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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Richard Cohn
Specialization: music theory.
Bio: Richard Cohn is Battell Professor of Music Theory at Yale University. His work on chromatic harmony has been the topic of a series of summer seminars convened by the late John Clough, and has been developed in about a dozen doctoral dissertations, at Chicago, Indiana, Yale, Harvard, and SUNY-Buffalo. His recently completed Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad's Second Nature is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. In preparation is a general model of meter with applications for European, African, and African-diasporic music, and a co-edited collection on David Lewin's phenomenological writings. His articles have twice earned the Society for Music Theory's Outstanding Publication Award. Cohn edits Oxford Studies in Music Theory.
Selected Publications:
Audacious Euphony: Chromatic Harmony and the Triad's Second Nature, forthcoming Oxford University Press.
"Tonal Pitch Space and the (neo-) Riemannian Tonnetz," in Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding, ed., forthcoming Oxford University Press, 2011.
"Pitch-Time Analogies and Transformations in Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion," in Music Theory and Mathematics: Chords, Collections, Transformations, ed Jack Douthett et. al., University of Rochester Press (2008).
"Hexatonic Poles and the Uncanny in Parsifal." Opera Quarterly 22.2 (2006), 230.
“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: relating analysis to performance, piano performance (special foci on the music of Schoenberg, Schumann and Beethoven), analysis of post-tonal music, ear training, chamber music coaching, model composition.
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. In spring, 2008, he served on the Yale/PkU program in Beijing, teaching both at Beijing University and the Central Conservatory of Music. Mr.
Friedmann has published articles in several music theory 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 1986.
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
Liner notes for Colorado Qts. recording of Beethoven op. 18 Recital Collaborations with violinist Yeon-su Kim in Gettysburg College, Hong Kong's Academy of Performing Arts and most recently in NYC's Zankel Hall Public addresses:
1) Pre-concert talks for the Tokyo Quartet's concerts at NYC's 92nd Street Y
2) Chinese University of Hong Kong-"Purposes of Analysis-Schoenberg's op. 23
Forthcoming Jan, 2011-Cornell University, Performance and lecture surrounding Schoenberg's Five Piano Pieces, op. 23
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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James Hepokoski
Specializations: History and analysis of European art music from ca. 1750 to 1950; historical contexts, musical structure, and hermeneutics (interpretations of textual meaning); symphonic and chamber works from Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven through Debussy, Mahler, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss; musical form, content, and deformation theory; conceptions of musical modernism, ca. 1880‑1920; music, ideology, and nationalism; twentieth-century music traditions in the United States (including blues and commercial song, 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, analysis, and 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." At the undergraduate level he teaches two music history survey courses required of music majors (1600-1800 and 1800-1960), along with specialized courses in Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, American music, symphonic nationalism and cultural identity, and other topics. His graduate-level seminars have dealt with a wide range of subjects. Among them: Late Beethoven; Sonata Theory; American Music Genres in the Twentieth Century (Ives, 1920s-30s blues, popular song and Cole Porter, all of these drawing on 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
Music, Structure, Thought: Selected Essays. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009.
Musical Form, Form & Formenlehre: Three Methodological Reflections. Co‑authored with William E. Caplin and James Webster (individual essays and mutual responses). Ed. Pieter Bergé. Leuven, Belgium: University Press Leuven, 2009.
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. Awarded the Wallace Berry Prize (best book) from the Society for Music Theory, 2008.
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 book on Verdian staging was the first volume of a series of “production-book” source-reprints—original staging manuals—undertaken by G. Ricordi & C.]
Giuseppe Verdi: Otello. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Giuseppe Verdi: Falstaff . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Selected Articles
“Approaching the First Movement of Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata through Sonata Theory.” In Pieter Berge, Jeroen D'hoe, and William E. Caplin, eds., Beethoven's Tempest Sonata. Perspectives of Analysis and Performance (Analysis in Context. Leuven Studies in Musicology, Vol. 2). Leuven, Belgium, and Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2009.
"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.
"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.
"The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-Musicological Sources." 19th-Century Music 14 (1991), 221-46.
