Aaron Ziegel’s research interests range widely, encompassing such diverse outlets as film music, American popular song, and the eighteenth-century keyboard sonata. His primary area of specialty is focused on the now little-known composition and production of operas by American composers during the 1910s.  With a passion for teaching, Ziegel served for a year as a Graduate Affiliate at the University of Illinois’s Center for Teaching Excellence. He has classroom experience instructing both music history and music theory/aural skills courses. His teaching and research is balanced by his activities as a pianist and accompanist (sample recordings are accessible here).

Ziegel won the National Opera Association’s 2010 Scholarly Paper Competition with material from his dissertation that examined the formation of an American style of opera libretto during the early years of the twentieth century. This work has also appeared in print in The Opera Journal. Beyond American opera, Ziegel is a specialist on the music of Vernon Duke, a composer equally adept at writing popular songs and classical concert music. The journal American Music published his reassessment of Duke’s compositional style in 2010. He also contributed a revised biographical entry on the composer to the forthcoming second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (Amerigrove II). Ziegel’s most recent publication, in the Fall 2011 issue of Music Research Forum, compares the alternate film scores for Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête composed by Georges Auric and Philip Glass. His research has been presented at the annual national meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the Nineteenth Century Studies Association.