Yuval Tessman-Bar-On (she/her) is from Upstate New York, and is entering her fourth year of her undergraduate degree as a double major in trumpet performance and music history at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Her research in musicology centers around themes of social justice in music, both in popular music and in brass and orchestral music. Her recent work includes a paper called “Musical Meaning in Dire Circumstances,” which draws on philosophy of music to consider how we should approach music composed or performed during World War II. In this paper, she characterizes music written in dire circumstances as testimony that requires a certain kind of witnessing by those who play or listen to the music. In another recent paper, Yuval discusses the connection between Miles Davis’ music and his horrendous actions as an abuser of women and questions how we must see his music in relation to this abuse; she looks critically at the versions of masculinity available to African American men at the time and connects Davis' presentation of jazz masculinity to his music. Aside from music, Yuval loves to rock climb, read, hike, run, weight-lift, travel, ride horses, and volunteer with political campaigns.