Brian Kane
Specializations: music theory; jazz; music and philosophy (with an emphasis on critical theory and phenomenology); aesthetic theory; avant-garde composition and electronic music since 1945; sound studies and new media; Pierre Schaeffer and acousmatic theory; indeterminate music and circuit bending; noise.
Bio: Brian Kane holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. in Philosophy, 1996; Ph.D. in Music, 2006). Prior to joining the faculty at Yale, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University (2006-2008).
His scholarly work is interdisciplinary, in the margins between music theory, composition and philosophy. Working primarily with 20th century repertoir, Kane's emphasis is on questions of sound and signification, . Central themes in his research are: music and sound art, histories and theories of listening, phenomenology, improvisation, music and subjectivity, technology, conceptualizations of sound and music in literature and philosophy, and theories of the voice.
Some of these themes are interwoven in Kane’s recent work on acousmatic sound. Acousmatic refers to the separation of audition from all other sensory modalities, and is often deployed in phenomenological contexts in order to disclose the “essence” of listening. In particular, Kane is currently involved in a large project that rethinks the question of acousmatic sound outside of its phenomenological context and demonstrates its centrality to current discourses on musical and non-musical forms of listening. This also involves reconstructing the philosophical and material history of acousmatic sound from its supposed origins in the Pythagorean school, through the rise of mechanically reproduced sound and electronic composition, to current discourses on the senses and contemporary compositional practices.
Parts of this project were published in Organised Sound (“L’objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction”), and presented at the University of California, Berkeley (“The Logic of Listening”) at the Sorbonne ("L’acousmatique mythique: Reconsidering the Pythagorean Veil”), New York University ("Listening to Nancy, Hearing Almost Nothing"), and University of Wisconsin, Madison ("Listening to "The Burrow": Kafka and Acousmatic Sound").
Professionally, Kane is co-chair of the Society for Music Theory's Music and Philosophy Interest Group, and a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal nonsite.org, forthcoming in 2011. Musically, he is a composer with an oeuvre of works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, vocalists, solo instruments, electronic music (fixed media and live), sound installations and more. He has received performances around the United States and in Europe. In addition, Kane is also a dedicated jazz guitarist.
Selected Publications:
Editor, special issue of The Journal of Music Theory on Stanley Cavell and "Music Discomposed," forthcoming.
"Excavating Lewin's 'Phenomenology'," Music Theory Spectrum, forthcoming.
"Acousmatic Fabrications: Les Paul and the Les Paulverizer," Journal of Visual Culture, forthcoming.
"Eight Theses on Sound and Transcendence," catalog for the exhibition Non-Cochlear Sound (2010).
“Review Essay: Peter Szendy, Listen: a history of our ears,” Current Musicology 86 (2008): 145-156.
“Aspect and Ascription in the Music of Mathias Spahlinger,” Contemporary Music Review 27:6 (2008): 595-609.
“Schaeffer: une pensée à l’état de vestiges.” In Pierre Schaeffer: Portraits Polychromes 13, ed. Evelyne Gayou. Paris: INA, 2008: 13-19.
“Review Essay: Andy Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music.” Current Musicology 85 (2008): 137-145.
“L’objet Sonore Maintenant: Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Objects and the Phenomenological Reduction,” Organised Sound 12.1 (2007): 15–24.
“The Cost of Affordance. On Tia DeNora’s After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology,” qui parle 15.1 (2004): 169-174.
“The Elusive ‘Elementary Atom of Music,’” qui parle 14.2 (2004): 117-143.
Links: Brian Kane’s website
Michael Klingbeil
Specializations: music composition, music technology.
Bio: Michael Klingbeil is a composer who is active in contemporary concert music, electroacoustic music, and computer music research. He completed his formal training at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, and Columbia University. Principal teachers include 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 Manhattan Sinfonietta, Columbia Composers, the U of I New Music Ensemble, Orchestre Lyrique de Région Avignon-Provence, the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Argento Chamber Ensemble. He is the first prize winner in the 2009 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award Competition. Additional honors and awards have come from the Concours Internationaux de Bourges, The MacDowell Colony, First Music, the Concorso Internazionale “Luigi Russolo,” and ASCAP. His music 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 active in computer music in both the academic and commercial fields and has developed novel software for audio analysis and re-synthesis.
