Zig Reichwald, Ph.D.

Siegwart “Zig” Reichwald teaches music history and serves on the Chapel team at Westmont College. He holds a B.M. in Organ Performance from the University of South Carolina and an M.M. in Conducting and a Ph.D. from the Florida State University. 

Dr. Reichwald is the author of The Genesis of Felix Mendelssohn's Paulus (Scarecrow Press, 2001), which dealt with the compositional process of Mendelssohn's oratorio Paulus. He also edited Mendelssohn in Performance (Indiana University Press, 2009), a collection of essays that, according to Choice, "does a superb job explaining the 19th-century sound environment of Felix Mendelssohn and his audiences," and Nineteenth Century Music Review suggests that it "should be on the shelf of every performer, scholar and devotee of Mendelssohn's music." He has published articles and presented papers on a variety of topics on the music of Brumel, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Poulenc, and Piazzolla at regional, national, and international conferences hosted by such organizations such as the International Musicological Society, the American Musicological Society, the College Music Society, the Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship, the Lyrica Dialogues at Harvard University, and the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini. 

Over the past 20 years, Dr. Reichwald’s research and teaching has advanced increasingly towards exploring the crevices between the siloed approaches to spirituality and an anachronistic division of sacred and secular spaces in 19thcentury music. Much of his current research focuses on Mendelssohn’s sacred music within the context of the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the politics of Restoration-era Prussia, and the rise of German nationalism. Prior to his appointment at Westmont, Dr. Reichwald taught at Converse University and Palm Beach Atlantic University.