Roger Freitas received a BM in vocal performance from Dominican College of San Rafael; an MM (with performer’s certificate) in early music, vocal performance, from Indiana University; and a PhD in music history from Yale.
He has been published in Journal of Musicology, Music and Letters, Journal of the Royal Musical Association (JRMA), and Opera News. His most recent work is an edition of the complete cantatas of Atto Melani (1626-1714), published with A-R Editions. His book, Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage, and Music in the Life of Atto Melani, is due to appear in April 2009 as part of the series New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism from Cambridge University Press.
Freitas has presented papers at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, Royal Musical Association, Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, and Modern Language Association. He has also spoken at more specialized conferences, including the 13th Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (Leeds, 2008), Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men (Univ. of Maryland, 2006), a symposium at the Harvard Center for the Humanities (2006), and Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour (Clark Memorial Library/UCLA, 2002).
Among his honors are a book subvention from the Donna Cardamone Jackson Publication Endowment Fund of the American Musicological Society (2008), the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (where he resided in 2003-04), and an NEH Fellowship (2000-01). In 2006 he received Eastman’s prestigious Eisenhart Award for Excellence of Teaching.
For the spring of 2009, Freitas is planning and hosting the annual meeting of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music at Eastman. At the meeting of the American Musicological Society in November 2008, he has organized a discussion panel of international experts on the subject of the Italian cantata. And in the spring of 2008 he brought four leading experts on the music of Francesco Cavalli to speak at a symposium linked to a performance of the composer’s opera La virtù de’ strali d’Amore. He is the academic advisor for the musicology department and a faculty associate at the University of Rochester's Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies.
Prior to joining Eastman in 1998, Freitas held a position as a visiting lecturer at Wellesley College (1997-98). He also performed as a soprano and alto adjunct member of Chanticleer (1984-86).