For more information please visit http://www.klingbeil.com
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Gundula Kreuzer
Specializations: History and theory of opera (particularly of the nineteenth century), with a special focus on staging and mediality; reception studies; music historiography; music and politics; German and European cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Verdi; Wagner.
Bio: Gundula Kreuzer studied musicology, philosophy, and modern history at the Universities of Münster (Westphalia) and Oxford, where she earned 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 a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, such as social, cultural, and political history as well as theories of multimedia. Her book Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in August 2010) 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. She is currently working on a book project that merges theoretical and historical concerns regarding opera's multi-medial nature. Preliminarily entitled "Wagner-Dampf: Opera, Steam, Technology," the book will use the introduction of water vapor (or fog effects) in the Munich an Bayreuth premieres of Der Ring des Nibelungen (1869-76) as a lens on the materiality and ephemerality of operatic staging, on various nineteenth-century attempts to "fix" an opera's production side, as well as on their complex legacies. In other recent work Kreuzer has challenged the centrality of the "Beethoven paradigm" in Germanic music historiography; argued that authorial control became both a major marketing factor and the chief motivation for the revamping of touring productions in the late nineteenth century; discussed the impact of translations on the shifting relations between words, sound, and image in performance; and questioned current scholarly approaches to the much-debated phenomenon of "Regietheater." She has contributed, among many other encyclopedias, to Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, and her critical edition of Verdi's instrumental chamber music for The Works of Giuseppe Verdi: Series V is forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press and Ricordi in the fall of 2010. In Germany she also gained experience as a freelance music critic and radio presenter. From 2006 to 2010 she served as Associate and Reviews Editor of The Opera Quarterly . In April 2010 she co-organized an international conference "Beyond Opera: Staging Theatricality" that took place jointly at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale and at Stony Brook University.
At Yale, Kreuzer's undergraduate courses include Introduction to the History of Western Music, 1800 to the Present; Opera; Listening in Paris; Performance: History and Theory; and The Operas of Verdi. On the graduate level her seminar topics include Reception History; Music in Nazi Germany; Opera and/as Multimedia; and Wagner in and on Production. She has also been teaching the Prospectus Seminar and Dissertation Colloquium, and is Director of Graduate Studies for the year 2010-11.
Among other grants and awards, Kreuzer has held fellowships from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (1994-99, 2001-03), 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 (Paul A. Pisk Prize, 2000; Alfred Einstein Award, 2006) and the Royal Musical Association (Jerome Roche Prize, 2006). In 2010-11 she will be a Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale.
Selected Publications:
Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; series New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism).
The Works of Giuseppe Verdi, Series V: Instrumental Chamber Music, ed. Gundula Kreuzer (string quartet in E minor; Romance sans paroles, album leaf for Florimo; Valzer) (Chicago and Milan: The University of Chicago Press and Ricordi, 2010).
"Heilige Trias, Stildualismus, Beethoven: Limits of nineteenth-century Germanic music historiography," in The Age of Rossini and Beethoven, eds. Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
"Wagnerdampf: Steam in Der Ring des Nibelungen and Operatic Production," forthcoming in a special issue "Operatic Transitions" for The Opera Quarterly, co-guest-edited by Gundula Kreuzer and Clemens Risi.
"Dahlhaus, Rossini und die Oper des 19. Jahrhundert," in Carl Dahlhaus und die Musikwissenschaft: Werk, Wirkung, Aktualität, eds. Hermann Danuser and Tobias Plebuch (Schliengen: Edition Argus, in press).
"Authentizität, Visualisierung, Bewahrung: Das reisende 'Wagner-Theater' und die Konservierbarkeit von Inszenierungen," in Angst vor der Zerstörung. Der Meister Künste zwischen Archiv und Erneuerung, eds. Robert Sollich, Clemens Risi, Sebastian Reus and Stephan Jöris (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2008), 139-60 (Recherchen 52).
"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.
