Kay Norton is Associate Professor of Music History in Arizona State University’s School of Music. She holds degrees from the University of Georgia and the University of Colorado-Boulder and has held faculty positions at Brenau Women’s College in Georgia and the Conservatory of Music, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Norton’s publications have provided insights into sacred music of the American Southeast. In the 2003 monograph, Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife—Jesse Mercer’s Cluster of Spiritual Songs, she examined an 1810 hymnal through contexts of gender, race, geography, and culture. Norton’s interdisciplinary interests led to the 2007 grant-funded installation, Dynamic Journey: Transformations of Slavery-era Spaces, Routes, and Sounds. Her life-and-works monograph on Normand Lockwood (1993) is the definitive work on that twentieth-century composer. A cross-disciplinary article exemplifying her current work on music and health appears in the Journal of Medical Humanities (2011). She is currently at work on a monograph exploring the healing power of the musical voice.

Norton has presented scholarly papers at national and international conferences of The College Music Society, Society for American Music, American Folklore Society, Music Teachers National Association, and Society for Ethnomusicology. Norton is currently Vice President of the Society for American Music, which she has also served as program chair (2009), site selection chair (2000-2005), and local arrangements chair (1998). She was chair of SAM’s Interest Group on Gender and American Music (1994-2000) and member-at-large on the Board of Trustees (2005-2008). A career-long member of The College Music Society, she was program chair of its Kansas City annual conference in 2002.