Thomas Christensen is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago and a specialist in the history of music theory. He is the author or editor of over sixty publications, including Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1993), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (2002), and most recently, Stories of Tonality in the Age of François-Joseph Fétis (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Among his more recent awards and honors are Fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin (2002), the Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin, 2011), an ACLS Senior Research Fellowship (2016), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019).

Zhuqing (Lester) S. Hu is an assistant professor in the Department of Music at the University of California Berkeley.  His research focuses on the global history of music during the so-called early modern period—both on the time period itself, typically defined as late 1400s to early 1800s, and on its much-debated “early modern” label. He has held the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies, the Townsend Fellowship, the CLIR/Mellon Fellowship, and the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Early Music. 

Carmel Raz is an assistant professor of music at Cornell University. She is the author of Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 2025). Other projects include Sound and Sense in British Romanticism, co-edited with James Grande (Cambridge, 2023), awarded the 2025 Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music, and The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity in the Long Nineteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026). She is currently working on theorizations of habit, automaticity, and attention in musical performance from antiquity to the present.