"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 been featured on stages in Australia, New Zealand, England, Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Israel, Japan and the United States and has performed as a soloist with the major symphony orchestras in her home country. After being named the James Fairfax Sydney Symphony Orchestra Young Artist she made her debut with the Sydney Symphony at fifteen and went on to win Australia’s most prestigious musical award: ‘The Symphony Australia Young Performer of the Year (Strings)’. She has been awarded prizes at the Kloster Schöntal International Violin Competition, Germany, Gisborne International Music Competition, New Zealand, and an Honorary Diploma at the 7th Wieniawski and Lipinski International Competition, Poland.
As a founding member and first violinist of the Alianza String Quartet, Ms Kwok has given debut performances at the Pacific Music festival, Japan, Aldeburgh festival, UK, Aix-en-Provence festival, France, and the French Academy in Rome. The Alianza quartet is the Grand Prize winner of the Plowman Chamber Music Competition 2007 and the First Prize winner of the Chamber Music Foundation of New England International Chamber Music Ensemble Competition 2008. From 2006 to 2008 the ASQ were in residence at the Yale School of Music and were closely mentored by the Tokyo String Quartet. In October 2007, the Alianza quartet made their Carnegie Hall debut to critical acclaim and received the following review from the New York Times: “the Alianza players are musical, well trained and have an unusually elegant sound – they boil over with an edge-of-the-seat eagerness”. With the ASQ, Ms. Kwok has been featured on concert series at the Brooklyn Friends of Chamber Music, NY, Danbury Concert Association, CT, Cosmos Club, Washington DC, Horowitz Piano series, CT, Redbank Chamber Music Series, NJ, to name a few, and on the international stages of Carnegie Hall’s Weill and Zankel recital halls, Merkin Concert Hall and Juilliard’s Paul Recital Hall in NY, Sapporo’s Kitara Hall and the Hakodate Arts Hall, Japan, the Villa Medici, Rome, and the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, Aix-en- Provence, France.
As a soloist and collaborator, Ms. Kwok has been featured throughout the United States on series such as the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Thayer Academy Winter Series, Hebron Academy and Temple Emanuel Chamber Series, Hammond Performing Arts Series and on WGBH public radio with pianist, Jian Liu, and her husband, cellist, Alexandre Lecarme. This season she performed on the Concert des Lauréats de l’Académie de Lausanne, Switzerland and was nationally broadcast by Suisse Romande radio. Ms. Kwok has performed in concert with Pinchas Zukerman, Amanda Forsyth, Boris Berman and members of the Tokyo String Quartet and has worked in master-classes with the late Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Midori, Pierre Amoyal and Bruno Canino and members of the Takacs, Guarneri and Julliard String Quartets.
Passionate about new music, Ms. Kwok has debuted works by Ezra Laderman, Jerome Combier and worked closely with Martin Bresnick and Michael Jarrell. The Alianza Quartet’s recording for Albany records of the three last quartets of Ezra Laderman has just been released. Ms. Kwok is also sought after as an educator, having given master-classes and pre-concert talks at the Rockport Festival, Hammond Performing Arts series, Wellesley College, and Central Connecticut State University. Recently, she completed a series of solo recordings on instruments in the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments.
Ms. Kwok received both the Doctoral and Masters of Musical Arts degrees from the Yale School of Music as a student of Syoko Aki. She currently serves on the faculty of the Yale Department of Music and is the Coordinator for the Undergraduate Lessons Program at the Yale School of Music.
Richard Lalli
Specializations: vocal performance, opera, early music, music theatre.
Bio:Richard Lalli, Professor of Music (Adjunct), taught in the Yale School of Music from 1982 until 1999; he then joined the faculty of the Department of Music. From 2001 until 2006 he was Music Director of the Yale Collegium Musicum and from 2007 until 2010 he was Artistic Director of the Yale Baroque Opera Project. Mr. Lalli also developed the Shen Musical Theater Curriculum. In March of 2008, he was designated the eleventh Master of Jonathan Edwards College, a position he relinquished because of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Mr. Lalli has performed around the world as a singer and pianist. Highlights include solo recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall and other European venues, and performances of Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon with Peter Serkin and the Brentano String Quartet. In 2007 he appeared with Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Folger Consort. Lalli is a champion of new music, having premiered works of Pulizer Prize recipients Ned Rorem and Lewis Spratlan. With pianist Gary Chapman, Lalli has recorded four discs of popular songs; their recording accompanies a Yale University Press publication, Listening to Classical American Popular Songs, by Allen Forte.
