Naomi Cumming was a fine violinist and music theorist. She published a host of journal articles and lectured internationally on the philosophy, psychology, and semiotics of music; her article on musical semiotics will appear in the Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. She was a Fulbright fellow at Columbia University, a research fellow in music theory at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Melbourne, and recipient of an award from the Society for Music Theory in 1998.