Faculty
Kathryn Alexander
Specializations: composition, contemporary music performance, music technology.
WWW Site: www.kathrynalexander.org
Bio: Composer Kathryn Alexander, a 2007-08 Aaron Copland Award winner and a 2006 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, has written a wide variety of works, both acoustic and technological. Her pieces draw upon a range of disciplines, including literature, the visual and plastic arts, the sciences, and technology to develop formal schema that distill from the abstract rather than from literal, programmatic meaning. This interdisciplinary approach has culminated in an extensive array of compositions, ranging from pieces for solo instrument and chamber ensemble, solo voice and orchestra, to technological presentations and multimedia works. When Alexander engages music with the other arts, whether for dramatic or abstract expression, or as sonic sculpture, she seeks to highlight the processes of transformation and the beauty of change. The result is a varied repertoire described variously by critics as music in which "... the gestures were bolder, the moods more volatile, the climaxes more clearly marked and - most significant - the sounds enormously more colorful," and where "... the instrumentalists out-Bartoked Bartok in their extramusical pursuits."
Alexander’s recent works include: AroundAbout (2007), a piano trio for the Williams Chamber Players; In The Purest Air, Sapphirine (2006), a chamber concerto for electric jazz guitar soloist, Mark Dancigers, and The NOW Ensemble; Dreams and Reveries (2005), a percussion quartet for the Yale Percussion Group; From The Faraway Nearby (2004), a piano trio for The Blue Elm Trio; … Mania REDUX! (2003), for virtual percussionist and controllist; and In Memoriam (2003), for vocal soloists Richard Lalli and Julia Blue Raspe with The Yale Camerata, Marguerite Brooks, conductor.
In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, Alexander has been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2004-2005), a Computerworld Laureate Award from the Smithsonian Institute (2000-2001), a Composer's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1989-1990), and the Rome Prize (1988-1989). She has won annual awards from ASCAP (1993-2006) and has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony (1994/1989), The Millay Colony (1990), The Virginia Center for the Arts (1990), Yaddo (1989), an! d the Atlantic Center for the Arts (1986). Alexander was a composition fellow of American Opera Projects (2003), the Vermont Chamber Music Festival of the East (1998), the Culture/Rockefeller Exchange (1998), the Words and Music Festival at Indiana University (1994), June-in-Buffalo (1987), and The Tanglewood Music Center (1985). In 1995, Alexander won the Outstanding Young Alumna Award from Baylor University, her alma mater.
A native Texan, Alexander comes from a musical family where she found it natural to be involved with music from an early age. She completed her Bachelor's degree at Baylor University as a flutist, studying with Helen Ann Shanley, and then went on to The Cleveland Institute of Music to work with Maurice Sharp, principal flutist of the Cleveland Orchestra. While there she began to compose. Alexander studied with Donald Erb and Eugene O'Brien at The Cleveland Institute of Music and later earned her DMA in composition at the Eastman School of Music, working with Samuel Adler, Barbara Kolb, Allan Schindler and Joseph Schwantner, and pursued additional study with Leon Kirchner at the Tanglewood Music Center. She has taught at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (1994/1987-1988), Dartmouth College (1990-1993), the University of Oregon (1995-1996), and currently teaches composition and music technology at Yale University.
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Seth Brodsky
Specializations: music after 1945; theories of modernism and postmodernism; music and critical theory; Adorno; continental philosophy; influence, borrowing, and intertextuality; music, melancholy, and pathologies of mind.
Bio: Seth Brodsky holds degrees from Wake Forest University (B.A., 1997) and the Eastman School of Music (M.A., 2002; Ph.D., 2007). Prior to joining the Yale faculty in 2006, he spent a year in Berlin as a Humboldt German Chancellor Scholar.
Brodsky's work as a scholar, teacher, and critic is guided by the tension between history as documentary practice, history as imagination, and imagination as forgetting; between event, memory, and the new, "that which happened" and its subjective transcription, distortion and effacement.
This work informs Brodsky's recent courses, which include an undergraduate seminar on intertextuality and influence in 20-century composition, focusing on the ambivalent role of the composer as both an original author and a reader/arranger of other texts; a graduate seminar on composing at the turn of the millennium which examines the current cultural position of the living composer-as writer of musical works, producer of texts-to-be-read, and inheritor of the "literate tradition"; and an undergraduate lecture on music and melancholy, charting a double history of the rich concept of melancholy and its influence on Western music from the Middle Ages through the present day.
Brodsky is completing a book uniting many of these themes. Currently titled Utopian Strain: Ambivalent Absolutes in European Music, 1961-2001, it explores four of postwar Europe's most influential composers (Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, Helmut Lachenmann, and Wolfgang Rihm) within the context of Adorno's writing on utopian negativity. Related projects include articles on Rihm and the German metaphysical tradition; an article (in preparation) on Berio, Berg, and Celan; and an examination of postwar European music as an endeavor in alternative memorial, not only to the aesthetic utopias of modernism's past, but also to the last century's genocides and art's complicity therein.
Brodsky has also worked for years as a critic and program annotator. In addition to work for the Kurt Weill Newsletter, Andante Magazine and All Music Guide, he has written concert notes and essays for a wide variety of ensembles, artists, and institutions including The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Wiener Philharmoniker, Alarm Will Sound, and Cecilia Bartoli.
Brodsky has also suppressed/repressed years as a classical guitarist into a deepening affair with another six-stringed, fourths-tuned, fretted instrument, the viola da gamba; he performs frequently with The Yale Temperament.
For complete CV: click here.
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Norman Carey
Specialization: music theory.
Bio: Norman Carey is a pianist and music theorist. He is on the music theory faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, where he is also the director of the DMA program in musical performance. Previously, he was a member of the music theory faculty at the Eastman School of Music. His research interests include scale theory and performance/analysis issues. His works have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Music Theory, Perspectives of New Music and Intégral. Upcoming works are set to appear in Essays from the Fourth International Schenker Symposium, Theory and Practice, and the Journal of Mathematics and Music. His paper, "Regions: A Theory of Tonal Spaces in Some Medieval Treatises," co-authored with David Clampitt, was a winner of the Society of Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award in 1999. He is one of the founding editors of the Journal of Mathematics and Music and serves on its editorial board. Carey is also a member of the editorial board of Music Theory Online.
As a performer, Norman Carey is the pianist of the Prometheus Piano Quartet. He was a winner of the Artists International Distinguished Artists' Award, a recipient of the prestigious Borden Award from the Manhattan School of Music, and a prize winner in the International Bach Competition. He has presented New York solo recitals at Merkin Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall. His debut was hailed by John Rockwell of The New York Times as "really delightful and very satisfying." Carey helped to found the Canandaigua Lake Chamber Music Festival and was artistic director of the Music-On-The-Lake Festival in Canada, where he collaborated with the Manhattan String Quartet. Mr. Carey has performed with tenor Robert White, and clarinetist Charles Neidich, and with the renowned violist Emanuel Vardi at Alice Tully Hall. He recorded the Brahms sonatas with Vardi for Finnadar Records. Other recordings include compositions of Fred Tompkins, with drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Dave Williams. He often collaborates in recitals with his wife, soprano Nadine Earl Carey.
Mr. Carey studied with Robert Casadesus and Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau. His master teacher was Kurt Appelbaum. He has degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and a Ph.D from Eastman School of Music.
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David Clampitt
Specialization: music theory.
Bio: David Clampitt’s interests include scale theory, transformational theory, and Brahms studies. He has been active in the development of mathematical methods in music theory, presenting papers in Paris (Ircam), Bucharest, at the national meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Phoenix, and on the series of neo-Riemannian symposia in Buffalo. In 1999, he received a publication award from the Society for Music Theory, the Emerging Scholar Award (with Norman Carey) for “Regions: A Theory of Tonal Spaces in Early Medieval Treatises.” He completed a Ph.D. in music theory at SUNY Buffalo, and holds degrees from Grinnell College and Manhattan School of Music. He is an active orchestral and chamber music violinist.