In 2006 Mr. Lalli was awarded the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities at Yale University. His recording of Yehudi Wyner's The Mirror was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2005. In 2010 he was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award by the Yale School of Music.
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, following a long-standing interest in the discipline of rhetoric, he contributed the article "Music and Rhetoric" to The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen. Another long-term interest is the music of Shostakovich, about which he has one essay in print and two forthcoming (see bibliography). In the past few years he has begun again to address aspects of chromaticism in tonal music: at the Sixth Annual Mannes Institute for Music Theory of 2006, which he co-directed at Yale with colleague Dan Harrison; in an essay (2007) on Elgar's use of chromaticism; in a talk, "'There Is Sweet Music': Thoughts on Tonality, 2008," at the Tonality in Perspective Conference at King's College London, in March of 2008; and in an upcoming seminar at Yale (spring 2009) on Wagner's Tristan.
As a practical musician, he is a choral director and organist, serving as Director of Music ad the First Presbyterian Church of New Haven since 1999.
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.
"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.
"Isolde's Transfiguration in Words and Music." In Engaging Music, ed. Deborah Stein. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004,
"The Anatomy of a Gesture: From Davidovsky to Chopin and Back." In Approaches to Musical Meaning, ed. Byron Almén and Edward Pearsall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006, 11-40.
"Elgar and the Theory of Chromaticism." In Elgar Studies, ed. Julian Rushton and J.P.E. Harper-Scott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007,
"Dmitri Shostakovich: The String Quartets." in Intimate Voices: The String Quartet in the Twentieth Century. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, forthcoming 2009.
"Analysis and Performance: A Counterexample?" Dutch Journal of Music Theory, forthcoming 2009.
"Shostakovich and the Politics of D Minor, 1931-1949." In Shostakovich Studies 2, ed. Pauline Fairclough. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2009.
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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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Ève Poudrier
Specialization: music theory; theories of rhythm and meter, with a special emphasis on polymeter and issues of perception and cognition; recent chamber music of Elliott Carter. Other research interests include music cognition research focusing on contemporary music and Schenkerian analysis.
Bio: I completed my doctoral studies in music theory at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). My Ph.D. dissertation "Toward a General Theory of Polymeter: Polymetric Potential and Realization in Elliott Carter's Solo and Chamber Instrumental Works After 1980" presented a conceptual framework for the analysis of polymetric structures and explored issues of performance and perception. During my studies at The Graduate Center, I also received an Elebash Dissertation Award to conduct research on music in New York as well as two grants from the Graduate Research Grants Program, the first one of which funded a listening experiment that used a polymetric texture from Carter's 90+ for piano (1994). My research on Carter's music included sketches studies at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland as well as a series of interviews with expert performers in New York.
Since coming to Yale in 2008, I have taught courses on the music of Elliott Carter, rhythm in twentieth-century music, the cognition of rhythm, and Schenkerian analysis. I have also collaborated with Bruno Repp at Haskins Laboratories on a series of experiments aimed at tackling issues in the perception of polymeter, in particular how highly trained musicians track the competing beats in a polymetric structure. I am also one of the co-founders of the Northeast Music Cognition Group (NEMCOG), a group created to facilitate interaction among researchers and students interested in all areas of music cognition, to discuss research in the field, and to identify topics of joint interest and areas for potential collaboration. Upcoming projects include research on polymeter in contemporary musical practices and further studies in the perception and cognition of complex rhythmic structures, in particular questions pertaining to expertise and attention.
I also hold a B.A./M.A. in music (piano/composition) from Hunter College of CUNY, where I subsequently served on the music theory faculty, as well as a Diplôme d'Études Collégiales in classical music (piano performance) from the Collège Lionel-Groulx (Québec). In my spare time, I enjoy hiking, making soup, and performing French cabaret songs.
Selected Publications & Conference Presentations:
“Le potentiel polymétrique et sa réalisation dans l'œuvre de Carter : Ébauche d'une approche analytique multivalente.” In Hommage à Elliott Carter. Ed. Max Noubel. Le Vallier, France: Editions Delatour, [forthcoming].
