This November Pittsburgh played host to musicologists from across the country, convening for the annual national meeting of the American Musicological Society. Among the fascinating work presented over the course of the weekend was a panel featuring two University of Pittsburgh graduate students, Hylton Smith and Jonathan Shold. Both papers came out of seminar work prepared in Dr. Rachel Mundy's seminar.
Graduate student Juan Velasquez will present his paper "Orfeo Impreso: edición y práctica musical en América Latina, a través del caso de Medellín, Colombia (1886-1903)"[Orfeo Printed: musical printing and musical practice in Latin America in Medellín, Colombia (1886-1903)] at the 8th International Colloquium on Musicology, which will be held in conjunction with the first conference of the IMS Regional Association for Latin America and the Caribbean (ARALC/IMS) in Cuba in March, 2014. The International Musicological Society (IMS) was founded in 1927 in Basel, where it has its headquarters.
Members of the American Musicological Society have descended on Pittsburgh for the organization’s annual meeting and Department of Music faculty and graduate students are very much involved.
Department of Music graduate students Sara Gulgas and Jonathan received Outstanding Presenter awards at Pitt’s Grad Expo 2013. Gulgas and Shold, both studying musicology, will receive a $100.00 reimbursement for the purchase of materials or to defray travel/research costs.
Gulgas’ paper, titled “’Summertime’: Pluralism, Appropriation, and Signifying in Janis Joplin’s Lullaby,” explores the way Big Brother and the Holding Company covered the famous George Gershwin song. According to Gulgas, the band
Bryan Wright, a doctoral candidate in musicology, recently returned from spending a week-and-a-half in Kansas and Missouri as the Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation's 2013 Artist in Residence. Every year, the Scott Joplin Foundation invites a performer to Sedalia, Missouri (where Scott Joplin lived for several years and where he composed and published his Maple Leaf Rag). Each day for a week, Wright traveled to area schools (K-12) to teach the students about ragtime and to perform examples.
How do you teach students with little or no formal musical training how to hear and understand the subtleties of music from the 14th and 15th centuries? That was just one question musicologist Emily Zazulia, a specialist in early music and one of three new assistant professors in the Department of Music, had to grapple with as she taught a new course titled Renaissance Music: Reason, Ritual, and Representation.
Rachel Mundy is one of three new Assistant Professors this year in the Department of Music. As a musicologist, she adds to the interdisciplinary richness of the Department with expertise in an area of research that is so new it was up to her to give it a name: animanities.
Though he retired in 2009, Don Franklin (Professor of Music, Emeritus) continues to keep up a busy schedule of research and publication. This April, Franklin presented a paper in a Mozart Colloquium held at the Harvard University Music Library. He was one of 12 participants representing current areas of research in Mozart studies.
His paper, "Time, Proportion and Dramatic Action in the Act I Finale of Don Giovanni," was dedicated to the memory of renowned Mozart scholar Wendy Allanbrook.
This year’s graduation marked the end of a particularly fruitful year for the Department of Music graduating class, current students, and alumni.
2012 Graduates and Current Students
Congratulations are in oder for Elizabeth Hoover (PhD 2012, musicology), who has been appointed a Lecturer in Musicology at Miami University in Ohio. Dr. Judith Delzell, Chair of the Department of Music at Miami University, expressed particular pleasure in appointing Hoover, who earned her BA from MU with a concentration in literature and theory. Delzell writes that,
“In 2002 I offered Elizabeth an oboe scholarship to come to Miami as an undergraduate; in 2012 I offered her a faculty job!”
Read the complete article from Miami University.