Publications:
“‘Cardinality Equals Variety for Chords’ with a Note on the Twin Primes Conjecture,” to appear, (solicited for a volume to honor John Clough).
“Ramsey Theory, Unary Transformations, and Webern’s Op. 5, No. 4,” Intégral vol. 13 (1999): 63–93.
“Review of Music, Gestalt, and Computing: Studies in Cognitive and Systematic
Musicology, Marc Leman ed.,” Gestalt Theory vol. 21, no. 1 (1999): 62–69.
“Alternative Interpretations of Some Measures from Parsifal,” Journal of Music Theory vol. 42, no. 2 (1998): 321–34.
“Self-similar Pitch Structures, Their Duals, and Rhythmic Analogues,” (with Norman Carey) Perspectives of New Music, vol. 34, no. 2 (1996): 62–87.
“Regions: A Theory of Tonal Spaces in Early Medieval Treatises,” (with Norman Carey) Journal of Music Theory, vol. 40, no. 1 (1996): 113–47.
“Some Refinements on the Three Gap Theorem, with Applications to Music,” Muzica vol. 6, no. 2 (1995): 12–22.
“Report: An International Symposium on Music and Mathematics (Bucharest, Romania),” Music Theory Online vol. 1, no. 1 (1995).
“Aspects of Well-formed Scales,” (with Norman Carey) Music Theory Spectrum vol. 11, no. 2 (1989): 187–206.
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Richard Cohn
Specialization: music theory.
Bio: Richard Cohn was appointed Battell Professor of Music Theory in 2005, after twenty years on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Cohn majored in music history at Brown University (B.A., 1977), and taught piano privately for several years before entering the PhD program in music theory at the Eastman School of Music. He received his PhD in 1987 with a dissertation on transpositional combination in 20th-century music. His dissertation and initial publications focused on the music of Bartók. During the early 1990's, Cohn published a series of articles on the role of motive in Schenkerian analysis, as well as a pair of papers on metric dissonance in music of Mozart and Beethoven. His article on transpositional combination of beat-class sets in the music of Steve Reich won him the Society for Music Theory's Outstanding Publication Award in 1994. He earned the same award for a second time in 1997, for an article that developed a neo-Riemannian approach to chromatic harmony focusing on voice-leading parsimony. Those ideas have been further developed in a number of Cohn's papers appearing during the last decade, which variously explore geometric models, analytical and hermeneutic implications, and historical precedents. Other aspects of Cohn's ideas have been developed by participants in a series of summer seminars convened by John Clough at SUNY-Buffalo, as well as by PhD students at Harvard, Buffalo, Indiana, and Chicago. Along with his continuing work in chromatic harmony, Cohn's recent work develops geometric models of metric dissonance in music of Brahms and Dvorak, and of abstract relations among tetrachordal classes. He also serves as general editor for Oxford University Press's book series in music theory.
Selected Publications:
“Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57.2 (2004): 285-323
“A Tetrahedral Model of Tetrachordal Voice Leading Space,” Music Theory Online 9.4 (2003)
“Complex Hemiolas, Ski-Hill Graphs, and Metric Spaces,” Music Analysis 20.3 (October 2001), pp. 295-326
"Weitzmann's Regions, My Cycles, and Douthett's Dancing Cubes," Music Theory Spectrum 22.1 (2000): 89-103.
"As Wonderful as Star Clusters: Instruments for Gazing at Tonality in Schubert” Nineteenth-Century Music 22.3 (1999): 213-232.
"Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious Trichords, and their Tonnetz Representations," Journal of Music Theory 41.1 (1997), 1-66.
"Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions." Music Analysis 15.1 (1996), 9-40.
"Transpositional Combination of Beat-Class Sets in Steve Reich's Phase-Shifting Music." Perspectives of New Music 30/2 (1992), 146-177.
"The Autonomy of Motives in Schenkerian Accounts of Tonal Music." Music Theory Spectrum 14/2 (1992), 150-170.
"Dramatization of Hypermetric Conflicts in the Scherzo of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," Nineteenth-Century Music 15/3 (1992), 22-40.
"Bartók's Octatonic Strategies: A Motivic Approach." Journal of the American Musicological Society 44 (1991): 262-300.
"Inversional Symmetry and Transpositional Combination in Bartók." Music Theory Spectrum 10 (1988): 19-42.
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Margot E. Fassler
Specialization: music history.
Bio: Professor Fassler was named Robert S. Tangeman Professor of Music History in 1999. She holds joint appointments at the Divinity School, the School of Music, and in the Department of Music. A historian of music and liturgy, her special fields of interest are medieval and American sacred repertories. She offers courses in medieval and contemporary liturgics, sacred repertories of music from early Christianity to the present, Christian hymnody, liturgical drama (with Jaime Lara). Her book Gothic Song won the Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy and the Otto Kindelday Prize of the American Musicological Society. She has recently finished a book on the Virgin of Chartres (Yale University Press) and is now writing a book on Hildegard of Bingen. Psalms in Community: Jewish and Christian Textual, Liturgical, and Artistic Traditions, which she co-edited with Harold W. Attridge, was published in 2004 by the Society of Biblical Literature. B.A., State University of New York; M.A., Syracuse University; M.A., Ph.D., Cornell University.
For complete CV: click here.
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Michael Friedmann
Specializations: ear training, piano performance (special foci on the music of Schoenberg, Schumann and Beethoven), analysis of post-tonal music, chamber music coaching.
Bio: He received his B.A. from Brandeis University and his Ph.D. in composition from Harvard University. He has served on the music faculties of the New England Conservatory of Music, the University of Pittsburgh, the Hartt School of Music, and was Valentine Visiting Professor at Amherst College in the fall of 1990. He has also taught at the Steans Institute for Young Artists of the Ravinia Festival. Mr. Friedmann has published articles in several theoretical journals. His book, Ear Training for Twentieth-Century Music, was given a special citation by the Society for Music Theory. His compositions have been widely performed, and he is a frequent piano recitalist. He joined the Yale faculty in 1989.
Selected publications and performances:
1985 "A Methodology for the Discussion of Contour", Journal of Music Theory , Fall 1985, pp. 243-248
1990 Ear Training for 20th Century Music Yale University Press (2nd printing 1995)1991 Amherst College: Two Lecture-Recitals: A Guided Tour to Schoenberg's Piano Music (complete)
1995 "Schoenberg's Waltz, op. 23/5: Multiple Mappings in Form and Row", Theory and Practice, Vol. 17
2002 Yale University, Beethoven's "Diabelli Variations"
2003 Virginia Commonwealth University: Vocal performance and lecture: Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon: A Cast of Characters
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Alain Frogley
Specialization: music history.
Bio: Alain Frogley is a native of Great Britain and holds degrees from Oxford University and the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at Oxford and Lancaster universities, and in 1994 was appointed to the faculty of the University of Connecticut, where he is Professor of Music History. A specialist in the music of the late- nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly that of Britain and America, he has also worked extensively on Beethoven; his research has centered on sketch studies, reception history, and the cultural contexts of musical nationalism. His most recent work includes research into the reception of British music in Nazi Germany, on racial Anglo-Saxonism in music, and post-colonial studies in musicology. In 2005-6 he was a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, working on a book about music and the modern city centered on Vaughan Williams's A London Symphony.