Poudrier, Ève and Bruno H. Repp. “Can Musicians Track Two Different Meters Simultaneously?” Paper read at the Auditory Perception, Cognition, and Action Meeting (APCAM), St. Louis (MO), 18 November 2010.
“Tracking the Beat in Carter.” Poster presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC11), University of Washington, Seattle (WA), 26 August 2010.
“Polymeter as Perceptual Paradox: Tracking the Beat in Carter.” Paper read at the Symposium of Research in Music Theory: “This is your Brain on Music Theory,” Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, 27 February 2010.
Review ofElliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents. By Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Paul Sacher Foundation and Boydell Press, 2008.) In Journal of the Society for American Music (2010) Volume 4, Number 1. Pp. 104–110.
“Local Polymetric Structures in Elliott Carter's 90+ for Piano (1994)." In Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music. Ed. Björn Heile. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. 205-233.
"Vincent d'Indy's Theory of Rhythm in the Cours de composition musicale (1902-1950): Sources, Reception, and Legacy." Paper read at the American Musicological Society (AMS) and Society for Music Theory (SMT) Joint Conference, Nashville, November 7, 2008.
“Polymetric Potential and Realization: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Polymeter." Paper read at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) Conference, Concordia University, Montreal (Canada), August 1, 2007.
“A Context-Sensitive Approach to the Perception of Polymeter: A Case Study." Paper read at the Don Wright Faculty of Music Graduate Student Symposium, University of Western Ontario, London (Canada), May 6, 2007.
“The Interaction of Foreground and Middleground Polyrhythms in the Music of Carter." Paper read at the Fourth Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music (ICTCM), University of Sussex, Brighton (England), August 25, 2005.
Ian Quinn
Specializations: music cognition; computational modeling; history of tonal theory; algebraic theory and analysis, especially neo-Riemannian and other transformational applications to harmony; American folk hymnody; 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 taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Oregon. In 2008-09 he was a Residential Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford.
Quinn regularly teaches courses in music cognition, computational modeling, and Sacred Harp singing. Other courses include 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 applications of computational linguistics to models of harmonic syntax and to the problem of key-finding. His earlier 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” and won the Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory in 2009. This article completes the project Quinn began with his article "Listening to Similarity Relations," which won SMT's Emerging Scholar Award in 2004. Related research in the mathematical modeling of voice leading, developed with collaborators Dmitri Tymoczko and Clifton Callender, was 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 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 was co-organizer (with Richard Cohn) of SMCM's second international conference, which was held at Yale in the summer of 2009. He serves on the executive committee of the Northeast Music Cognition Group (NEMCOG), which meets several times per year in New York, New Haven, and Boston. He also organizes the Yale-New Haven Regular Singing (YNHRS), a weekly shape-note singing group.
Selected Publications:
“On Woolhouse's Interval-Cycle Proximity Hypothesis.” Music Theory Spectrum 32 (2010): 172–79.
“Are Pitch-Class Profiles Really ‘Key For Key’?” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 7 (2010).
“Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces” (with Clifton Callender and Dmitri Tymoczko), Science 320 (2008): 346–48.
“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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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, conductor, joined the Yale faculty in 2005 as music director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, and as associate professor of conducting at Yale School of Music and Department of Music. He is also music director of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, music director, Music Director of the Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes and principal conductor of the Vienna Modern Masters, in Vienna, Austria. He was music director of the Portland (Maine) Symphony Orchestra from 1986-2005, and now serves as its Laureate Conductor. Prior to his post in Portland, he was associate conductor of the Houston Symphony Orchestra, he served as music director of the Nassau Symphony Orchestra, and of the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra at Rice University. Maestro Shimada has been frequent guest conductor of the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra, and the recent engagements include Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra; Orquesta Filharmonico de Jalisco in Guadalajara, Mexico, the Slovak Philharmonic; Tonkünstler Orchestra in Austria; Orchestre National de Lille; the Royal Scottish National Orchestra; and Prague Chamber Orchestra, to name a few. He has also been guest conductor with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra, Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, the San Jose Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Pacific Symphony Orchestra, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and many other U.S. and Canadian orchestras. He has also conducted All State High School Honor Orchestra in California, Maine, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut, as well as conducting the United States Air Force Band and Coast Guard Band. Maestro Shimada has studied with such distinguished conductors 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 in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute in 1983. He has collaborated distinguished artists such as Itzhak Perlman, Andre Watts, Emanual Ax, Yefim Bronfman, Idil Biret, Janos Starker, Jashua Bell, Hilary Hahn, Nadjia Salerno-Sonnenberg, Cho-Liang Lin, James Galway, and Doc Severinsen. He is a adjudicator of the National Orchestra Honor Project. Maestro Shimada records with the Naxos, the Vienna Modern Masters, the Capstone, the Albany, and the Querstand. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Maine College of Art.
