PRESIDENT & CEO

Suzanne Ryan-Melamed has directed the Bloomington Early Music Festival since 2022. A twenty-year veteran of academic publishing, Suzanne was Editor in Chief of Humanities and Executive Editor of Music at Oxford University Press from 2005 to 2020 and continues to consult and speak on publishing widely. She holds degrees from the University of Chicago (AB), DePaul University School of Music (BM), the New England Conservatory (MM), and IU’s O’Neill School (MPA). She completed Leadership Training with Netherlands-based Musicians Without Borders in 2021 with focus on work with displaced communities. Suzanne serves on the Bloomington Arts Commission and the board of directors of the Bloomington Chamber Singers, and she co-chaired Temple Beth Shalom’s sponsorship of Afghan refugees in 2021-2022 in partnership with Exodus Refugee Immigration, an organization with which she continues to collaborate.

Dr. Carolann Buff is a scholar, teacher, and musician regarded for both her research on late medieval and early Renaissance motets as well as expertise on historical performance. She is a founding member of the internationally renowned medieval ensemble Liber unUsualis and recorded two critically acclaimed CDs of 14th-century polyphony with the group, Unrequited: Machaut and the French Ars Nova and Flyleaves: Music in English Manuscripts. Buff has toured worldwide with the Boston Camerata and has recorded with the Renaissance choir Cut Circle on CDs featuring works by Josquin, De Orto, and Du Fay. Buff has also performed with the women's ensemble Tapestry and can be heard on their recording Sapphire Night, which received the 2005 ECHO Klassik prize in Germany. Buff is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

​​J. Peter Burkholder is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Ranging from borrowing to modernism, from musical meaning to music history pedagogy, and from fifteenth-century masses to Charles Ives, Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg, his research has won awards from the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, ASCAP, and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. He is most widely known as the primary author of A History of Western Music and the Norton Anthology of Western Music (W. W. Norton), the leading music history texts in the English language. His writings have appeared in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Italian, German, Spanish, and Braille. He is an Honorary Member and former president of the American Musicological Society.

Anastasia Chin is a harpsichordist and fortepianist active in the United States and Singapore. Praised for her sensitive, elegant and eloquent performances as soloist, chamber musician and continuo player, she won the top prize ex aequo at the 2021 Jurow International Harpsichord Competition and was one of three finalists at the 2018 Berkeley Festival International Early Piano Competition. Recent and upcoming engagements include solo fortepiano recitals for the Western Early Keyboard Association and MusicSources, harpsichord concerti with Seven Hills Baroque and the Indiana University Historical Performance Institute for the Madison Performing Arts Foundation, Handel’s Messiah with the Oregon Symphony, concerts with the Tonos Del Sur ensemble in Chicago and Bloomington, and guest recitals and lecture-recitals at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, Singapore.

Anastasia is concert manager for the Bloomington Bach Cantata Project. She holds historical keyboards degrees from Indiana University (MM, PD, DM), where she studied with Elisabeth Wright, and a Piano Performance degree (BMus) from the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music in Singapore, where she studied with Albert Tiu.

John Matthew Cowan is a Ph.D. student in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Cowan’s research interests center on analytical techniques for mid- to late-18th-century European music, 18th- and 19th-century opera (particularly comic opera), and all things musicological-historiographical. At IU, Cowan serves as Administrator of the University Gilbert and Sullivan Society and as Co-President of the Graduate Musicology Association. He also works in Reference and Special Collections at the William and Gayle Cook Music Library, where he oversees the Walter Kaufmann Collection. Cowan holds a B.A. in Music Studies from the University of South Florida (‘21) and an M.M. in Musicology from the University of Miami Frost School of Music (‘23).

Linda Handelsman joined the Bloomington Early Music board in 2024. She has been working in the field of World Music since 2006, with the California-based agency Riot Artists (formerly Eye for Talent), representing artists from around the globe. World travel is an important part of her musical, cultural, and linguistic education. Over the past 10 years she has participated in travel seminars doing deep dives into the music of Cuba, Spain, New Orleans, and Tanzania.

Coming from a strong background in classical piano, flute, and harpsichord, she began college at Oberlin Conservatory before she discovered other interests and migrated toward the visual arts, earning her BA from Southern Illinois University. She soon returned to music, gravitating toward traditional British Isles and American genres, playing music for dancers (English Playford, Scottish, Contra, Square), and touring for 16 years with the Ohio-based percussive dance and music company, Rhythm in Shoes. She also lived for 15 years near Lafayette, LA, where she was deeply embedded in Cajun and zydeco cultures.

Linda is active in organizing and presenting house concerts of traditional music in Bloomington for visiting artists. She participates in local Irish music sessions and in Ritmos Latinos, Bloomington’s salsa dance club. She is an avid gardener, and has something of a local reputation as a baker of fine cakes.

