As a child, Susan McClary actually looked forward to her weekly piano lessons, so much so that she assumed she would become a concert pianist.

That is, until she landed a job as an accompanist to fellow music majors at Southern Illinois University.

"What I enjoyed more than anything," she recalled, "was helping soloists under-stand the music they were performing and helping the music and the period come to life for them."

The noted musicologist, who will deliver UCLA's 92nd annual Faculty Research Lecture at a presentation open to the entire campus at 3 p.m. April 4 in Schoenberg Hall, has been bringing music to life ever since.

A 1995 winner of a MacArthur Fellow-ship, McClary has earned a reputation for originality in the field by interpreting symphonies or popular songs as cultural artifacts, much as art historians or English professors do with painting, sculpture, novels and poetry.

McClary looks at the musical details -- note selection, meter, tone color and organizational structure -- of specific pieces to find what they reveal about the milieu that produced them.

"I take the music very seriously," she said, "and it gives me a sense of what's going on in the period."

The author and editor of 25 books and numerous articles does not focus on a single musical genre or period. Instead, her interests run from medieval hymns to contemporary hip-hop.

Within musicology, McClary specializes in an area once dismissed as ineffable: how music embodies shifting perceptions about gender and sexuality and expresses in subtle ways how individuals define themselves and experience emotion. She is best known for her 1991 book, "Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality."

"Most people have music in the center of their lives, and I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential," she said.

Since 1993, McClary has delivered several prominent public lectures, including the Bloch Lectures at UC Berkeley, the Grout Lecture at Cornell University and the Hooker Lectures at McMaster University. Two years ago, she was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar at universities throughout the United States. She also is a frequent pundit in the cultural press.

"I'm a better talker than performer," she joked. Nevertheless, McClary plans to perform while delivering Thursday's lecture, which is the highest honor UCLA bestows on active faculty. In discussing "Evidence of Things Not Seen: History, Subjectivities and Music," McClary will play the harpsichord as well as sing with the UCLA student madrigal choir Musica Humana.

"I plan to explore several examples of music -- a Renaissance madrigal, a Schubert string quartet and a popular song," McClary said. "I want to talk about the kinds of subjective qualities that music conveys at different moments in European and North American history and demonstrate how music helps shape human experiences."