Cody Norling

Cody A. Norling is a scholar of American musical life in the long nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and his research explores the varied tastes, repertoires, performance contexts, and social networks that once shaped the nation’s operatic cultures. This work is currently supported by the Newberry Library’s 2026–27 Collester Fund for Chicago Music Fellowship, which contributes further original research to his book project on the civic density of operatic production and reception in 1920s Chicago. His published work on the subject can be found in issues of American Music and The Journal of Musicological Research as well as in the forthcoming volume Black Identities on the Operatic Stage: Global Perspectives (Oxford University Press). Norling also takes particular interest in cases of Midwest regionalism and is currently pursuing a co-edited volume project on historical constructions of midwestern musical identities to be published with Indiana University Press. He has also contributed his own essays 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), and he recently co-authored a forthcoming piece for Middle West Review, addressing the question: “What is Midwestern Music?” Norling’s earlier work on Puccini’s La fanciulla del West received the National Opera Association’s Leland Fox Scholarly Paper Award.

Norling has been an active presenter at meetings of the Society for American Music (SAM), American Musicological Society (AMS), and Midwest History Association (MHA), as well as for specialized conferences in opera and Midwest studies. He currently serves on SAM’s Local Arrangements and Education Committees. He is completing a term as president of AMS’s New York State–St. Lawrence Chapter and is a member of AMS Allegheny’s 2026–27 program committee, having previously served as Web Manager for AMS Midwest. In April 2026, Norling co-organized a public event, “Mountaineering Voices: Appalachian Primitive Baptists and Congregational Singing in West Virginia,” for SAM’s “Sounding the Nation at 250” initiative.

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 held administrative appointments at SUNY Genesee Community College and the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music.