Recital Hall in Sydney. She co-founded the interdisciplinary concert series ‘Mosaïque’, the multimedia storytelling platform ‘Talespin, Musical Tales for Big and Small’ – which commissions new music and visual art to accompany folktales from around the world, and created the podcast series on gender and song, ‘Too Many Frocks’. She performs regularly with the circus orchestra ‘The Freestyle Orchestra’ as an aerialist and pianist, regularly records art song and chamber music by forgotten composers, and has worked as a music critic for the London-based ‘Bachtrack’ for over a decade.
She received her bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from the Eastman School of Music in piano performance, followed by three graduate degrees in vocal coaching and accompaniment in Austria, studying with Julius Drake, Carolyn Hague, Roger Vignoles and David Aronson before completing a PhD in musicology from the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna (mdw) in 2016 with the dissertation, ‘Die Entwicklung des Kunstliedes im Wiener Konzertleben zwischen 1848 und 1897’. In 2023 she received data steward certification from the University of Vienna.
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