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Anna Maria Busse Berger is professor of music history at University of California, Davis. She is a scholar of Medieval and Renaissance History and Theory and is the former chair of the UC Davis music department. She was born in Hamburg, Germany, and has lived in the United States since 1976. She is married to the musicologist Karol Berger.
Busse Berger was the 1991 recipient of the American Musicological Society's Alfred Einstein Award for best article by a young scholar. In 1992-93 she was a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence. In 1997-98 she was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2001-02 she was a fellow at the National Endowment for Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center. Busse Berger was the Lehman Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti in 2005-06. In 2011-12 she was a Lise-Meitner Fellow at the University of Vienna. Her book Medieval Music and the Art of Memory appeared in June 2005 and was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and the Wallace Berry Award from the Society of Music Theory for 2006.
She has written on medieval music notation, music and mathematics, the art of memory, and historiography. In her first book, Mensuration and Proportion Signs: Origins and Evolution, she explains the meaning of all signs encountered in mensural notation and also relates them to other measuring systems of the period, in particular the Roman system of fractions. Her book on Medieval Music and the Art of Memory is the first detailed study of music and memory in the Middle Ages. It shows that orality and literacy interacted throughout the period and fundamentally transforms our notion of how musical texts were created. She has also demonstrated how our notions of medieval music have been taken over more or less unquestionably from one of the founding fathers of musicology, the German scholar Friedrich Ludwig.
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