Biography

Dr. Simonot has a wide-ranging background in historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and performance. She taught at the University of Saskatchewan and McGill University before coming to Brandon. Dr. Simonot began her academic career with a Bachelor of Music in clarinet performance from the University of Saskatchewan. She then completed a Masters degree in Ethnomusicology under the direction of Dr. Beverley Diamond at York University in Toronto, where she wrote a thesis on Hart Rouge, a Western Canadian francophone pop group. Before continuing her studies at McGill, Dr. Simonot managed the Western Canadian Unifest Music Festival while maintaining a private studio and teaching music history at the University of Saskatchewan.  She has performed with a number of orchestras and concert bands, including the Saskatoon Symphony, the International Youth Wind Orchestra in Australia, the University of Illinois Classical Music Seminar-Festival Orchestra in Austria, as well as the klezmer band, the Heise Latkes.

While at McGill University, Dr. Simonot taught courses in music history, music and gender, opera history, music theory, and popular music. She has also given guest lectures on opera history at Carleton University in Ottawa. She has presented papers on topics as wide-ranging as the genre of Blue Rodeo’s music and hysteria in Poulenc’s opera at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Canadian University Music Society, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Feminist Theory and Music, and other conferences across Canada, the United States, and Europe. At McGill, Prof. Simonot completed a dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Steven Huebner in which she addressed the representation and intersection of gender, politics, and religion in Poulenc’s 1957 opera, Dialogues des Carmélites, the story of the martyrdom of sixteen Carmelite nuns during the French Revolution.  Her examination of the role of hysteria fuels an interpretation of Dialogues des Carmélites as a reflection on French society’s post-revolutionary ideological tug-of-war. Dr. Simonot is continuing research on Poulenc’s two other operas, as well as examining the intersection of operatic hysteria and religion in operas of Messiaen, Hindemith, Penderecki, and Puccini, among others. Themes relating to gender and culture thread through much of her writing. She has written book reviews, several articles for the Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, and countless program notes. Dr. Simonot also has an essay forthcoming in Grassland Sounds: Popular and Folk Musics of the Canadian Prairies.