Professor Frogley's research has been presented at international conferences and published by leading journals, including Music and Letters, Beethoven Forum, and Notes. He has edited Vaughan Williams Studies for Cambridge University Press, and written a monograph on Vaughan Williams's Ninth Symphony for Oxford University Press's series Studies in Musical Genesis and Structure. His article 'Re-writing the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British Music since 1840' won the Westrup Prize for the best article published in Music and Letters during 2002-3. He is a consultant to OUP on textual problems in Vaughan Williams scores. While working in Britain, he wrote and presented major BBC radio series on British and American music, and he is a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine; in the United States he has lectured at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Dr. Frogley is also a contributor to the revised edition of the New Grove Dictionary, and to the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He is active as a singer and is a member of Connecticut Choral Artists (CONCORA).
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Daniel Harrison
Specialization: music theory.
Bio: B.A. Stanford University, with distinction and honors; 1981
Ph.D. Yale University; 1986
My chief research interest is in tonal theory, especially at historical margins of the common-practice era. A dissertation on the music of Max Reger was the springboard for Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music (Chicago, 1994), which offered a theory and some analytic tools based on late nineteenth-century ideas on harmony, chiefly those of Hugo Riemann. (I find the history of music theory to be an especially rewarding field of study.) Further developments of this project were undertaken in “Supplement to the Theory of Augmented Sixth Chords” and “Nonconformist Notions of Nineteenth–Century Enharmonicism.” Lately, I've (re)turned to the study of 17th- and 18th-century tonality in “Rosalia, Arcangelo, and Aloysius: A Genealogy of the Sequence.” (See curriculum vitae for details of publication.)
My current work in this area of interest is on contemporary tonal music, especially that of the 20th century. I am investigating ways in which a variety of composers—among whom are notables such as Hindemith, Shosatkovich, Prokofiev, Martinu, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Barber, and Copland—maintained, adapted, and developed traditional compositional materials. A conference paper, “Dissonant Tonics and Post-Tonal Tonality,” currently being prepared for publication, is one result. Other focused projects from this study include an examination of Paul Hindemith's music theories, an investigation into implied claims of Jazz theory about tonality, and various matters relating post common-practice tonality to psychoacoustics and music cognition. All of these topics will culminate in a book, Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonality.
I also have a stake in the analysis of pop music, chiefly from the 1960s and 70s, and specifically the music of The Beach Boys. I've given a few conference papers in this area, published an essay, “After Sundown: The Beach Boys' Experimental Music” in the collection Understanding Rock, and appeared in a Don Was documentary on Brian Wilson, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times (1995).
A long-standing interest that I look forward to working on in the future is musical rhetoric, especially on techniques of proposition and argument and their realization in performance.
At both Yale and at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music, I've taught graduate courses in chromatic music and analysis; tonality after the common practice; analysis of rock music; the pedagogy of music theory; and the writing of music theory and analysis. I've advised dissertations on common-practice tonal and contemporary tonal musics, and I would be happy to continue supervising research in these areas as well as in the history of music theory, popular musics, rhetorical-narrative analysis, and analysis of sacred music.
My primary instrument is the organ, which I studied with Herbert Nanney at Stanford and Robert Baker at Yale. In Rochester, I was assistant to David Craighead at St. Paul's Episcopal church for twelve years. Among my other musical experiences is a stint as an arranger and bass-pan player in the steel-drum band Calliope's Children.
Links:
More information, including a complete curriculum vitae and some research papers in draft form, is available on my homepage.
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Craig Harwood
Specialization: music theory.
Bio: Craig Harwood was appointed Dean of Davenport College in June 2005. He earned the Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from Queens College, where he played tuba in the College Orchestra. He received his Ph.D. in Music Theory from Yale University; his dissertation explored issues of musical grammar in the work of Mozart.
After graduating from Yale, Dean Harwood was appointed an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at Amherst College. At Amherst and Yale, Dean Harwood has taught classes in music theory, Klezmer Music and Mozart. He plays both guitar and mandolin, and performs in Generation Klez, a professional klezmer ensemble with a group of Alumni from the Yale School of Music. During his graduate school days at Yale he played with the Professors of Bluegrass.
Dean Harwood has been tireless in his devotion to both the world of music and the music of the world; while at Amherst, he helped develop the Global Sound Project, and served on the Five College Ethnomusicology Committee, which organizes festivals and symposia on world music. As a performer, as a teacher, and as mentor to undergraduate musicians, Mr. Harwood has used music of all types as his medium for connecting with students.
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James Hepokoski
Specializations: Music from ca. 1750 to the present: historical contexts, structure, and hermeneutics (interpretations of textual "meaning"); symphonic and chamber works from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven through Mahler, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss; sonata-form theory and sonata deformations; conceptions of musical modernism, ca. 1880-1920; music, ideology, and nationalism; interplays of differing twentieth-century music traditions in the United States (art music, blues, Broadway, 1900-1950); Italian opera (Verdi, Puccini).
Bio: Hepokoski received his M.A. (1974) and Ph.D. (1979) in music history from Harvard University. He has taught at Oberlin College Conservatory (1978-1988), at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (1988-1999), and at the Yale Department of Music since 1999. He was the co-editor of the musicological journal 19-Century Music from 1992 to 2005.
Both in his writings and in his courses, Hepokoski explores ways of synthesizing music history, music theory, and music criticism (music as cultural discourse). "Our goals are to think more deeply about how we talk and write about music; to ask informed, hard questions of ourselves and our disciplinary traditions; to contribute original and challenging ideas to the ongoing discussion about music and its many different roles in culture." In the past decade, in collaboration with Warren Darcy (Oberlin College Conservatory), Hepokoski has developed a new mode of sonata-form analysis—"Sonata Theory"—that merges historical research, current music theory, and recent styles of textual questioning and interpretation.
At the undergraduate level he teaches two music history survey courses required of music majors (1600-1800 and 1800-present), along with specialized courses in Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, American music, symphonic nationalism and cultural identity, and other topics. His graduate-level seminars deal with a wide range of subjects. Among them: Late Beethoven; Sonata Theory; American Musical Genres in the Twentieth Century (Ives, 1920s-30s blues, popular song and Cole Porter, all of these drawing on extensive primary-source holdings in the Yale Libraries); Methodological Issues in Music History and Analysis; Program Music and Structure; and Richard Strauss’s Tone Poems.
Selected Publications:
Books
Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late-Eighteenth-Century Sonata. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Co-authored with Warren Darcy.
Sibelius: Symphony No. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Otello di Giuseppe Verdi [in the series Musica e spettacolo: Collana di Disposizioni sceniche diretta da Francesco Degrada e Mercedes Viale Ferrero ]. Co-authored with Mercedes Viale Ferrero. Translated into Italian by Francesco Degrada. Milan: G. Ricordi & C., 1990. [This is a book on Verdian staging. It was the first volume of a series of "production-book" source-reprints—original staging manuals—being undertaken by G. Ricordi & C.]
Giuseppe Verdi: Otello. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Selected Articles
"The Framing of Till Eulenspiegel," 19th-Century Music 30 (2006), 4-43.
"Structure, Implication, and the End of Suor Angelica." Studi pucciniani 3 (2004), 241-64.
"Beyond the Sonata Principle." Journal of the American Musicological Society 55 (2002), 91-154.
"Back and Forth from Egmont: Beethoven, Mozart, and the Nonresolving Recapitulation." 19th-Century Music 25 (2002), 127-54.
"Beethoven Reception: The Symphonic Tradition." Chapter 15 [on the symphony and symphonic poem, ca. 1840-1900] of Jim Samson, ed., The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002. Pp. 424-59.
"Jean Sibelius," entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 2001. Vol. 23: 319-47.
"The Medial Caesura and its Role in the Eighteenth-Century Sonata Exposition." Music Theory Spectrum 19 (1997), 115-54. Co-authored with Warren Darcy.
"Ottocento Opera as Cultural Drama: Generic Mixtures in Il Trovatore." In Martin Chusid, ed., Verdi’s Middle Period (1849-59): Source Studies, Analysis, and Performance Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. 147-96.
"Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss's Don Juan Reinvestigated." In Bryan Gilliam, ed., Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1992. Pp. 135-176.
"The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-Musicological Sources." 19th-Century Music 14 (1991), 221-46.
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Robert Holzer
Annette Jolles
Specialization: music theatre.
Bio: Annette Jolles has created a diverse body of work as a director, writer and producer for stage and television. She directed and choreographed Laurence Holzman and Felicia Needleman’s That Time of the Year at the York Theatre Company, where she also directed Little By Little and the York’s 2007 NEO benefit. She directed “Johnny Mercer at the Movies” for the 92nd Street Y’s Lyrics and Lyricists series and five seasons of New Voices Concerts at Symphony Space where she also staged “Broadway and Beyond” with host Rob Fisher and their monumental Wall to Wall Sondheim tribute. For The Little Orchestra Society, Ms. Jolles has directed and choreographed fifteen seasons of Lolli-Pops Concerts and productions including Amahl and the Night Visitors, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, and Peter and the Wolf at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center. In addition, she directed and produced their multi-award winning DVD The Orchestra – A Happy Family. Her work in television earned her an Emmy Award as producer of the 9/11 Memorial from Ground Zero and six additional Emmy nominations. Highlights of broadcasts include Broadway Under the Stars (CBS), Egypt Week Live (Discovery), The Dr. Joy Browne Show (Discovery Health), Romance/ Romance, Nunsense 1, 2 & 3, Stop the World… (PBS, A&E, TNN), Trading Spaces “Home Free” Finale (TLC), and the Times Square New Year’s Eve festivities from 1997-2004. In the emerging field of live webcasts, Ms. Jolles co-produced several AOL broadband concerts featuring artists such as Usher, Avril Lavigne, and Alicia Keys. Most recently, she directed the live MSN Al Gore interview that launched Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University and recipient of a Drama League Directors fellowship. She is also a proud mother of two.
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Michael Klingbeil
Specializations: music composition, music technology.
Bio: Michael Klingbeil holds a BM from Oberlin Conservatory of Music (TIMARA program), a BA in Computer Science from Oberlin College, and an MM in composition from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. He is currently completing a DMA in composition at Columbia University. His principal teachers are Tristan Murail, Heinrich Taube, Gary Lee Nelson, P.Q. Phan and James Beauchamp. His works have been played in both the U.S. and Europe by ensembles including the Columbia Composers Ensemble, University of Illinois New Music Ensemble, the Orchestre Lyrique de Région Avignon-Provence, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Argento Chamber Ensemble. Recent awards include a First Music chamber music commission from the New York Youth Symphony, finalist recognition from the Concorso Internazionale "Luigi Russolo," and an ASCAP Morton Gould Composer Award. His work is recorded on the ICMC label. In addition to musical activities, he was a computer science research fellow at the University of Iowa, and has earned industry awards for computer software development. He is actively involved in computer music research in both the academic and commercial fields and has developed novel software for audio analysis and resynthesis.
For more information please visit http://www.klingbeil.com
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Sarah Kohane
Gundula Kreuzer
Specializations: History and theory of opera (particularly of the nineteenth century), with a special focus on staging; reception studies; music and politics; German and European cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; music criticism; Verdi.
Bio: Gundula Kreuzer studied musicology, philosophy, and modern history at the Universities of Münster (Westphalia) and Oxford, where she got her Master of Studies and D.Phil. in musicology. She held a Junior Research (postdoctoral) Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, before joining the Yale Department of Music in 2005.
In both her writing and her teaching, Kreuzer approaches music from wider interdisciplinary perspectives such as social, cultural, and politica l history. She is currently working on a book about Verdi and German-language culture which examines the changing impact of the popular Italian composer on German musical self-perception and national identity between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries . Other projects concern the marketing of music and composers in the nineteenth century, and the multi-medial nature of opera. Kreuzer has examined the impact of translations on the shifting relations between words, sound, and image in performance, and has questioned current scholarly approaches to the much-debated phenomenon of "Regietheater," intending to pursue further research into opera's visual and performative sides in her second book. She has contributed, among other publications, to Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Personenteil, and is editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi: Series V, Chamber Music (forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press and Ricordi). In Germany she also gained some experience as a freelance music critic and radio presenter. Since 2006 she has been Associate and Reviews Editor of Opera Quarterly.
At Yale, Kreuzer's courses include Introduction to the History of Western Music, 1800 to the Present (Music 131), Introduction to Opera (Music 241), Music in Nazi Germany (Music 280/German Studies 380), The Operas of Verdi (Music 335), Listening in 19 th-Century Paris (Music 340), a Graduate Practicum in German Source Reading and Translation (Music 532), and Reception History – Theory and Practice (Music 844). A future graduate seminar will address issues of operatic performance and production.
Among other grants and awards, Kreuzer received fellowships from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (1994-1999, 2001-2003), the DAAD (1997/98), the British Academy (A.H.R.B., 1999-2002), and the Fazit-Stiftung (2000/01). She has received prizes from both the American Musicological Society and the Royal Musical Association (Paul A. Pisk prize, 2000; Alfred Einstein award, 2006; Jerome Roche prize, 2006).
Selected Publications:
"Voices from Beyond: Don Carlos and Modern Regie," Cambridge Opera Journal 18 (2006), 151-79.
"Deception on Stage: Don Carlos di Vargas and Franz Werfel's Politics of Operatic Translation," Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany, 1850-1950, ed. Nikolaus Bacht (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 137-57.
"Oper im Kirchengewande? Verdi's Requiem and the Anxieties of the Young German Empire," Journal of the American Musicological Society 58/2 (Summer 2005), 399-449.
"Schwarze Augen—blaue Augen. Zur Wahrnehmung Verdis im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts," Verdi e la cultura tedesca. La cultura tedesca e Verdi. Atti del convegno internazionale Villa Vigoni, 11-13 ottobre 2001, eds. Markus Engelhard, Pierluigi Petrobelli, and Aldo Venturelli (Parma: Istituto nazionale di studi verdiani, 2003), 102-134.
"'Erzieher und Bannerträger an der Spitze des Volkes:' Aspects of Verdi Reception in the Third Reich," Verdi 2001. Atti del Convegno internazionale Parma, New York, New Haven, 24 gennaio-1° febbraio 2001 , eds. Fabrizio Della Seta, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, and Marco Marica (Florence: Olschki, 2003), vol. 1, 295-306
Abridged version: "Verdi in the Third Reich," Opera 52/12 (December 2001), 1430-1437.
Entries on "I masnadieri" and "La forza del destino," Verdi-Handbuch, eds. Anselm Gerhard and Uwe Schweikert (Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2001), 358-64 and 437-48.
"Zurück zu Verdi: the 'Verdi Renaissance' and Musical Culture in the Weimar Republic," Studi verdiani 13 (1998), 117-154.
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Sarita Kwok
Specialization: ear training.
Bio: Australian violinist Sarita Kwok has performed as soloist with the Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, in the country’s major concert halls and on national television and radio. Awards she has won in Australia include the country’s most prestigious musical award: ‘The Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year 1998’, and the James Fairfax Sydney Symphony Orchestra Young Artist 1996. She was a prizewinner of the Kloster Schontal International Violin Competition, Germany 1997, Gisborne International Music Competition, New Zealand 1998, 7th Wieniawski and Lipinski International Competition for Young Violinist, Poland 2000. Ms Kwok has performed in masterclasses and privately for Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Pinchas Zukerman, Lydia Mordkovitch, Ilya Kaler, Stephen Clapp and Mauricio Fuks. As a founding member and first violinist of the Alianza String Quartet, Ms Kwok recently gave debut performances at the Aldeburgh festival, UK, Aix-en-Provence festival, France, and the French Academy in Rome. The Alianza quartet also has a keen interest in contemporary music, premiering works by Jerome Combier and Michael Jarrell in Europe this past summer. They have enjoyed collaborating with composers-in-residence at Yale such as Ezra Laderman and Martin Bresnick, performing the quartets of both composers on New Music series concerts at Yale. The quartet has had the opportunity of working intensively with artists such as the Juilliard String Quartet, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and members of the Berliner Philharmoniker. They are now post-graduate associates of the Yale School of Music where they are coached and mentored by the Tokyo String Quartet. Ms. Kwok graduated with a B.A. (Literature) from the University of Sydney, M.M from Michigan State University, Masters of Musical Arts and Artist Diploma from Yale School of Music where she studied with Syoko Aki.
