Caleb Labbe Phelan

Biography

Caleb Labbe Phelan is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music and a Junior Fellow of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. He also holds a Master of Music degree from the University of Glasgow. His dissertation project titled “Performance as Translation” considers musical interpretation/performance as a process of translation between text, gesture, and sound, and accounts for the ways these translations are culturally mediated. In particular, he looks at the piano music of Franz Liszt and Maurice Ravel in relation to Romantic and modern poetry and philosophy, with a particular focus on virtuosity, aesthetics, and nationalism. Caleb’s research is generously supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship.