Michael Friedmann, theory and chamber music; Gregory Dubinsky, Margot Fassler, Paul Hawkshaw, Markus Rathey, and Frank Tirro, history; Joan Panetti, hearing; Willie Ruff, theory and interdisciplinary studies
Gregory Dubinsky, music history, received his B.A. from Brown University and is completing his Ph.D. in music history from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1998 to 2000, and in the spring of 2002, he was a Visiting Lecturer in Yale’s Department of Music. His current research focuses on the musical, cultural, and political contexts surrounding the dissemination of twelve-tone composition. He has published on Ernst Krenek and Austrian nationalism and prepared biographical entries for the New Grove Dictionary of Music.
Michael Friedmann, theorist, pianist, and composer, 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. Most recently he 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.
Margot E. Fassler has been director of the Institute of Sacred Music since 1994, and 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. An Assistant Professor of Music at Yale from 1983 to 1989, she previously taught in the Department of Music at Mills College. Most recently, she taught at Brandeis University where she was Associate Professor of Music, Director of Graduate Studies in Music History and Theory, and the administrator of a master’s degree program in music and women’s studies. She earned her B.A. from the State University of New York, M.A. from Syracuse University, and M.A., Ph.D. from Cornell University.
Paul Hawkshaw, professor of music history, received his Ph.D. in musicology from Columbia University in 1984. His principal area of research has been the music of Anton Bruckner. He has coedited six volumes of Bruckner’s Collected Works Edition, and is currently working on a biography of the composer for Yale University Press. He has coedited two volumes of essays, Perspectives on Anton Bruckner, and his latest book on Bruckner’s psalms was published by the Musikwissenschaftlischer Verlag, Vienna, in the spring of 2002. In October 1996 Professor Hawkshaw had the honor of being invited by the Austrian National Library, Vienna, to give the keynote address at the ceremony commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of Bruckner’s death. He joined the Yale faculty in 1984.
Joan Panetti, pianist and composer, studied at the Peabody Conservatory and the Conservatoire de Musique in Paris, and holds degrees from Smith College and the Yale School of Music. Her principal mentors were Olivier Messiaen, Yvonne Loriod, Wilhelm Kempff, Alvin Etler, Mel Powell, and Donald Currier. Having toured extensively in the United States and Europe, she performs frequently as a soloist and in chamber music ensembles. Miss Panetti has served on the faculties of Yale College, Princeton University, and Swarthmore College, and returned to Yale in 1979. She was appointed Music Director of the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and the Yale Summer School of Music and Art beginning with the 1982 season, and is coordinator of the musicianship program at the School.
Markus Rathey, music history, has studied musicology, Protestant theology, and German philology in Bethel, where his received his B.A. from the Kirchliche Hochschule and in Münster, where he received his Ph.D. from Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität. Following his graduation, he held a postdoctoral position at the research institute for the study of sacred song and hymnody (Graduiertenkolleg “Geistliches Lied and Kirchenlied”) at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. In 2000–2001 he was lecturer at the department of musicology at the University of Mainz. Most recently he has been employed as a Research Fellow at the Bach-Archiv, Leipzig. Professor Rathey has focused his research especially on the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as on music of the early seventeenth century. He has published a book on German baroque music in the seventeenth century and is now writing a book on the use of sacred music by nineteenth-century composers of symphonies and other concert repertories.
Willie Ruff, horn and bass, (www.willieruff.com) received both his B.M. and M.M. at Yale. With pianist Dwike Mitchell as the Mitchell-Ruff Duo, he performs extensively in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe. In addition to the Interdisciplinary Seminar on Rhythm, Instrumental Arranging, and other courses at the School of Music, he has taught Yale College courses in ethnomusicology and folklore, and is the founding director of the Duke Ellington Fellowship program. Mr. Ruff has been a member of the Yale faculty since 1971.
Frank Tirro (http://www.music.org/FrankPTirro), music history, served as Dean of the School of Music from 1980-90. Previously, he served as chairman of the Department of Music at Duke University, as Director of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and as chairman of the Music Department of the Laboratory Schools at the University of Chicago.
A clarinetist, Tirro has performed chamber music recitals with distinguished Yale colleagues Sidney Harth, Erick Friedman, Syoko Aki, Jesse Levine, Aldo Parisot, Elizabeth Parisot, Joan Panetti, and many others. In jazz, he played with the Johnny Palmer and Jimmy Phillips orchestras and over the years has played occasional concerts with jazz artists Willie Ruff, Dwike Mitchell, Clark Terry, Donn Trenner, and Mary Lou Williams. Among his published compositions, the American Jazz Mass and American Jazz Te Deum are the most frequently performed. His Sonata for Clarinet and Piano was granted a National Federation of Music Clubs award, and his ballet, Masque of the Red Death, won the Ida M. Vreeland Prize in composition. Over the years, he has received several A.S.C.A.P. Standard Composer Awards.
Professor Tirro is a specialist in both Renaissance music and the history of jazz and is the author of Jazz: A History (W. W. Norton), Renaissance Musical Sources in the Archive of San Petronio in Bologna (Haenssler-Verlag), and Living With Jazz (Harcourt Brace). He co-authored The Humanities: Cultural Roots and Continuities (Houghton Mifflin) and edited a volume of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Duke University Press). Tirro served as Associate Editor for American National Biography, a multi-volume publication sponsored jointly by Oxford University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies, primarily responsible for jazz, ragtime, and related areas. His most recent book, The Birth of the Cool of Miles Davis and His Associates is in press and will be published by the College Music Society and Pendragon Press.
Frank Tirro has been a Fellow of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Nebraska, his master's degree from Northwestern University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.