www.yalesymphony.org
www.toshiyukishimada.com
www.williamreinert.com
www.myspace.com/toshishimada
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). Veal’s work has typically addressed topics within the musical sphere of Africa and the African diaspora. His 2000 biography of the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (Fela: The Life & Times of an African Musical Icon) uses the life and music 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 documentation of “Afrobeat” will continue with the forthcoming as-told-to autobiography Tony Allen: Master Drummer of Afrobeat. His 2007 study of Jamaican dub music (Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae) examines the ways in which the studio-based innovations of Jamaican recording engineers during the 1970s transformed the structure and concept of the post-WWII popular song, as well as the theme of how sound technology can be used to articulate themes of spirituality, history and politics. His forthcoming book Technotopia 1969: Miles Davis at the Crossroads surveys an under-documented period in the life and career of Miles Davis, examines the role of sound rcordings in the construction of jazz history, and takes an analytical approach to the years of “electric jazz” prior to its commodification as “jazz-rock fusion.”
Undergraduate courses that Professor Veal has taught have included: Music Cultures of the World; Theory & Practice of Ethnomusicology; Traditional and Contemporary Musics of Sub-Saharan Africa; Jazz in Transition 1960 -1985; Funk – The Re-Africanization of the American Popular Song Form; Jazz & Architecture; and Popular Music: The Experimental Tradition. Graduate courses have included: Music in Africa; The Recording Studio in Sonic and Cultural Perspective; Topics in Jazz Studies; and Recalibrating the Ethnographic Radar.
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)
“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. Her on-going projects include a comparative study of rasa in Indonesia and India; a long-term project on gender representation in Asian music-theatre genres; and an investigation into the effects of hybridity on listening reception across cultures. She was invited to give the Yung Wing lecture at Peking University on this topic in April 2008. Weiss’s most recent local research is a 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 performed its inaugural concert on 26 January 2008 in Battell Chapel on the Yale campus. The group rehearses on Wednesday evenings and is open to members from around the Yale and New Haven communities.
Sarah Weiss is a member of the Council for Southeast Asia Studies and is affiliated 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.
Selected Publications:
Books:
Ritual Soundings: Women, Religion and Music. University of Illinois Press (under contract)
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. For Soundscapes, 2nd edition, (Shelemay). WW Norton, 2006.
Selected Articles:
(in press) Innovation and Renewal: Javanese Wayang Kulit Without the Shadows. Shadows. Resounding Transcendence: Transition in Music, Ritual, and Religion, edited by Philip Bohlman and Jeffers Englhardt. Oxford University Press
Gender and Gender Redux: Rethinking Binaries and the Aesthetics of Old-Style Javanese Wayang. Woman and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture vol. 12, pp. 22-39, 2008.
Permeable Boundaries: Hybridity, Music, and the Reception of Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo. Ethnomusicology vol. 52, pp. 203-38, 2008
Literature and Art: World Music (Overview). 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, 2007.
“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. Journal of Asian Music 34: 21-49, 2003.
Recent Professional Activities:
Society for Ethnomusicology Council (2008-11)
Program Committee, 2008 Society of Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting
Editor, Audio and Visual Recordings Reviews for the Journal of Asian Music and Member of the Board, Society for Asian Music
Member, Inaugural Editorial Board, The Choral Scholar, online journal of the National Collegiate Choral Organization
Member, Indonesian and East Timor Studies Committee of the Association for Asian Studies
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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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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