She is a professor of music at University of California, Davis and a former dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies.
She received a Bachelor of Arts in Latin from Barnard College in 1971, Master of Fine Arts in Musicology from Princeton University in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Musicology from Princeton University in 1978.
[2][3] She was the Dean, Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis from 2006 to 2014 and a Distinguished Professor of Music, Emeritus from 2017.
[3][4] She noted in her book Composers at Work that musical education was "an area badly in need of further investigations.
[6] Using paleographical and philological analysis, she also studied the possible relationship between renaissance music composers Cipriano de Rore and Baldissera Donato providing new insights about them.