Research

Cat Slowik is a PhD candidate in the Department of Music at Yale. She received her BA in Anthropology and Art History at Columbia, graduating with honors in 2012, and received an MPhil and MA from Yale in Musicology in 2019. Her dissertation, “Audile Techniques in Early Modern England,” considers the ways of hearing that contributed to the development of cantus firmus music in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and questions how musical expertise is constituted in different musical communities. Other research interests include techne and the production of musical knowledge, the history of music theory, and the philology of digital music archives.

Slowik has presented her research at the Society for Music Theory and the International Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, and at subject-specific conferences on topics including Historical Performance: Theory, Practice, and Interdisciplinarity (Indiana University) and Music and Sound on the Edges of History. From 2017 to 2022 she co-convened Yale’s Sound Studies Working Group, and since 2019 she has served on the board of the American Musicological Society’s Music and Philosophy Study Group.

Teaching

Slowik has held teaching appointments at Yale College, the Institute for Sacred Music at Yale, the Hartt School of Music and Dance, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in music history, writing, performance, and music theory. In 2019 she was awarded “Associates in Teaching” funding by Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning to develop an undergraduate seminar entitled “Audile Technique” based on her research. Her commitment to equitable teaching practices led her to receive a Teaching Innovation Project Grant from Yale’s CTL to research inequitable citation practices in music scholarship and pedagogical materials. That research also led her to co-found #CiteBetter, a project aimed at disrupting exclusionary habits of citation in research and classroom settings across academic disciplines.

As a MacDougal Teaching Fellow at the Poorvu Center from 2020–2023, she ran pedagogy workshops for graduate students on topics including Equitable Teaching, Course Design, Teaching First Generation and Low Income Students, Preparing and Delivering Effective Lectures, Leading Effective Discussions, Mental Health in the Classroom, and Mentoring Undergraduates.

Since 2018 Slowik has directed and taught students in the Yale Consort of Viols, a subsidiary of the Yale Collegium Musicum focused on introducing string players and other interested students to the viol and its literature. She is committed to a holistic and humanistic approach to teaching early music performance, mixing private and group lessons with informal sight-reading sessions, instruction in reading historical notations, and extra chamber music coaching for advanced students.

Performance

Slowik is a versatile multi-instrumentalist specializing in historical performance, performing regularly on viola da gamba, cello, baryton, and violone. A core member of the Smithsonian Chamber Players, Elm City Consort, Yale Baroque Opera Project, and Yale Collegium Musicum—whose viol consort she directs—Slowik also serves on the faculty of Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute. Her recent projects include performances with The Thirteen, Cathedra, and the New Muses Project, as well as producing and music-directing an outdoor, COVID-safe production of Dido and Aeneas in the summer of 2020. In the same year, she was named a Smithsonian Haydn Fellow.