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Richard Lalli
Specializations: music theatre, vocal performance.
Bio: Richard Lalli is Professor of Music (Adjunct) at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. He has recently been named Artistic Director of the the Yale Baroque Opera Project, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation and introduces undergraduates to aesthetic, stylistic and performative aspects of seventeenth-century Italian opera. For the past six years he conducted the Yale Collegium Musicum, an ensemble devoted to early music and started by Paul Hindemith in the 1940s; the Collegium regularly performs works from manuscript at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven. At Yale he also teaches courses related to vocal performance, oversees the instruction of Fundamentals of Music, and coordinates the Shen Musical Theater Curriculum.
Mr. Lalli performs around the world as a singer. He has given solo recitals at Wigmore Hall, the Spoleto Festival USA, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Merkin Hall in New York, Salle Cortot, and the United States Embassy in Paris. During the Schubert bicentenary year the baritone presented the three Schubert cycles at Yale University, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, and in Paris. He has been particularly active in the performance of chamber music, appearing with the Boston Camerata, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Brentano String Quartet, the Folger Consort, and with the new-music ensemble Sequitur. As a pianist he has participated in chamber music programs in Weill Recital Hall and Town Hall in New York, as well as in Paris, London, Stockholm, Basel, Edinburgh, and Budapest. Lalli has premiered works of Gary Fagin, Yehudi Wyner, Kathryn Alexander, Tom Cipullo, Christopher Berg, Richard Wilson, Lewis Spratlan, Francine Trester, Ricky Ian Gordon, Richard Pearson Thomas, Eric Zivian, Braxton Blake, Daron Hagen, Juliana Hall, Matthew Suttor, and John Halle.
Highlights of recent seasons include the premiere John Adams in Amsterdam: A Song for Abagail by Gary Fagin and Terry Quinn; this work for baritone and string quartet was performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (with Queen Beatrix in attendance). In March of 2006 he performed songs of Stephen Sondheim with the composer at Yale Univeristy, where he has also performed William Walton’s Façade with that composer’s widow. At Princeton he was featured in the one-man chamber opera Cézanne’s Doubt by Daniel Rothman, and he gave the American premiere of a new one-man performance piece, ME, by Edmund Campion, at the Cal Performances Edge Festival in Berkeley. During the coming seasons he will perform–among other things–Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon with Peter Serkin and the Brentano String Quartet.
With pianist Gary Chapman, Lalli has recorded four discs of popular songs. The two have appeared at festivals around the world, and also in intimate spaces such as the Players' Club, the Carlyle, the Park Plaza, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Their recording accompanies a Yale University Press publication, Listening to Classical American Popular Songs, by Allen Forte.
Mr. Lalli was recently awarded the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities at Yale University, and his recording of Yehudi Wyner's The Mirror was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2005.
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Judith Malafronte
Specialization: early music performance.
Bio: Judith Malafronte has an active career as a mezzo-soprano soloist in opera, oratorio and recital. She has appeared with the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the St. Louis Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Handel and Haydn Society and Mark Morris Dance Group. She has sung at the Tanglewood Festival, the Boston Early Music Festival, the Utrecht Early Music Festival, and the Göttingen Handel Festival. Winner of several top awards in Italy, Spain, Belgium and the US, including the Grand Prize at the International Vocal Competition in Hertogenbosch, Holland, Malafronte holds degrees with honors from Vassar College and Stanford University, and studied at the Eastman School of Music, in Paris and Fontainebleau with Mlle. Nadia Boulanger, and with Giulietta Simionato in Milan as a Fulbright scholar. She has recorded for major labels in a broad range of repertoire, from medieval chant to contemporary music and her writings have appeared in Opera News, Stagebill, Islands, Early Music America Magazine, Schwann Inside and Opus. B.A., Vassar; M.A., Stanford.
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Patrick McCreless
Specializations: history of music theory; Wagner, rhetorical and narrative approaches to analysis.
Bio: Master of Music in Music Theory from the University of Michigan, and the Ph. D. in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. Before coming to Yale in 1998, he taught for fifteen years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was Associate Director of the School of Music, and five years before that at the Eastman School of Music.
Much of his work has focused on Wagner and on the music of the late nineteenth century. His dissertation/book Wagner's Siegfried: Its Drama, Its History, and Its Music, remains one of the few monographs on a single Wagner opera. In "Schenker and the Norns" he brings later nineteenth-century tonal and structural principles together with Schenkerian analytical principles to bear on the opening scene of the Prologue of Götterdämmerung. In another essay on Wagner, "A Motivic Dyad in Parsifal," he shows how a simple pair of pitch-classes bears the structural weight of much of the musical drama. Another early article examines the analytical work of the Swiss theorist Ernst Kurth, whose pathbreaking book on Wagnerian harmony, Romantische Harmonik und Ihre Krise in Wagner's Tristan, set the stage for later twentieth-century approaches to Wagner's music.
From his work on Wagner he has branched out to consider a much wider range of topics. He addresses larger problems of harmony and chromaticism in late tonal music in "Syntagmatics and Paradigmatics," "Schenker and Chromatic Tonicization: A Reappraisal," and "An Evolutionary Perspective on Semitone Relations in the Nineteenth Century." Before serving as President of the Society for Music Theory in 1993 to 1995, he wrote a retrospective on the history and practice of music theory in the United States, "Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory." Here he appropriates the work of Michel Foucault on disciplinarity to put the development of contemporary theory into historical perspective. More recently he has become interested in the music of Shostakovich, about which he has written one article and lectured extensively. And following a long-standing interest in the discipline of rhetoric, he wrote the article "Music and Rhetoric" for The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen.
Selected Publications:
Wagner's Siegfried: Its Drama, History, and Music. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982.
"Ernst Kurth and the Analysis of the Chromatic Music of the Late Nineteenth Century." Music Theory
Spectrum 5 (1983), 56-75.
"Schenker and the Norns." In Analyzing Opera, ed. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 276-97.
"Schenker and Chromatic Tonicization: A Reappraisal." In Schenker Studies, ed. Hedi Siegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 125-45.
"Motive and Magic: A Referential Dyad in Parsifal." Music Analysis 9 (1990), 227-65.
"Syntagmatics and Paradigmatics: Some Ramifications for the Analysis of Chromaticism in Tonal Music." Music Theory Spectrum 13 (1991), 146-79.
"The Cycle of Structure and the Cycle of Meaning: Shostakovich's Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 67." In Shostakovich Studies, ed. David Fanning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 113-136.
"An Evolutionary Perspective on Semitone Relations in the Nineteenth Century." In The Second Practice of Nineteenth-Century Tonality, ed. William Kinderman and Harald Krebs. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, 87-113.
"Rethinking Contemporary Music Theory." In Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz and Anahid Kassabian. Charlottesvile: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
"Music and Rhetoric." In The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 847-79.
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Robert Mealy
Specialization: early music performance.
