Cody Norling

Cody A. Norling is a scholar of American musical life in the long-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His research explores the varied performance contexts and repertoires that once characterized the nation’s operatic cultures. Norling’s recent dissertation illuminated the civic density of operatic production and reception in 1920s Chicago, and his published work on the subject can be found in issues of American Music and The Journal of Musicological Research as well as in a forthcoming volume addressing the long history of Black engagement with opera. Norling takes particular interest in cases of Midwest regionalism and is currently pursuing an edited volume project on historical constructions of midwestern musical identities. To this end, he has contributed chapters on the subject to The Making of the Midwest: Essays on the Formation of Midwestern Identity, 1787–1900 (Hastings College Press, 2020) and Where East Meets (Mid)West: Exploring a Regional Divide (Kent State University Press, 2025). His earlier work on Puccini’s La fanciulla del west received the National Opera Association’s Leland Fox Scholarly Paper Award. 

He has also been active at meetings of the Society for American Music, American Musicological Society, Midwest History Association, and specialized conferences in opera and Midwest studies. Norling currently serves on the Society for American Music’s Education Committee and as interim president of the American Musicological Society’s New York State–St. Lawrence Chapter, having previously served as Web Manager for the Society’s Midwest Chapter. 

Norling holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of Iowa, where he studied with Marian Wilson Kimber, and a BA in Music History from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, where he studied with Gretchen Peters. He previously taught general-education courses in music and rhetoric for Western Technical College and the University of Iowa, and he recently held administrative appointments at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and SUNY Genesee Community College.