Paula Maust is a performer, scholar, and educator dedicated to fusing research and creative practice to amplify underrepresented voices. She is the creator of Expanding the Music Theory Canon, an open-source collection of more than 350 music theory examples by women and people of color with users around the world. A print anthology based on the project was be released by SUNY Press in December 2023. Additionally, she collaborated with Auralia & Musition to curate a collection of online worksheets with examples from Expanding the Music Theory Canon. Paula is also one of the early modern area editors for Oxford University Press’s women, gender, and sexuality revision of Grove Music Online.
Paula has published articles in The Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Women and Music, EMAg, and the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, and she has presented her research at conferences of the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Eighteenth Century Music, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, the American Handel Society, the Indiana University Historical Performance Institute, and the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic.
As a harpsichordist and organist, Paula 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 co-director of Musica Spira, she curates lecture-concerts that tell the stories of early modern musical women. The ensemble’s debut album will be released in 2026 and includes the first recordings of music by the seventeenth-century Italian nuns Isabella Leonarda and Maria Perucona. Paula performs extensively as a continuo player with numerous ensembles in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C. region, including InSeries Opera, the Washington Bach Consort, and the Folger Consort.
Paula is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches courses in the undergraduate core and graduate seminars on Analyzing Mad Scenes, Expanding the Music Theory Canon, and Baroque Counterpoint. She co-chaired the Department of Music Theory’s committee that redesigned the undergraduate core curriculum and has been invited to present lectures about that curriculum at New York University and the Society for Music Theory. Paula 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).