Bio: One of America’s leading baroque violinists, Robert Mealy has been praised for his “imagination, taste, subtlety, and daring” by the Boston Globe; the New Yorker recently called him “New York’s world- class early music violinist.” He has recorded over 50 cds of early music on all major labels, ranging from Hildegard of Bingen with Sequentia, to Renaissance consorts with the Boston Camerata, to Rameau operas with Les Arts Florissants. At home in New York, he is a frequent leader and soloist with the New York Collegium, Early Music New York, and ARTEK. He regularly appears at international music festivals from Berkeley to Belgrade, and from Melbourne to Versailles. A devoted chamber musician, he is a member of the celebrated Renaissance violin band The King's Noyse, which records for harmonia mundi usa, and the new 17c ensemble Spiritus. He served for over a decade as an instrumental soloist and leader with the Boston Camerata. Through his interest in earlier repertories, he co-founded the medieval ensemble Fortune’s Wheel, which has appeared at early music festivals throughout the Americas, and at the Cloisters and the Frick Museum here in New York.
In 2004 Mr. Mealy was appointed concertmaster of the internationally-acclaimed Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, and led them in their recent production of Lully’s Psyché, as well as their Grammy- nominated recording of Conradi’s Ariadne and the critically-hailed modern premiere of Mattheson’s Boris Godenouw. The Boston Phoenix remarked of that production that “the most exceptional music came from the pit. Concertmaster Robert Mealy played more music than anyone onstage or off, every measure of it with erudition and compelling energy.”
A keen scholar as well as a performer, Mr. Mealy has lectured and taught historical performance techniques at Columbia, Brown, Rutgers, Oberlin, and U.C. Berkeley. He was recently appointed Lecturer at Yale University, where he directs the Yale Collegium in a series of annual concerts at the Beinecke Library; his Collegium Players have also collaborated with Simon Carrington and the Yale Schola Cantorum in a number of concerts which have resulted in critically-acclaimed live recordings, including Biber's Vesperae Longiores, Bach's St. John Passion, and Bertali's Missa Resurrectionis. During the past ten years, he also directed the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra, which regularly collaborated with distinguished musicians like Christopher Hogwood, Ton Koopman, Andrew Parrott, and Bobby McFerrin. For his work with both institutions, he received Early Music America’s Thomas Binkley Award for outstanding teaching and scholarship. Mr. Mealy served for several years as the Hogwood Fellow of the Handel and Haydn Society, to advise on scholarship and performance, and he regularly teaches historical improvisation and technique at workshops across North America.
Recent projects include leading and directing the Phoenix Symphony, his third annual solo appearance at the prestigious Colorado Music Festival in Boulder, and serving as concertmaster and soloist in Jonathan Miller’s staged *Matthew Passion* at BAM.
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Klara Moricz
Ilya Poletaev
Specialization: early music performance.
Bio: Ilya Poletaev leads a multi-faceted career as a classically trained pianist as well as a performer on early keyboards. As a solo pianist, he has appeared with the Toronto and Hartford symphony orchestras; as a chamber musician, he has performed alongside such distinguished artists as Donald Weilerstein, Gary Hoffmann, and Boris Berman, and Susan Narucki. He has also recently appeared at several prestigious festivals, including Moab, Caramoor, Sarasota, Norfolk, Yellow Barn, Banff Festival of the Arts, the Orford Arts Center, and Stratford Summer Music Festival. As a harpsichordist, he has been the recent winner of the Southeastern Historical Society International harpsichord competition, and has been heard in such venues as Weill Hall in Carnegie Hall, the Pierpont Morgan library in New York City, the Amherst Early music festival, and the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments. As a continuo player, he has played under such conductors as Andrew Lawrence-King, Steven Stubbs, Simon Carrington, Graham O-Reilly, and Helmuth Rilling. He has also been the recipient of Early Music America scholarship.
Mr. Poletaev began his studies in Moscow at the age of 6, and continued in Israel,
where at age 13 he performed a piano concerto of his own composition. Since age 14 he resided in Canada. He holds a BM from University of Toronto, where his teachers included Marietta Orlov and Colin Tilney, and an MM and MMA from Yale, where he studied with Boris Berman. Currently, he is a candidate for the Yale DMA. Betweeen 2005 and 2007, Poletaev served on the faculty of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music as a Lecturer in Applied music.
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Ian Quinn
Specializations: music cognition; history of tonal theory; algebraic theory and analysis, especially neo-Riemannian and other transformational applications to harmony; minimalism and postminimalism; Ligeti.
Bio: Ian Quinn has degrees from Columbia University (B.A., 1993) and the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester (M.A., 1998; Ph.D., 2004). Before joining the Yale faculty, he held a postdoctoral fellowship in music theory at the University of Chicago (2002-03) and was Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Oregon (2003-04).
Recent courses include a survey of music cognition, an undergraduate seminar on minimalism and postminimalism in music, graduate classes on the analysis of post-tonal music and on the cognitive history of tonality, and a freshman seminar called "Math, Music, and Mind."
Central themes of Quinn's work are music cognition and the foundations of music-theoretic practice. His current work interrogates the historically resilient analogy between music and language, with a particular focus on harmonic syntax. In 2008-09 he will be a Residential Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford, where he will work on a book tentatively called Studies in the Cognitive History of Tonality: Musical Syntax in Theory and Practice. The book will examine selected harmony treatises from the last 400 years in search of both a historical understanding of harmonic cognition and a cognitive understanding of the history of music theory.
Quinn's work in mathematical music theory deals with the classification of the horizontal and vertical building blocks of music -- melodies and chords -- focusing on careful critique of the models mathematically-inclined music theorists have used in the last few decades. His theory of abstract (non-tonal) chord classification was published serially in Perspectives of New Music as “General Equal-Tempered Harmony,” which won Yale's Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication in 2008. This article completes the project Quinn began with his article "Listening to Similarity Relations," which won the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award in 2004. Related research in the mathematical modeling of voice leading, developed with collaborators Dmitri Tymoczko and Clifton Callender, will be published in Science in 2008.
A musician who has recorded works by Steve Reich with Alarm Will Sound (Canteloupe) and Ossia (Nonesuch), Quinn's interests extend also to modern and avant-garde music. Related scholarly writing projects include a study of the development since the late 1970s of Steve Reich’s harmonic language, and an essay on Ligeti’s early and late music that uses the evolution of a particular musical idée fixe as a springboard for a discussion of the composer’s idiosyncratic thoughts on form.
Quinn edits the Journal of Music Theory and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Mathematics and Music, which launched in 2007. He is on the executive board of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music, and is co-organizer (with Richard Cohn) of SMCM's second international conference, to be held at Yale in the summer of 2009.
Publications:
“Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces” (with Clifton Callender and Dmitri Tymoczko), Science, forthcoming.
“Minimal Challenges: Process Music and the Uses of Formalist Analysis,” Contemporary Music Review 25 (2006): 283-95.
“General Equal-Tempered Harmony,” Perspectives of New Music 44.2 (2006): 6-50 (Introduction and Part 1); Perspectives of New Music 45.1 (2007): 6-65 (Parts 2 and 3).
“Listening to Similarity Relations,” Perspectives of New Music 39 (2001): 108-58.
“The Combinatorial Model of Pitch Contour,” Music Perception 16 (1999): 439-56.
“Fuzzy Extensions to the Theory of Contour,” Music Theory Spectrum 19 (1997): 232-63.
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Ellen Rosand
Specializations: Italian music and poetry, Music of the Baroque, Venice, Italian opera, Handel, Opera criticism.
Bio: Vassar College (B.A.), Harvard University (M.A.), New York University (Ph.D.).
