Faith Lanam

Faith Lanam is a musicologist, performer, pedagogue, and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on the music and women of the Colegio de San Miguel de Belem, Mexico’s first female music conservatory. She has collected and edited numerous musical manuscripts, performance scores, partbooks, and archival documents from the Archivo Histórico del Colegio de San Ignacio de Loyola, Vizcaínas, in Mexico City. Drawing on secondary sources in historical musicology, music education, and studies in colonialism and gender, Dr. Lanam’s research increases our understanding of historically underrepresented foci in musicology, specifically eighteenth-century music pedagogy and the professional training of female musicians, situated within the greater context of the musical and social life of colonial Mexico City.

Dr. Lanam has presented her research on the Colegio de San Miguel de Belem at the international conferences of the American Musicological Society; American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; Society for Eighteenth-Century Music/Royal Swedish Academy of Music; Ignacio Jerusalem 250: Galant Musics in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and the New World; and Ignacio Jerusalem, Chapelmaster of the Mexico City Cathedral: Music and Art in New Spain during the Eighteenth Century. Her work has been cited by Pedrone Persone in The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord (2019), Javier Marín-Lopez and Drew Edward Davies in Ignacio Jerusalem (1707–1769): Cronología biográfica y lista de obras (2019), and Nicholas Baragwanath in The Solfeggio Tradition: A Forgotten Art of Melody in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2020), among others.

Dr. Lanam serves as the organist at Saint Ann Chapel in Palo Alto, California, where she performs weekly liturgical services and specializes in hymnody, early keyboard literature, and the accompaniment of 18th- through 20th-century sacred vocal literature. As a percussionist, she performs orchestral and chamber works and collaborates with local composers in the performance of new works. Her editions of Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger's Libro terzo d’intavolatura di chitarrone facilitate the study of early baroque performance practice and performance of archlute repertoire by marimbists.

With extensive experience in the field of music education, Dr. Lanam applies her knowledge of pedagogy and educational psychology to foster an engaging and positive learning environment for students of diverse backgrounds. In both her applied and academic classes, she seeks to create well-rounded curricula interweaving relevant aspects of performance practice, music history, social and cultural context, music theory, and critical listening skills.