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Lena Leson joined the Conservatory faculty in fall 2024 as assistant professor of Musicology. She teaches courses on 20th- and 21st-century music, and her research primarily focuses on the intersections between music, politics, and dance. She has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Music & Politics, and the Revue de musicologie, and has presented her work at conferences across the country.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How has your first year at Oberlin been?
It’s been wonderful! I felt a really strong connection to Oberlin when I visited during the interview process, and Oberlin has been more than I hoped it would be. The students are so bright, interested, engaged, and amazing. Truly, I feel lucky every day.
Could you talk about your presentation “Sounding the Worlds of American Girls” from the Society for American Music’s 51st Annual Conference this March?
My colleague from Dickinson College, Dr. Lila Ellen Gray, and I gave that presentation. She was teaching a seminar about women and gender in music, and American Girl dolls had come up. She and I started doing some initial reading and then made a bibliography. The more we’ve worked on it, the more excited we feel about the potential to develop a study of music in American Girl into a fully-fledged project.
We decided last-minute to write an abstract and submit it for the Society for American Music. We ended up on a panel that comprised female-identifying scholars presenting work about women and girls, and it was so powerful to be in this space where we were taking seriously the musical attitudes and labor of young women in music-making and performance. I’m really excited for the direction it will go in next.
Is there a research project of yours that you’re especially proud of?
I am currently working on my first book, which is about George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet in Cold War Europe. It’s drawn from my dissertation project but is its own distinct thing — I love that book project so much. Every time I get to spend a couple of hours reading or writing or outlining a new part of a chapter, I feel so much joy.
The American Girl project is also feeling really thrilling. I tend to geek out for my research projects. I mean, I get to write about ballet and American Girl dolls! I feel so lucky. Sometimes I’ll be in a concert or listening to a conversation and think, “I really want to write an article about this,” or “I think that could be a chapter in a book.”
What prompted your interest in musicology, specifically in relation to dance and politics?
I grew up in ballet studios. My mother was a costume designer — she worked for Capezio when I was growing up — and she enrolled me in dance class. I had no concept of how unusual it was at the time, but all of my ballet classes were accompanied by a live pianist. That’s not even standard in some professional ballet companies, so it was incredibly special. But for me, it meant my first experiences of live music were also paired with dance. When I got to conservatory, I was surprised that my classmates didn’t have an appreciation for dance and didn’t know very much about dance history. For me, dance history is musical history. So often they are tied up — the Bach dance suites would not have existed if not for Baroque dance. Really early on in my undergraduate studies, I knew I really wanted conservatory students in particular to have a strong, clear understanding about the role movement, and dance more specifically, played in the works they performed as musicians.
But when I was much younger, I didn’t think I would go to a conservatory. I wanted to study political science. My dad had been a political science and economics double major. We talked about politics at the dinner table. I told him I really wanted to study political science in college, and he told me I could only do it if I also studied economics, but I was never a particularly strong math student. Instead, I went to music school — my dad’s plan really backfired. When my Tchaikovsky article was first published, I shared it with him and he said, “This is political science for music.” I said, “Yes, I know!” I got there eventually.
The Oberlin Orchestra will be performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 this May, and I was curious to hear about your research and analysis into this piece from your article published in 2023. Would you say the political backdrop of this piece has changed since then, especially situating it now in 2025?
I love the Olympics, and I was watching the 2021 medal ceremony, and I noticed the Russian music was different. Once I recognized it, I wondered, “Why are they using Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as a national anthem?” I hadn’t really read anything about the doping case or the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s intervention. I was just curious about the presence of Tchaikovsky. Weirdly, the first of the three statements of the opening material were not in the right key. I thought, “You’re doing something wrong,” and that led me down this path. I started by reading everything I could about the decision to use this concerto as the anthem.
I was curious about it, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to say about it. It was after the 2022 Olympics and the invasion of Ukraine that I felt like there was something I did really want to say that was connected to the idea about Ukrainian musical identity.
My initial “You’re wrong about” ultimately did not become the center of the paper so much as what Tchaikovsky’s relationship to Ukraine looked like, what the present Russian administration’s relationship to Ukraine today looks like, and the decision to use that particular piece of music, which is full of Ukrainian musical themes. My research led me to Russian nationalist TikTok, which is dark sometimes, but it gave me a completely different kind of insight into what was happening among young people. So many of the ways in which we think about what it is to be American versus what we think it is to be Russian or Polish is constructed.
About a year after the invasion, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other figures in the Zelenskyy administration really encouraged Western performance groups to stop performing Tchaikovsky and boycott Russian music broadly.
The Russia–Ukraine war continues to devastate Ukraine, but I don’t know that the answer is not playing Tchaikovsky. The Putin administration is using Tchaikovsky, Petipa, and Shostakovich — these are not artists who are engaged in and working to support the administration, these are artists who are being weaponized by that administration.
Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 has a political history between the U.S. and Russia that is way deeper than just this one moment. Van Cliburn won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition playing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. It’s the only time in the history of the U.S. that there’s ever been a ticker-tape parade for a musician, when Cliburn returned after his win. He was a beautiful performer and articulated how music could help to bridge cultural divides.
I don’t know that anybody playing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 right now is going to end the Russia–Ukraine War, but I think a willingness to recognize a shared love of music could be a starting point for reaching a diplomatic understanding with one another. I would certainly like to see a resolution to this conflict that acknowledges Ukraine’s sovereignty. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but I don’t think that not performing this work feels like the answer.
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