She was the recipient of fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, Rockefeller Foundation, and Guggenheim Foundation, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. Editor of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (1981-83), President of the American Musicological Society (1992-94), and Vice-President of the International Musicological Society (1997-2002), she taught at Rutgers University before coming to Yale as Professor of Music in 1992, where she chaired the department from 1993-98. Her undergraduate Introduction to Opera has turned several generations of Yale students into opera fanatics, and she has co-taught on both undergraduate and graduate levels with members of the Italian and Comparative Literature Departments. Her dissertation students have written on subjects ranging from the Italian madrigal (Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Guarini), 17 th-century opera, cantata, and motet (Atto Melani, Francesco Cavalli, Florentine Comic Opera, Music in Austria under Ferdinand II), and 18 th –century opera (on Tasso subjects, Arcadian opera, Handel, Scarlatti). She currently serves on the editorial boards of The Journal of Musicology, The Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and Cambridge Studies in Opera.
Bibliography
In addition to her books, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: the Creation of a Genre (1991) and Monteverdi’s Venetian Trilogy: the Late Operas (forthcoming), she edited Orfeo by Antonio Sartorio and Aurelio Aureli (Drammaturgia musicale veneta, vol 6, 1983), I sacri musicali affetti by Barbara Strozzi (1988), and the fourteen-volume Garland Library of the History of Western Music (1985). Her other publications include articles on Barbara Strozzi, Monteverdi, Cavalli, Vivaldi, Handel, and music in sixteenth-century Venice.
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Joshua Rosenblum
Specialization: music theatre composition.
Bio: Joshua Rosenblum received his B.A. in music summa cum laude from Yale College and his M.M. in Piano Performance from the Yale School of Music. He returns to Yale this fall for his second year teaching Composing for Musical Theater.
Rosenblum composed the score to the cult hit musical Fermat's Last Tango, which had a critically acclaimed Off-Broadway production at the York Theatre Company in 2000, and spawned both CD and DVD recordings. Other works for the theater include The Joy of Going Somewhere Definite (Atlantic Theater Company), Arabian Nights, and Einstein’s Dreams, based on the best-selling novel by Alan Lightman. He is also the composer and creator of Bush Is Bad, the smash Off-Broadway musical revue, which Variety called “a sensation.” In addition to the New York production, the show has enjoyed successful runs in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, as well as numerous special benefit performances around the country.
For the concert hall, Rosenblum has written pieces for trumpeter Philip Smith of the New York Philharmonic, flutist Kathleen Nester of the New Jersey Symphony, Mannes School of Music faculty trombonist Haim Avitsur, French hornist Eric Ruske, the Herrick Trio, and the ground-breaking string quartet Ethel, among many others. Recordings of his instrumental music include Impetuosities—Music of Joshua Rosenblum, and the forthcoming Sundry Notes, both available from Albany Records. Rosenblum has won awards from ASCAP and the Meet the Composer Foundation, and his music, including his prize-winning choral setting of Jabberwocky, is published by the Theodore Presser Co.
Also a conductor, Rosenblum has led the orchestras for thirteen Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. Other conducting credits include guest appearances with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and the American Repertory Ballet. He has also conducted world premiere productions for the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the B.A.M. Next Wave Festival, Playwrights Horizons, and Lincoln Center Theater, as well as the soundtracks to five major motion pictures.
As a music journalist, Rosenblum has contributed articles to Newsday and Stagebill, as well as over 300 CD and concert reviews for Opera News. He lives in New York City with his wife, singer and author Joanne Lessner, and their two children, Julian and Phoebe.
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Wendy Sharp
Specializations: chamber music performance, violin performance.
Bio: Wendy Sharp, award-winning violinist, performs frequently as a recitalist and a chamber musician. In demand as a teacher and chamber music coach, she is on the faculties of the Yale School of Music and California Summer Music, and maintains a private studio. At Yale, Ms. Sharp teaches Music 221-The Performance of Chamber Music, coordinates the School of Music Chamber Music program and has a studio of undergraduate violinists. For nearly a decade, Ms. Sharp was the first violinist of the Franciscan String Quartet. As a member of the Quartet, she toured the USA, Canada, Europe and Japan, and was honored with many awards including first prize in the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the Press and City of Evian Prizes at the Evian International String Quartet Competition. A native of the San Francisco Bay area, she attended Yale University, graduating summa cum laude with Distinction in Music and received her Master of Music degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Ms. Sharp has served on the faculties of Mannes College, Dartmouth College, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Choate Rosemary Hall, and has participated in the Aspen, Tanglewood, Chamber Music West, Norfolk, and Music Academy of the West festivals.
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Toshiyuki Shimada
Specialization: conducting, orchestral performance.
Bio: Toshiyuki Shimada has been Music Director and Conductor of the Portland Symphony Orchestra, Portland, Maine, USA, since 1986, andhe has just been appointed as Music Director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, New Haven, Connecticut, as of July, 2005. His is also Music Director and Chief Creative Officer of the Trinity Music Partners, LLC, in New York, Rome and Los Angeles, which hold the worldwide rights to the Vatican Library Music Collection,and he is Principal Conductor of the Vienna Modern Masters, in Vienna, Austria.Prior to Portland, he was Associate Conductor of the Houston Symphony Orchestra for six years beginning in 1981.
In addition to these activities, he was Music Director of the Nassau Symphony Orchestra, Music Director of the Cambiata Soloists, a contemporary music ensemble in Houston, Music Director of the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra at Rice University, and Music Director of the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra in Los Angeles from 1978-81.
Maestro Shimada has been frequent guest conductor of the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra in Czech Republic, since 1998; the Slovak Philharmonic in Slovakia; Tonkuenstler Orchestra in Austria; Orchestre National de Lille, in France; the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in the UK, in the Edinburgh Festival; and Prague Chamber Orchestra to name a few.
He has also guest conducted Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, the San Jose Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Pacific Symphony Orchestra, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and many other US and Canadian orchestras.
Maestro Shimada was fortunate to study with many distinguished conductors of the past and the present such as Leonard Bernstein, Herbert von Karajan, Herbert Blomstedt, Hans Swarovsky, Sergiu Comissiona, David Whitwell and Michael Tilson Thomas.
He was a finalist in the 1979 Herbert von Karajan conducting competition in Berlin, and a Fellow Conductor in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, in 1983.
He has received many awards and honors such as Ariel Musician of the Year from the Ariel Records, ASCAP award, Portland Fire Department's Merit Award, the Maine Publicity Bureau Cultural Award, the Italian Heritage Society Cultural Award, Toshiyuki Shimada Day in Houston, TX, etc.
Maestro Shimada records with the Vienna Modern Masters label, and with the Moravian Philharmonic, and currently he has twelve Compact Discs: VMM 3043, 3044, 3047, 3048, 3049, 3050, 3052, 3053, 3057, 4001, 4002 and 4004. Two more Compact Discs will be released in the 2004-05 season. He also records with the Capstone Records: CPS-8731 , the Querstand-VKJK (Germany) and the Albany Records: Troy646. In late 2005, he will begin a seriesof recording projects for the Trinity Music Partners, collaborating with Prague Chamber Orchestra and Prague Chamber Choir.
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Michael Veal
Specializations: Ethnomusicology (African and Caribbean Music), African-American Music (Jazz and Popular Music) .
Bio:
B.M. Berklee College of Music (Jazz Composition and Arranging); 1986
M.A. Wesleyan University (Ethnomusicology); 1994
Ph.D Wesleyan University (Ethnomusicology); 2001
Michael Veal has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1998. Before coming to Yale, he taught at Mount Holyoke College (1996 – 1998) and New York University (1997-1998). His work has addressed topics of biography, history, analysis, and interpretation in various musics of Africa and the African diaspora. His socio-contextual biography of the late Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti uses the life of one of the most influential African musicians of the post-WWII era to explore themes of African post-coloniality, musical and cultural interchange between cultures of Africa and the African diaspora, and the political uses of music in Africa. His current work-in-progress on Jamaican dub music examines the ways in which the studio-based innovations of Jamaican recording engineers during the 1970s created a sonic space for the emergence of a distinctly post-colonial Jamaican culture locally, while they worked to transform the structure and concept of the post-WWII popular song globally.
