Dr. Robertson earned the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts from the Manhattan School of Music in May 2022. Her doctoral thesis is entitled “The Beauty and Drama of Opposites in the Concertante Flute Works of Sofia Gubaidulina.” She is delighted to contribute to the literature on one of today’s most important composers.

She was drawn to the study of Soviet music through Shostakovich’s opera The Nose and his Twelfth Symphony. She was later drawn to Gubaidulina’s unique voice as not only a woman, but also a member of the Tatar ethnic minority in Russia. Addressing two of Gubaidulina’s works for flute and orchestra, Music for Flute, Strings, and Percussion and …The Deceitful Face of Hope and of Despair, Phoebe has developed the first-ever large-scale analyses of the forms of these important works. Taking a philosophical approach to her analysis, she examines Gubaidulina’s understanding of musical opposition in light of twentieth-century philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Eli Siegel.

Throughout her graduate studies, her research interests have intersected with the fields of sacred music and musicology, as she examines Gubaidulina’s works through the traditions of Russian Orthodox Christianity and Siberian shamanism.

She has presented at conferences throughout North America and Europe, most recently speaking at the Twelfth International Conference on Music Since 1900 in Birmingham, England and the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music at Duke University in Durham, NC. In other fields of interest, she has also given lecture-recitals on flute works ranging from J.S. Bach to 21st-century composer James Newton.

In November 2020, her article “Piping Hot: On Fluting, Folklore, and Feminism” was published in the Eidolon Journal of Classics. In this article, she draws on her experience as a performer of flute works by Debussy and Ravel to bring new insights to the Classics community on interpretations of the myths of Pan & Syrinx and Daphnis & Chloe.

An avid supporter of open knowledge, she has secured a grant to prepare an Open Educational Resource anthology for undergraduate music history survey courses from 1750 to 1900. This resource is forthcoming at the end of 2023.