About

Remi Chiu is a musicologist specializing in Renaissance music and the history of medicine. He is the author of Plague and Music in the Renaissance, published by Cambridge University Press, which examines the role of music and music-making in the medical, spiritual, and civic strategies for combating pestilence. A companion volume of Renaissance plague songs, Songs in Times of Plague, was published by A-R Editions. His work on music and medical history has appeared in various academic journals including the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Frontiers in Psychology, Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques, Early Music History, Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy, and The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising. Some of his research on music and plague has been featured in media outlets such as The Guardian, NPR, PBS, and Pitchfork. He is co-editing the complete Masses of Ippolito Baccusi with Alessandra Ignesti, with the first of six volumes published in 2024. His current research focuses on the role of music in popular (quasi-) scientific entertainments and the uses of music in quack medicine advertising in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exploring how music shapes consumers’ concepts of a normative body and how medical commodities help maintain it. Chiu is the current general editor of the Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance series published by A-R Editions. He earned his PhD in musicology from McGill University and is a pianist. Prior to joining Peabody as chair of the musicology department, he taught at the University of Toronto and Loyola University Maryland, where he was the director of the music program. He also serves as director-at-large on the Board of the American Musicological Society.

Research topics

• Art
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Philosophy
• Artificial Intelligence
• Linguistics
• Physics
• Epistemology
• Quantum mechanics
• Theoretical physics
• Virology
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Cognitive science
• Cognitive psychology
• History
• Literature

Selected publications

• Challenging score-centered norms in Western classical higher music education: an exploratory qualitative study of instructor-led initiatives in the UK and Europe

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2026-03-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Western classical music (WCM) in higher music education (HME) remains anchored in score-centered norms that may constrain interpretative freedom. While innovative pedagogies exist, little is known about how instructors who challenge these norms design and sustain their courses, particularly within conservatoire settings. This exploratory qualitative study examines: (1) the characteristics and aims of such courses, (2) how they challenge WCM norms through their content, (3) instructors' perceptions of course impacts, and (4) the institutional contexts that enable or constrain these initiatives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 instructors across seven countries in Europe and the UK, predominantly from conservatoires, with three participants from university music departments. Analysis combined content analysis for course characteristics with inductive thematic analysis using a deductive-inductive framework for norm-challenging approaches, perceived impacts, and institutional contexts. Courses clustered into two broad categories: repertoire-based designs employing historically informed and ahistorical score deviation, and non-repertoire designs centered on improvisation and cross-arts practice. Instructors perceived positive impacts including what they described as reduced performance anxiety and increased student agency, alongside some student reticence toward excessive freedom. Institutional tensions were pervasive, including skepticism from colleagues and examination panels, the primacy of one-to-one instruction, funding pressures, and assessment regimes privileging accuracy. Adoption was facilitated by historical framing strategies, collegial alliances, leadership support, and flexible evaluation frameworks. Instructors expressed cautious optimism regarding long-term employability benefits while doubting immediate gains given prevailing audition and orchestral selection practices. It is important to note that findings represent the perspectives of a purposively sampled group of critically oriented instructors and should not be generalized to indicate prevalence or typicality across HME more broadly. The study contributes depth of understanding regarding how norm-challenging courses operate when they exist, rather than how common such courses are. Implications for curriculum design, assessment practices, and future research directions are discussed, including the need for direct investigation of student experiences and audience impacts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Music, Medicine and Religion at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Rome: 1550–1750</i> By Naomi J. Barker

  Music and Letters · 2025-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Contagious Vibrations: Sympathetic Resonance as a Model for Disease Transmission in the Writings of Ficino, Fracastoro, and Cardano

  Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences · 2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • Physics

  Contagious diseases were among the most vexing problems in ancient theories of health, which could not easily account for how a corruption of one person's humors could cause a similar corruption in another's. One useful explanatory concept for Renaissance doctors tackling this theoretical gap was the phenomenon of resonance or "sympathetic vibration" - where one stationary string begins to vibrate spontaneously when a similarly tuned string is plucked nearby - as both resonance and contagion involved some mysterious, insensible action at a distance between an agent and a patient. Tracing the writings of Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Fracastoro, and Girolamo Cardano, this essay explores the relationships between the writers' accounts of sympathetic vibrations and their contagion theories. It argues that different conceptions of the acoustic phenomenon - either as a manifestation of a Neo-Platonic World-Soul that underpinned the universe or else as a physical effect - revealed the writers' cosmological views that, in turn, informed their accounts of the human body and disease.

