Yale University

 

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Faculty


Kathryn Alexander

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

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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Richard Cohn

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

Margot 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

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
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Daniel Harrison

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 composersamong whom are notables such as Hindemith, Shosatkovich, Prokofiev, Martinu, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Barber, and Coplandmaintained, 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

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.


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Brian Kane

Brian Kane

 

Specializations: music theory; jazz; music and philosophy (with an emphasis on critical theory, phenomenology and Wittgenstein); aesthetic theory; avant-garde composition and electronic music since 1945; Pierre Schaeffer and acousmatic theory.

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).

As a scholar, Kane has been pursuing interdisciplinary research, working in the margins between music theory, composition and philosophy. The music-theoretical work centers on questions of sound and signification, working primarily with 20th century repertoire. Some central research themes concern the relationship between music and skepticism; musical ontology; phenomenology; improvisation; subjectivity, in particular the persistence of the musical subject in recent critical theory and psychoanalytical approaches to the musical self.

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 cultural forms of listening. This also involves reconstructing the ideological 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 in recent talks at the University of California, Berkeley (“The Logic of Listening”) and at the Sorbonne ("L’acousmatique mythique: Reconsidering the Pythagorean Veil”). Other articles and reviews have appeared in qui parle, Current Musicology and Contemporary Music Review.

Upcoming projects include: a paper on musique concrete and Jean-Luc Nancy (as part of a special panel on Nancy at the SMT 2008 conference); an article on rhythm and synaesthesia in 20th century aesthetic discourses; and a paper for the conference “Listening In/Feeding Back” (Feb. 2009, Columbia University)

Kane is also a composer with an oeuvre of works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, vocalists, solo instruments, electronic music, sound installations and more. He has received performances around the United States and in Europe. In addition, Kane is also a dedicated jazz guitarist with a decade and half of professional experience.

Selected Publications:

“Review Essay: Peter Szendy, Listen: a history of our ears,” Current Musicology 86 (2008), forthcoming.

“Aspect and Ascription in the Music of Mathias Spahlinger,” Contemporary Music Review, forthcoming.

“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
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Michael Klingbeil

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

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

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

Richard Lalli

 

Specializations: vocal performance, opera, early music, music theatre.

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 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 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. Mr. Lalli’s recording of Yehudi Wyner's The Mirror was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2005.
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. In March of 2006 he performed songs of Stephen Sondheim with the composer at Yale University, 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 season 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.

In 2007, Mr. Lalli was awarded the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities at Yale University, and he was recently appointed to be the eleventh master of Jonathan Edwards College.
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Patrick McCreless

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

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

Eve Poudrier

 

Specialization: music theory; theories of rhythm and meter, with a special emphasis on polymeter and issues of perception and cognition; and recent chamber music of Elliott Carter. Other research interests include Schenkerian analysis, analysis of performance, ars subtilior, and topics in the history of theory.

Bio: Ève Poudrier completed her doctoral studies in music theory at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her Ph.D. dissertation "Toward a General Theory of Polymeter: Polymetric Potential and Realization in Elliott Carter's Solo and Chamber Instrumental Works After 1980" presents a conceptual framework for the analysis of polymeter and explores issues of performance and perception. During her work at The Graduate Center, she received an Elebash Dissertation Award for 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). Her research on Carter also included sketches studies at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland as well as a series of interviews with expert performers in New York. Upcoming projects include a conference presentation of "Vincent d'Indy's Theory of Rhythm in the Cours de composition musicale (1902-1950): Sources, Reception, and Legacy" (AMS/SMT Nashville, 2008); research on polymeter in contemporary musical practices, including empirical work on performance and perception; and a study of rhythmic tropes in Carter's recent chamber music. Ève Poudrier also holds a B.A./M.A. in music (piano/composition) from Hunter College of CUNY, where she 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 in her native Québec.

Selected Publications & Conference Presentations:

“Local Polymetric Structures in Elliott Carter's 90+ for Piano (1994)." In The Legacy of Modernism. Ed. Björn Heile. England: Ashgate, forthcoming.

“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.
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Ian Quinn

Ian Quinn

 

Specializations: music cognition; computational modeling; 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 taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Oregon. In 2008-09 he will be a Residential Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford.

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 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,” 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, 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 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 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

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

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

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 laureate of the Portland, Maine Symphony Orchestra, music director and chief creative officer of the Trinity Music Partners, LLC, Artistic Advisor of the Tulare County Symphony and principal conductor of the Vienna Modern Masters, in Vienna, Austria. 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; 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. 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, Janos Starker, Jashua Bell, Hilary Hahn, Nadjia Salerno-Sonnenberg, Cho-Liang Lin, James Galway, and Doc Severinsen. 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.toshiyukishimada.com
www.myspace.com/toshishimada
www.schmidtart.com
www.yalesymphony.com
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Michael Veal

 Michael E. 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

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

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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