Performance Calendar

Teaches

College
Classroom Studies (Music)
Graduate Studies

About

L. Michael Griffel has taught in the music history department at Juilliard since 1997 and chaired it from 2005 to 2019. Professor emeritus of music at Hunter College (1970-2006) and the PhD–DMA Program (1977-2005) of the City University of New York, he is also a former member of the graduate faculty of the Mannes College of Music (1980-99).

Born in N.Y.C. and educated at Yale (BA summa cum laude, music theory, 1963), Juilliard (MS, piano, 1966), and Columbia (MA, music theory, 1968; PhD, historical musicology, 1975), Griffel specializes in 19th-century music history. His many roles at Hunter College included music department chair, Thomas Hunter Honors Program co-chair, associate dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, and acting associate provost, and upon his retirement he was awarded the President’s Medal. At Juilliard, he studied piano with Rosina Lhévinne and Martin Canin. His other piano teachers were Angela Weschler, S. Ellsworth Grumman, and Donald Currier, and his musicology teachers included Janet Knapp, William J. Mitchell, Edward A. Lippman, Ernest Sanders, Paul Henry Lang, Denis Stevens, and Alan Tyson.

Among Griffel’s publications are chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, The Schirmer History of Music, and Scholars Who Teach, and articles and reviews on 19th-century music in various journals. He has served as vice president of the New York chapter of the American Beethoven Society (1995-2007) and is on the advisory boards of the Schubert Society of the U.S.A. (since 2003) and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy (since 2011). He serves on the editorial board of the textbook component of the A-R Online Music Anthology (since 2015). In June 2008, Griffel directed the College Music Society/Juilliard Institute for Music History Pedagogy, held at Juilliard.