One of today's most respected baroque violinists, Ingrid Matthews is a Visiting Associate Professor of Violin Performance at Indiana University's Historical Performance Institute. She co-founded the Seattle Baroque Orchestra with Byron Schenkman in 1994 and served as its Music Director until 2013, while performing extensively around the world with many other leading early music ensembles. Since winning First Prize in the Irwin Bodky International Competition in 1989, she has collaborated as a soloist, guest director, chamber musician, and concertmaster with such groups as the New York Collegium, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Ars Lyrica (Houston), Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Toronto), Musica Pacifica (San Francisco), and countless others. She has previously taught at the University of Southern California/LA, Oberlin College, the Comish College of the Arts, and many workshops and festivals, including masterclasses in Beijing and Dubai. Ingrid Matthews has won high critical acclaim for her extensive discography; her recording of the Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin of J.S. Bach has been named "top recommendation for this music ... on either period or modem instruments" by American Record Guide. She also plays jazz and swing styles, and is active as a visual artist.

Martie Perry enjoys a vibrant national career as a respected baroque specialist on both violin and viola.  Her playing has been called "…ideally realized…taut and loaded with nuance" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and “highly expressive” by the Boston Musical Intelligencer.  Martie performs with many North American period instrument ensembles including the Indianapolis, North Carolina, and Atlanta Baroque Orchestras, Tallahassee Bach Parley, Spire Ensemble, and Wyoming Baroque, as well as with the ensemble she founded and directs, Heartland Baroque. She earned a Master of Music in Early Music Performance/Baroque Violin at Indiana University, where she studied with Stanley Ritchie and was graduate assistant for the baroque orchestra.  Martie has been heard in a live international broadcast on Chicago's WFMT radio, on the early music program "Harmonia," and on N.P.R.'s "Performance Today," and has recorded for ATMA Classique, Edition Lilac, Musica Omnia, Naxos, WFIU, Cedille, the National Cathedral, and Concordia Publishing. Martie served as the executive assistant for the Bloomington Early Music Festival from 2002-2005, and is excited to return to being a part of supporting its mission.

Jennifer Saltzstein is professor of music in musicology and chair of the Musicology Department at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

She was previously professor of musicology at the University of Oklahoma School of Music. Her scholarship on the music of medieval France has engaged issues such as identity, the environment, relationships between music and literature, citation and quotation, gender, sexuality, and violence.

She is the author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013) and editor of Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle (Leiden: Brill, 2019). She has published book chapters in numerous interdisciplinary collections of essays and peer-reviewed articles in Viator, Musica Disciplina, Early Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017 and 2019).

Saltzstein has served the American Musicological Society as a member of the council, Committee on Honorary and Corresponding Members, Program Committee for the Annual Meeting (San Antonio, Texas), H. Colin Slim Award Committee (2020-22, chair in 2022), and Committee on Career Related Issues (member in 2023, chair in 2024).

She has received grants and awards from the Huntington Library Foundation, International Machaut Society, American Musicological Society, and National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded her both a summer stipend (2014) and a year-long fellowship (2016-17).

In 2018, her article “Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets” (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2017) was honored with the H. Colin Slim Award of the American Musicological Society, which is awarded each year to a musicological article of exceptional merit, in any language and in any country by a scholar who is past the early stages of their career.

Saltzstein’s latest book, Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History, was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press.

Travis is new to the board this year but has been a part of the BLEM community for the past four years. He was the former Manager of Finance and Administration for BLEM during the 2021-2022 season. During that season, he served on the program committee and worked closely with the board and President Suzanne Ryan Melamed to prepare the first hybrid festival and the first festival after COVID: BLEMF 2022 Celebrating Women in Early Music. He continued to volunteer with the organization while still in Bloomington and provide music for BLEM events like the Soiree and community concerts. He is thrilled to return to the organization this year as a board member. 

Travis is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at IU, completing his dissertation Organ Tablature and Conceptions of Music in the Seventeenth Century with Professor Dan Melamed. He moved to Rochester, Minnesota this summer to begin as the Minister of Music and Organist at Calvary Episcopal Church. Calvary is nestled in the center of the Mayo Clinic campus. There, he directs multiple choral ensembles, leads the music program, and works closely with the Mayo Clinic on community music and arts initiatives in southern Minnesota.

As a scholar, Travis’s research interests center on musical notation and embodiment in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century instrumental music. He is a specialist in German organ tablature and intabulation, currently exploring how musicians in German-speaking lands conceived of tablature as a map for the body and a guide for the physical process of playing their instruments. He has worked extensively in Germany at archives in Lüneburg, Munich, Regensburg, and Berlin. He has presented his work internationally and recently won the Irene Alm Prize from the Society for Seventeenth Century Music for his presentation, The Coexistence of Organ Tablature and Thoroughbass. Travis has taught courses at IU on Baroque music, keyboard music, musical notation, and American country music, his secondary research interest. 

As an organist, Travis frequently performs from organ tablature and has given workshops on how to read and play from tablature. He has given several recitals in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa since moving to Rochester. Recently, he collaborated with fellow board member Carolann Buff as she directed the Bloomington Chamber Singers in a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb. He has served congregations in Minnesota, Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina. 

Travis holds an M.M. in Organ Performance and an M.A. in Musicology from Indiana University, as well as bachelor's degrees in Piano Performance, Composition, and German from Virginia Tech.