  PublisherDOI

• Illness, Metaphor, and Bells

  Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • History

  Throughout 2020 and 2021, bells have rung in a variety of COVID-related rituals in the West, ranging from large-scale religious and civic rites, to ad hoc neighborhood and hospital initiatives, to anti-racist memorials that simultaneously spoke to the health crisis at hand. Taking stock of how these COVID bell-ringing rituals were formalized, their structures and actions, and the historical precedents from which they drew their meanings, this article investigates what the sounds of bells and the rituals of bell-ringing communicated about COVID, how they shaped our personal and collective experiences of the crisis, and what functions they were expected to serve during this liminal period. It reveals how, owing to the historical polysemy of bells on the one hand and the social uncertainties of living with COVID on the other, those rituals generated vivid symbolisms and mobilized powerful emotions that sometimes brought about unintended consequences.

  PublisherDOI

• Advertising Millie-Christine, or the Making of the Two-Headed Nightingale

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021-02-10

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Millie and Christine McKoy (1851–1912), African American conjoined twins billed as the “Two-Headed Nightingale,” were among the most successful “freak show” performers in the last quarter of the 19th-century. This chapter relies on “freak show” ephemera—such as press articles, (pseudo) biographical and autobiographical pamphlets, and posters and photos—to reconstruct Millie-Christine’s musical act and to examine the troubling process by which the sisters were made into and promoted as a “freak.” With a focus on the sonic elements described by these texts, examined alongside visual and textual narratives, the chapter builds an account of an advertising strategy that traded on the consumers’ prejudiced musical expectations with regard to gender and race, while cultivating new sonic fantasies about the conjoined body.

  PublisherDOI

• Functions of Music Making Under Lockdown: A Trans-Historical Perspective Across Two Pandemics

  Frontiers in Psychology · 2020 · 65 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science
  • Psychology

  This paper describes how music fulfills two of its broadly recognized functions-"mood regulation" and "social cohesion"-in times of pandemics and social isolation. Through a trans-historical comparison of the musical activities of the Milanese during an outbreak of plague in 1576 with the musical activities observed during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 (such as balcony-singing and playlist-making), this paper suggests a framework for understanding the role of music in the care of the biological body and the social body in times of medical disaster.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Singing on the Street and in the Home in Times of Pestilence: Lessons from the 1576–78 Plague of Milan

  2018-10-15 · 23 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Medicine for the Body and the Soul

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2017-06-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

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• Plague and Music in the Renaissance

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2017-06-05 · 25 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Plague, a devastating and recurring affliction throughout the Renaissance, had a major impact on European life. Not only was pestilence a biological problem, but it was also read as a symptom of spiritual degeneracy and it caused widespread social disorder. Assembling a picture of the complex and sometimes contradictory responses to plague from medical, spiritual and civic perspectives, this book uncovers the place of music - whether regarded as an indispensable medicine or a moral poison that exacerbated outbreaks - in the management of the disease. This original musicological approach further reveals how composers responded, in their works, to the discourses and practices surrounding one of the greatest medical crises in the pre-modern age. Addressing topics such as music as therapy, public rituals and performance and music in religion, the volume also provides detailed musical analysis throughout to illustrate how pestilence affected societal attitudes toward music.

  PublisherDOI

• Madrigals, Mithridates, and the Plague of Milan

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2017-06-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

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Frequent coauthors

• Jessica Thompson

  1 shared

• Dana Gorzelany-Mostak

  1 shared

• Gabriel Vigliensoni

  1 shared

• Wendy Liu

  University of Kentucky

  1 shared

• Alastair Porter

  Pompeu Fabra University

  1 shared

• John Ashley Burgoyne

  University of Amsterdam

  1 shared

• Andrew Hankinson

  RISM Digital Center

  1 shared

• Ichiro Fujinaga

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Musicology

  McGill University

  2012

• MA, Musicology

  McGill University

  2006

• BA, Music and English

  Queen's University

  2004