As Canada Research Chair in Music, Contact, and Conflict (since 2023), Linda Pearse specializes in the intercultural encounter and music of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pearse is Associate Professor of Music at Mount Allison University (New Brunswick) and serves in an adjunct capacity at McGill University. Following studies at the Schola Cantorum (Basel), a career in Europe included regular performances with the Stuttgart Philharmoniker, the Stuttgart Opera House, the Basel Symphony, La Cetra, piano possibile, and the Stuttgart Musical Theater. Studies in performance at Indiana University Bloomington and musicology at McGill University round out her diverse international musical experiences. Pearse has served in administrative roles previously as Artistic Director of the San Francisco Early Music Baroque Workshop (USA) and the Sackville Festival of Early Music (Canada).

Pearse’s research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) as well as the Canada Council for the Arts, FACTOR Canada and other bodies, focuses on intercultural encounters, music history pedagogy, and the performance of early European art music, drawing on historiographical, performative, and traditional musicological frameworks. 

Her most recent publication, The Early Trombone: A Catalogue of Music (Brepols 2023; 840 pp.), co-authored with H. Weiner and C. Leonard, documents nearly 9000 musical works specifying the trombone, from anonymous pieces mentioned in early sixteenth-century writings up to Haydn’s iconic oratorios The Creation and The Seasons on the cusp of the nineteenth century. As such, the catalogue provides a single resource for scholars, trombonists, chamber musicians, and conductors to access instrumental solo and ensemble, as well as choral works specifying trombone from the sixteenth through to the end of the eighteenth century. 

Linked with her Canada Research Chair position, Pearse directs the SUMR (Sackville Undergraduate Music research) Lab, which offers paid research opportunities for students during the summer months.

An enthusiastic and dedicated pedagogue, Pearse collaborates with other researchers and pedagogues in rethinking the instruction of music history and its intersections with conflict and cultural encounter. In connection with a Symposium on Music and War (October 2024), Pearse is collaborating with colleagues K. Galway and A. Dodson, local Indigenous education specialists, and the SUMR Lab students to create educational materials aligned with New Brunswick’s new curriculum that address the needs of high-school teachers (SSHRC CG 2024).

Pearse also co-directs a research team with Margaret Walker (Queen’s, PI) and Sandria P. Bouliane (Laval, co-applicant) that brings together undergrad and graduate students from the three universities for the project “Changing Colonial Narratives in Music History” (SSHRC IDG 2021). Within the SUMR Lab, students acquire foundational research skills through their synthesis of the different methodologies, and benefit from enhanced preparation for graduate studies, such that they will already have experience working on a research team, performing meaningful research, and contributing to pedagogical outputs.

In addition to directing the SUMR lab, Pearse supports students working on Independent Student Research Grant projects, Experiential Learning courses, and Independent studies. Many of her students go on to study at Canada’s finest graduate institutions and to engage successfully in myriad other professional directions (e.g., arts administration, music education, music therapy). Her written publications bring her perspectives and experiences as a performer together with her consideration of intercultural encounter, musicology, and pedagogy. 

In the artistic realm, Pearse has created intercultural projects with her collaborators Ann Waltner and John Watkins (University of Minnesota) that weave music, texts, images, and soundscapes. 

How Do We Listen? tells the truth of the surviving family of a Shubenacadie Indian Residential School survivor, Virginia Acquin. The project combines soundscape, music, and text to create a performance which engages with historical and present cultural and religious contact in New Brunswick, all with an eye to the complex identities of Indigenous, specifically Wolastoqiyik and Mi’kmaq, and non-Indigenous peoples who reside in the region that is now known as the Province of New Brunswick (SSHRC IDG 2015; SSHRC Connection 2017; premiere Oct 2019; for documentary film and articles see links below). 

Other intercultural projects include Matteo Ricci: His Map and Music that premiered in China (2010), and that considers Matteo Ricci’s Map of the World (1602), writings by Chinese literati, and the music that might have surrounded him. Venetia 1500, a work inspired by the Barbari aerial woodcut of Venice (c.1500), weaves new music by Canadian Kevin Morse (Mount Allison), early European art music, texts, and images, to explore the gritty world of Venice in the sixteenth century, and finding resonance with Maritime cultures in decline (2015). 

From 2008 to 2019, Pearse directed the early brass and string ensemble ¡Sacabuche! Extensive touring included performances in Beijing (China), Hong Kong and Macau (China), Hawaii, Chicago, Seattle, Vancouver Island, Calgary, Vancouver, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, New York, San Francisco, Bloomington (IN), Madison (WI), Kansas City, and Houston. In addition to work with ¡Sacabuche!, Pearse performed with La Rose des Vents, Pacific MusicWorks (Seattle), The Toronto Consort, Music of the Baroque (Jane Glover), Ensemble Caprice (Montréal), and the Spiritus Chamber Choir (Timothy Shantz). 

With ¡Sacabuche! Pearse released two albums on the ATMA label: 17th-Century Italian Motets with Trombone (Sept 2015) and Hidden Treasures: 17th-Century Music of Habsburg and Bohemian (April 2021). She has recorded for broadcast with Harmonia (NPR), IPR, and WFIU, and with Cappella Artemisia. Her critical edition of Seventeenth-Century Italian Motets with Trombone is published with A-R Editions (April 2014).