Kate van Orden specializes in cultural history. Her books include Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (2005), which won the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society, the edited volume, Music and the Cultures of Print (2000), and Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print (2014). She performs on historical bassoons and has recorded for Sony, Virgin Classics, Glossa, Teldec, and Harmonia Mundi. She is a professor of music at Harvard University.