THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS SCHOOL OF MUSIC November 2015
Faculty NEWS Joyce Castle, professor of voice, Ellen Sommer, lecturer of collaborative piano, and Kristin Newbegin, DMA candidate studying with Joyce Castle, performed at the Chancellor’s Club dinner and celebration on October 30. Not pictured are Sar ah Frisof, assistant professor of flute, and DMA flute student Brian Allred, who also performed. Cindy Colwell, professor of music therapy, recently presented at the American Orff Schulwerk Association national conference in San Diego, CA. The workshops focused on using children’s storybooks through the Orff Schulwerk process to target music benchmarks and speech/ language objectives for children with disabilities.
Michael Compitello, assistant professor of percussion, and his cello/ percussion duo premiered Christopher Stark’s The Language of Landscapes at Washington University in St. Louis on November 1st. The piece was commissioned by Chamber Music America, and used field recordings and found instruments made and discovered by Stark and the ensemble New Morse Code over the past year of workshops, residencies and performances.
in Research: Enhancing Clinical and Professional Development. Several undergraduate and graduate equivalency music therapy students joined Dr. Dvorak in the second presentation to share their insights and experiences with conducting research in her class. In addition, the AMTA research committee selected The Meaning of Music: A Qualitative Exploration of the Experience of Music Therapy Students as one of four research studies for a special oral research presentation at the conference. Five music therapy graduate students, Eugenia Hernandez-Ruiz, Sekyung Jang, Leanna Kim, Megan Joseph, and Kori Wells, worked as team members on the study.
Compitello and New Morse Code also performed November 12th at the yearly Percussive Arts Society International Convention in San Antonio, on a showcase concert featuring mixed chamber ensembles.
Paul Laird, professor of musicology, published the second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Broadway Musical, co-written with William A. Everett, curator’s professor of musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music. The dictionary was published by Rowman & Littlefield, replacing and updating the first edition that
Abbey Dvor ak, assistant professor of music education and music therapy, recently presented at the American Music Therapy Association National Conference in Kansas City, MO. Her presentations included Mindfulness Skills and Music Therapy: An EvidenceBased Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Model and Student Engagement
Cover Photo: Sigma Alpha Iota held an instrument petting zoo for children at the Annual Symphony Orchestra Halloween Concert on October 30.
QuickNotes - November 2015 - music.ku.edu
appeared in 2008. It includes hundreds of entries on Broadway shows, major creative figures and stars, theaters, and related topics. In addition, Laird’s lecture “’A Hint of West Side Story’: The Genesis of Chichester Psalms as Seen in the Leonard Bernstein Collection,” which he presented at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC in April 2015 as part of the American Musicological Society - Library of Congress Lecture Series, is now available in a webcast on the Library of Congress web site, http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/ feature_wdesc.php?rec=6836&loclr=essloc. On November 13, during the American Musicological Society’s national conference in Louisville, professor of music theory Scott Murphy was elected to the Board of Directors of the American Brahms Society.
Br ad Osborn, assistant professor of music theory, presented a paper entitled “Music Videos as Music Theory: Teaching MTV’s Buzz Clips” at the Ann Arbor Symposium on Teaching and Learning Popular Music. The paper introduces new tools to help students analyze the auditory and visual stimuli together in order to understand music videos more holistically. Associate professor of music composition Forrest Pierce’s 2013 choral work Gratitude Sutra was performed on November 6 and 7 by the San Francisco contemporary chamber choir Volti, and recorded for commercial release. Two songs from Pierce’s Gazelles were presented by Seattle mezzo-soprano Melissa Plagemann at Seattle’s Opera on Tap at the Royal Room on November 16. The world premiere of Pierce’s The Little Sappho Book took place on November 17 in Los Angeles, performed by soprano Laura Bohn and the Isaura String Quartet. Charlotte Mundy, soprano; Elizabeth Derham, violin; Kallie Ciechomski, viola; and Kivie Cahn-Lipman, cello, presented a concert of Pierce’s music at Spectrum in New York City on November 22. On the program were The Dante Samadhi, Lord of June, Moses and the Shephere, and Silver Birch Scroll.
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Colin Roust, assistant professor of musicology, participated in two panels at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society. He gave a talk on “Teaching Writing to Doctoral Students” in a session on teaching writing in the music history classroom. He also chaired a session entitled “Getting ‘Into the Groove’: Teaching Students How to Listen to Temporality in Popular Music.” The meeting marked the beginning of his term on the AMS Council and the end of his terms as Chair of the AMS Pedagogy Study Group and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. After concerts this semester on three continents, Steven Spooner, associate professor of piano, made his solo recital debut in Brunei, sponsored by Steinway and the Brunei Music Society. He was later featured in his own festival in Singapore called Inspire Music Camp for teachers and students in Southeast Asia.
Assistant professor of music composition Ingrid Stölzel’s new choral composition The Best Thing in the World was premiered by KHORIKOS in New York City on November 7. She was a guest composer at the 38th Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University. Stölzel’s composition Into Being for SATB choir was performed at the national conference of the Society of Composers, hosted by the University of Florida, Gainesville. Into Being was also performed by Schola Cantorum on Hudson in New York City and Montclair, NJ. Stölzel’s chamber piece Loveliness Extreme for viola, clarinet and piano was performed at Hong Kong Baptist University by the HKBU Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Véronique Mathieu, assistant professor of violin; Steven Spooner, associate professor of piano; and Robert Walzel, dean, traveled to Milan, Italy with music students Man Wang, violin (pictured fifth from the right, back row); K atherine Okesson, violin (second from right, back row); Kelly Bohling, viola
QuickNotes - November 2015 - music.ku.edu
(second from right, back row); and Sunnat Ibr agimov, cello (fifth from left, back row), where they held a one-week residency including rehearsals, master classes and concerts at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory of Music in Milan. The KU School of Music established the exchange program two years ago and this was the first collaboration between the two programs, with more planned in the future.
The School of Music Ambassadors Club has water bottles for sale in 460 Murphy Hall! They are $10 each, cash or check payable to SMAC.
Mathieu, Spooner, and Walzel then continued to Tbilisi, Georgia, to perform a concert at the Tbilisi State Conservatoire, where Spooner studied piano.
Student NEWS Nathan Jones, DMA composition student, will have his song cycle Six Qabanni Love Songs performed at the 2016 Region VI SCI Conference in Wichita, KS, February 13-16. Listen to Ashley Puenner’s premiere performance of this cycle here. Becca Lunstrum, MM horn student, won the MTNA Young Artist Brass Competition for Kansas and advances to regionals in January.
Mi Ou Lee, Yuta Sugano, Christine Liu, Terry Lee, and Sunjung Lee were finalists at this year’s KU concerto competition. The preliminaries were judged by renowned pianist and Oberlin faculty member Alvin Chow. MM piano student Mi Ou Lee was named the winner and will perform the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Prokofiev with the KU Symphony. All are students of Professor Spooner.
Alumni NEWS Jim Doepke, BME ‘74, is excited to return to KU to perform the National Anthem and KU Alma Mater prior to the January 4 KUOklahoma men’s BB game. Doepke continues his “Anthem Across America” project, having now appeared at eleven of thirty major league baseball venues. Jim is now retired after a thirty-three year teaching career in Wisconsin. Jon Lewis, BM trumpet ’81, played the main theme from Star Wars at the American Music Awards in November. Lewis was also First Trumpet on the upcoming Star Wars film. He will be giving a master class and performance at KU in February.
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Upcoming Events DECEMBER DEC. 4
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DEC. 8
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DEC. 8
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DEC. 10
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QuickNotes - November 2015 - music.ku.edu