Paula Maust is a performer, scholar, and educator dedicated to fusing research and creative practice to amplify underrepresented voices and advocate for social change. She is the creator of expandingthemusictheorycanon.com, an open-source collection of music theory examples by women and composers of color. A print anthology based on the project is under contract with SUNY Press, and Maust has given talks about her research at Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, and Early Music America. Future plans for the site include professional recordings for each work and a series of analytical video essays aimed at a broad audience.

Maust also researches the reception history of early modern women musicians on stage. She is currently working on The Ugly Virtuosa, a book and performance project about the pejorative language used to describe professional women on stage in England, France, and Italy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Maust has published articles in Women and Music and the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, and she has presented her research at conferences of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, the American Handel Society, and the Indiana University Historical Performance Institute.

As a harpsichordist and organist, Maust has been praised for combining “great power with masterful subtlety” (DC Metro Theater Arts) and as a “refined and elegant performer” (Boston Musical Intelligencer). As the codirector of Burning River Baroque and Musica Spira, she curates provocative lecture-concerts connecting baroque music to contemporary social issues such as climate change, mental health, and the #MeToo movement. Paula also performs extensively with numerous ensembles in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. region and is currently recording Elizabeth Turner’s 1756 Six Lessons for Harpsichord.

Prior to her appointment at Peabody, Maust taught music theory, music history, keyboard skills, and historical performance courses at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and in the Peabody @ Homewood program. She holds degrees in harpsichord from Peabody (DMA ’19, MM ’16) and in organ from the Cleveland Institute of Music (MM ’12) and Valparaiso University (BM ’09). Her teachers include Adam Pearl, Webb Wiggins, Todd Wilson, and Lorraine Brugh.