Cat Slowik

Cat Slowik teaches viol in the Five College Early Music Program. A versatile multi-instrumentalist specializing in historical performance, Slowik performs regularly on viola da gamba, cello, baryton, and violone. She is a core member of the Smithsonian Consort of Viols, Elm City Consort, and Yale Baroque Opera Project, and founding and managing member of Y415. She directs the Yale Consort of Viols and serves on the faculties of Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute and Amherst Early Music workshops. A performer-scholar, Slowik frequently delivers pre-concert talks and writes program notes for ensembles including Parthenia and the Smithsonian Chamber Players. In 2020 she music directed an outdoor, COVID-safe production of Dido and Aeneas.

Slowik has served on the faculties of UMASS Amherst, Yale’s Institute for Sacred Music, and the Hartt School of Music, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in music history, writing, performance, and music theory. She has presented her research at many venues, including 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 from 2019 to 2023 served on the board of the American Musicological Society’s Music and Philosophy Study Group. Her doctoral research at Yale explores the history of listening in early modern England. Her research and teaching combine close attention to historical sources with a deep investment in collaborative music-making. Slowik is the co-author of the Oxford Bibliographies entry on the Viol.