Prof. Beverly Stein

College of Arts and Letters
Department of Music

Professor of Music in Music History and Analysis

Beverly Stein teaches a wide range of graduate and undergraduate courses in music history and music analysis at Cal State LA. She is passionate about helping singers and collaborative pianists understand the deeper meaning of the songs they perform, and her book Unlocking Meaning in Art Song: The Singer’s Guide to Practical Analysis Using Schubert Songs will be available beginning on August 6, 2024. Dr. Stein has given numerous workshops and talks for singers and collaborative pianists at universities, NATS events (National Association of Teachers of Singing), and the CSU Summer Arts program "The Romantic Lied in German."

Passionate about the arts, Dr. Stein has been recognized for her engaging teaching style and has presented many pre-concert lectures and program notes for concerts.  At Cal State LA, she is an advocate for community engagement; her career development course requires every undergraduate music major to use their musical skills to help a community organization, guiding students into the real world and exposing their abilities to the public.

Dr. Stein directs a social justice performance group called the Exploration Ensemble. Originally known as the Cal State LA Early Music Ensemble, the repertoire was expanded to create a yearly original production by students featuring music in all genres and styles combined with dance, theatre, commentary, and visual images exploring a particular theme.

Dr. Stein has presented papers at the American Musicological Society, the National Association of Teachers of Singing, the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, and the College Music Society. She is also an accomplished flutist, with solo performances in Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall, and degrees from Juilliard, Yale, and Brandeis.  You can hear her six-minute improvised flute solo here.  As a flutist, Beverly Stein worked with Julius Baker at the Juilliard School and Thomas Nyfenger at Yale University; further private studies were with Marcel Moyse, James Pappoutsakis, and Alain Marion.  

With a love for dance, Dr. Stein has appeared in a number of theatrical performances and a recent dance film.  She particularly enjoys historical dance and brings what she learns in summer workshops back to Cal State LA, both in the classroom, where she teaches basic Renaissance and Baroque dances to her music history students, as well in the Exploration Ensemble performances, which often include dance.

Dr. Stein has served as President and Vice-President of the American Musicological Society, Pacific Southwest Chapter, and on the Council of the American Musicological Society.