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 Expanding the Music Theory Canon, an extensive open-source collection of music theory examples by women and people of color. This is the first open-source collection of this magnitude and scope, and it is aimed at concepts covered in the undergraduate core music theory curriculum. A print anthology based on the project will be released in December 2023 with SUNY Press. She is also collaborating with Auralia & Musition to curate a collection of worksheets to accompany the book that can be used in those platforms. She has also given lectures about diversity in music educational resources at Duke University, the Johns Hopkins University, for Early Music America, Indiana University, the Peabody Institute, and Texas Tech University. Her recent study on racial and gender representation in the music classroom was published in the Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music. Paula is also one of the early modern area editor’s for Oxford University Press’s women, gender, and sexuality revision of Grove Music Online.

Paula’s other primary research interest is the reception history of early modern women musicians. She has published articles in Women and Music and Early Music America’s blog, and she has given lectures about women performers for the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Medieval and Early Modern Studies program, the Peabody Musicology Colloquium, the Pioneer Valley Symphony, Shenandoah University, and Bard High School Early College Cleveland. She has presented her research for the Society for Eighteenth Century Music, the American Musicological Society, the Indiana University Historical Performance Institute, the American Handel Society, the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, and the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.

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). In her work as the co-director of Musica Spira, she curates lecture-concerts aimed at connecting baroque music to contemporary social issues concerning women. Paula is currently working on recording Elizabeth Turner’s 1756 Six Lessons for Harpsichord. She performs extensively as a chamber musician with the Folger Consort, Third Practice, and the Washington Bach Consort.

Paula is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Prior to her appointment at Peabody, she was a faculty member at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she taught music theory, music history, keyboard skills, harpsichord, organ, piano, and coached students in the Collegium Musicum. An advocate for conducting dramatic early modern works from the keyboard, she directed a program of baroque opera scenes in collaboration with UMBC’s Collegium Musicum and Opera Workshop and was the assistant music director for Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas and The Fairy-Queen with the Peabody’s historical performance department. In Spring 2022, she directed a program of scenes by Francesca Caccini, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, and Henry Purcell in collaboration with Peabody’s Opera Workshop.

Paula completed a doctorate degree in harpsichord at Peabody in 2019, where she was the recipient of the Dean’s DMA fellowship. She earned Master of Music degrees in harpsichord and organ from Peabody and the Cleveland Institute of Music, respectively, and she completed her Bachelor of Music degree in church music/organ at Valparaiso University. Her teachers have included Adam Pearl, Webb Wiggins, Todd Wilson, and Lorraine Brugh.