Kate van Orden specializes in cultural history. Her books include Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (2005), which won the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society, the edited volume, Music and the Cultures of Print (2000), and Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print (2014). She performs on historical bassoons and has recorded for Sony, Virgin Classics, Glossa, Teldec, and Harmonia Mundi. She is a professor of music at Harvard University.

Awarded the 2016 Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship

Winner of the Society for Renaissance Studies bi-annual Book Award, 2014-2015

"The study is characteristic of Kate van Orden's subtle, erudite negotiations between literary history and music history. It is full of insights relevant not just to musicologists but to anyone interested in the history of books in the early modern period. It navigates impressively between reflections likely to engage literary historians and explanations of musical material made accessible, with exemplary clarity and without simplification, to non-musicians. The examples, musical as well as visual and literary, are well chosen and analysed."--H-France

From its image on the jacket cover to its endorsements on the back, Kate van Orden's Materialities promises 'to have resonance well beyond the fields of musicology and French Cultural History' ( Jennifer Richards). As a companion to her 2014 Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print, Van Orden has produced erudite material for scholars wishing to know more about the production of music books, how they were read and used in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Over the past decade or so, material culture has become a subsidiary discipline of Renaissance studies, particularly in art history and Italian language and literature. Van Orden's work breaks new ground in the field of musicology." --Renaissance Quarterly