Undergraduate courses have included: Music Cultures of the World; Traditional and Contemporary Musics of Sub-Saharan Africa; Jazz in Transition - The 1960s; Funk – The Re-Africanization of the American Popular Song Form; and Theory and Practice of Ethnomusicology. Graduate courses have included: Music in Africa and Theory and Practice of Ethnomusicology. Courses in development include Music of the Caribbean and Popular Music: The Experimental Tradition.
Selected Publications:
Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon (Temple University Press, 2000)
Dub: Songscape, Studio Craft, Science Fiction, and the Shattering of Song Form in Jamaican Reggae (Wesleyan University Press, 2007)
On the Corner: Miles Davis and the Architects of Electric Jazz in Musical Perspective, 1968 – 1975 (edited volume, in progress)
“Miles Davis and the Unfinished Project of Electric Jazz” Raritan, Summer 2002
“African Music and African-American Audiences” New York Times, 17 July 2001
Guest Editor, Glendora Review (Lagos, Nigeria) Music Issue, Summer 2004
Grants/Awards/Fellowships:
Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship (Yale University, 2003 – 2004)
Griswold Faculty Travel Fellowship (Yale University, 2000)
Five College Dissertation Fellowship (Mount Holyoke College, 1996 –1997)
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Sarah Weiss
Specializations: Southeast and East Asian performance; hybridity and postcoloniality; aesthetics; gender studies; theater studies; modal musics and improvisation.
Bio: Sarah Weiss holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from University of Rochester/Eastman School of Music and a Ph.D. in Musicology from New York University. She has taught in the Departments of Music at the University of Sydney and the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. She was a Visiting Professor in the Department of Music at Harvard University, 2004-05. Sarah Weiss began her appointment in the Department of Music at Yale University in July of 2005.
Working primarily with Asian performing arts, Weiss has addressed issues of gender, aesthetics, postcoloniality, and hybridity in both her writing and teaching. Her book, Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender and the Music of Wayang in Central Java was published in 2006 by KITLV Press in Leiden. Weiss is currently working on a comparative project exploring women and performance across several of the world’s major religions. In 2006 she engaged in fieldwork in Java, Bali and Sulawesi where she investigated composer Supanggah’s music and the reception of Robert Wilson’s international touring production I La Galigo. Other on-going work includes: a study of rasa in Indonesia and India; an examination of Javanese wayang kulit as ritual in transition; and a long-term project on gender representation in Asian music-theatre genres. Weiss has begun a short-term project on affinity groups and choral communities, engaging members of her Fall 2007 graduate seminar, entitled “Singing Community” (MUSI 712), in fieldwork with the dynamic Yale undergraduate a cappella ensembles.
In Spring 2007 Weiss began rehearsing with members of Yale’s new Javanese ensemble, Gamelan Suprabanggo. The group will perform an inaugural concert on 26 January 2008 in Battell Chapel. Over the next five years Weiss plans to expand Asian performance opportunities for students at Yale. Sarah Weiss is a member of both the Council for Southeast Asia Studies and collaboratees with the South Asian Council. She is also an active member on the Council of the Women’s Faculty Forum and the Friends of Music at Yale.
Recent Courses: Gongs and Punk: The Sounds of Contemporary Southeast Asia; Theater and Dance in Contemporary Asia; Permeable Boundaries: Contemplating Musical Hybridity; Music Cultures of the World; Singing Community: A Cappella at Yale and the Practice of Fieldwork; Gendering Musical Performance; World Music Theories, Practice, and Aesthetics; and Javanese Gamelan in Context: History, Literature, Theory and Performance. With others from the greater Yale community, students in this last seminar perform as Gamelan Suprabanggo.
Recent publications:
(in press) Permeable Boundaries: Hybridity, Music, and the Reception of Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo. Ethnomusicology
(in press) Gender and Gender Redux: Rethinking Binaries and the Aesthetics of Old-Style Javanese Wayang. Woman and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture.
(in press) Innovation and Renewal: Javanese Wayang Kulit Without the Shadows. For an edited collection tentatively entitled, Sacred Musics in Transition edited by Philip Bohlman and Jeffers Englhardt. Oxford University Press.
2007 Literature and Art: World Music (Overview). In Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, vol 5, 188-95.
2007 Review Essay–Getting Beyond Java: New Studies in Indonesian Music. Ethnomusicology 51/1: 131-42.
2006 Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender and the Music of Wayang in Central Java. Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde monograph series, vol. 237. Leiden: KITLV Press (CD-ROM included).
2006 Instructor’s Guide. Soundscapes, 2 nd edition, (Shelemay). WW Norton.
2003 Thoughts on the Female Style. CD notes essay for The Meditative Gender. Produced by John Noise Manis, Yantra Productions, Ivrea, Italy.
2003 Kothong Nanging Kebak Empty Yet Full: Some Thoughts on Embodiment and Aesthetics in Central Javanese Performance. Asian Music 34: 21-49.
Recent Professional Activities
Program Committee, 2008 Society of Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting
Editor, Audio and Visual Recordings Reviews for Asian Music; Member of the Board, Society for Asian Music, 2006-present
Member, Inaugural Editorial Board, The Choral Scholar, online journal of the National Collegiate Choral Organization, 2007-present
Member, Indonesian and East Timor Studies Committee of the Association for Asian Studies, 2007-present
Residency at Arizona State University, School of Music and Southeast Asian Studies Program, 27 February-2 March, 2007.
For complete CV: click here.
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Erin Westmaas
Craig Wright
Specialization: music history.
Bio: Studied piano and music history at the Eastman School of Music (1962-1966) and went on to earn an M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology at Harvard (1966-1972). While at Harvard he attended numerous Red Sox games, played chess with pianist Robert Levin, and, as a teaching assistant, taught composer John Adams—all survived the experience. After a pleasant year teaching at the University of Kentucky in Lexington (1972-1973), Wright moved to Yale, serving as chair of the Department of Music from 1986-1992 and becoming the Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music in 2006. At the undergraduate level he teaches a basic music appreciation course (one of Yale’s largest) and the music history course required of majors in medieval and Renaissance music. Similarly, his graduate courses tend to concentrate on early music, specifically on composers diverse as Leoninus, Dufay, Josquin, and Bach, as well as early chant and liturgy. Recently, he has changed the focus of his professional research from early music to that of Mozart.
Wright’s writing in music history began with a rigorously primary-source approach—the first-hand study in situ of the music manuscripts and archival documents of Western Europe as they pertain to early music. In the course of time he has expanded his view to a broadly interdisciplinary one, as the title of his most recent book suggests: The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology and Music. His interests have also extended chronologically, and his publications now range from studies of the music of Leoninus (died ca. 1200) to Bach. He is one of the few individuals to be awarded the Dent medal (RMA), the Einstein prize (AMS), and the Kinkeldey award (AMS). He also has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship. In 2004 Wright was awarded the honorary degree Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Chicago. He especially enjoys playing tennis and traveling around Europe.
Books:
Music at the Court of Burgundy, 1364-1419: A Documentary History (Institute of Mediaeval Music, Ltd., Henryville, Ottawa, Binningen, 1979), 271 pp.
Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500-1550 (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 400 pp.
Listening to Music (West Publications, St. Paul, 1992), 419 pp; 2nd edition (West Publications, St. Paul, 1996), 435 pp; 3 rd edition (Wadsworth, 2000), 451 pp.; 5th edition (Wadsworth, 2007), 451 pp.
The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology and Music (Harvard University Press, Cambrdge, MA, 2001, paperback edition, 2004), 351 pp.
Music in Western Civilization (Wadsworth-Schirmer, to appear 2006)
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