Biography

Minnesota native and countertenor Joseph Nelson has gained a reputation as scholar, performer, and concert producer both in the Twin Cities and beyond. He began his career studying at Lawrence University with Patrice Michaels, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in Music and Gender Studies. While there he sang the Sorceress in Dido and Aeneasand produced and starred in a production of Act 2 of Handel’s Rinaldo(1711). Moving to Boston after college, he worked with Helen Hodam and Susan Ormant. He performed in scenes programs through the New England Conservatory Community Education division under the direction of Marc Astafan. He studied Goldovsky stage technique and movement under Richard Crittenden and Elizabeth Vrenios. While in Boston, he performed excerpts from Pergolesi’s Stabat Materat King’s Chapel. 

After returning to Minnesota, Joseph Nelson began studying with the voice teacher Elizabeth Mannion, and attended the Oberlin University Baroque Performance Institute, working Max van Egmond and Nancy Zylstra. He attended the Ardingly International Summer Music School where he studied with Dr. Steven Rickards and coached with Robin Bowman of the Guildhall School. He then spent a summer as a member of the Aspen Music Festival Opera Theater Center where he understudied the role of Zotico in the North American premiere of Cavalli’s Egliogabalo(1667) under the baton of Jane Glover and directed by Ed Berkeley. He then earned a Master of Music degree from Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of the Performing Arts, studying with countertenor Mark Crayton, Shannon McGinnis, and Dana Brown. He then began performing as founding member of The Hyperion Singers in the Twin Cities. He performed in recitals and concerts, including a performance of the full Pergolesi Stabat Mater, and as alto soloist in J. S. Bach’s Magnificat, with members of the Minnesota Orchestra. He has collaborated locally with Bruce Jacobs, Phil Rukavina, Tami Morse, and Kathy Kraulik. He then performed the role of Oberon in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dreamfor the University of Minnesota Opera Theater Division under the director David Walsh. 

Equally at home in the field of scholarship, he stepped away from performance to pursue a Master of Arts degree in Musicology and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Musicology with a doctoral minor in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society. His research has focused on music of seventeenth-century England and the relationship between mad songs and the sonic environments of madhouses. He is particularly interested in how musical madness and sound relate to discourses on political and social disorder at a time of terrific upheaval in England. His dissertation, “’Bless Us All, ‘Tis a Mad World’: Music, Madness, and Disorder in Seventeenth-Century England,” explores these subjects by tracing the history of the character Poor Tom o’ Bedlam, or Mad Tom, from sixteenth-century literature to William Shakespeare’s King Lear(1606), to popular broadside ballads and political pamphlets of the later-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. He traces the threads of musical madness through music for dance, particularly Morris dancing, in Stuart Court Masques, visual depictions of the medieval Wild Man in prints and literature of the seventeenth century, and in the mad songs and arias of Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel. He has presented on his research for conferences both national and international, including the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, the North American British Music Studies Association, the Association Repertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale, the Newberry Library, and the Early Modern Songscapes conference. He has published on the subject of mad songs and biopolitics in the journal Musicology Research.

He has returned to performing and joined the nascent Bold North Opera Company, under the artistic direction of Phil Rukavina and the musical direction of Marco Real. He sang Tirsi in the company’s inaugural production of Marco da Gagliano’s La Dafne(1608), which takes as its text the Rinuccini libretto of La Dafneused by Peri and Corsi in 1597. Future projects include further collaborations soprano Sarah Jackson on songs from seventeenth-century England, and opera projects with Bold North Opera.