Congratulations to Columbia ethnomusicology PhD student Kevin Holt, who has been awarded a 2013 Predoctoral Fellowship from the  Ford Foundation. 

This fellowship, which provides three years of full support for doctoral research, is sponsored by the Ford Foundation and administered by the National Research Council of the National Academies.  Mr. Holt's selection for this prestigious award reflects Ford Foundation's panelists’ "judgment of scholarly competence as well as the promise of future achievement as a scholar, researcher, and teacher." 

Mr. Holt's doctoral research concerns youth culture and hip-hop music in Atlanta and more broadly in the US; his MA thesis was an ethnographic study of "Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater."  He holds a prior MA from Columbia's Institute for Research in African-American Studies, and a BA in Music from Oberlin Conservatory.

Mr. Holt is also the third PhD student in ethnomusicology at Columbia to win support from the Ford Foundation in the past three years!

The Department of Music congratulates alumna Dr. Maria Sonevysky (PhD, Ethnomusicology, 2012).  Dr. Sonevytsky has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College, beginning in 2014.  Prior to taking up the position at Bard, Dr. Sonevysky will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto for 2013-14.

Dr. Sonevytsky is currently a Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She received her BA degree in Music from Barnard College, and her PhD in Music (Ethnomusicology) from Columbia University. Her  dissertation was entitled “Wild Music: Ideologies of Exoticism in Two Ukrainian Borderlands."  The dissertation develops comparative musical-ethnographic studies of two distinct Ukrainian borderland groups, the Hutsuls of the Carpathian Mountains, and the Crimean Tatars, and examines the role of discourses of "wildness" and exoticism in Ukrainian music, culture,  and politics.

In 2011, Dr. Sonevystky presented “The Chornobyl Songs Projects: Living Culture from a Lost World” that sought to broaden public awareness about the cultural impact of nuclear disaster by reviving ritual song repertoires from rural communities around Chornobyl that were dispersed after 1986. The project culminated with multi-media performances in four cities, and will result in a recording from Smithsonian Folkways in 2013. Sonevytsky is also an accomplished accordionist, as well as a vocalist and pianist. She performs with a composers’ collective in New York City called Anti-Social Music.

The Department of Music cordially invites all graduating Music students (grad and undergrad!) and their families and guests to join us for a congratulatory luncheon reception in 620 Dodge Hall at approximately 1PM on Wednesday May 22, immediately following the conclusion of the commencement ceremonies (approximately 1PM).

Call 212-854-3825 for information.

The Department of Music is delighted to welcome Mariusz Kozak to our faculty in Music Theory.  Prof. Kozak will join Columbia University as an Assistant Professor of Music in July, 2013.  He is currently a post-doctoral scholar and visiting assistant professor of music theory at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Georg Friedrich Haas will join Columbia University’s composition faculty as a full-time tenured professor in September 2013. This appointment promises to sustain and enhance our composition program’s reputation as one of the strongest, most progressive, and most international such programs in the United States.

Haas has emerged as one of the major European composers of his generation. His music synthesizes in a highly original way the Austrian tradition of grand orchestral statement with forward-looking interests in harmonic color and microtonal tuning that stem from both French spectralism and a strand of American experimentalism. The result is an exploratory, uncompromising music that is also sensuously attractive. His music appeals to unusually diverse constituencies, from avant-garde composers for its microtonal investigations to casual listeners for its spacious forms and euphonious harmony.

Writing the Word: A Selection of Medieval Latin Biblical Manuscripts in Columbia Collections

Chang Octagon Exhibition Room, Rare Book and Manuscript Library (6th Floor, Butler Library)

April 10 to July 5, 2013

This exhibition was curated by members of Susan Boynton's Seminar in Historical Musicology: the Middle Ages (Dongmyung Ahn, Lindsay Cook, Sofia Gans, Lisa Holsberg, Paula Horner, Anne Levitsky, Joshua Navon, Thomas Smith, Sarah Jane Starcher, Kathryn Straker) and Maristela Verastegui.

Congratulations to Giuseppe Gerbino, Associate Professor of Historical Musicology and Chair of the Department, on winning the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award. Established on a  donation from trustee Gerry Lenfest (Law '58), the Lenfest award recognizes faculty who demonstrate unusual merit in scholarship, university citizenship, and professional involvement. Professor Gerbino will receive an award of $25,000 per year for a three-year period.

Drumming Up Some Difference: Autism, Ethnomusicology, and the New Normal of Disability

A Talk By:
Michael B. Bakan (College of Music, Florida State University)

Date: Thursday, May 23, 2013
Time: 4:00pm
Location: 701C Dodge Hall (Center for Ethnomusicology)
Free and open to the public

The Department of Music congratulates ethnomusicology graduate program alumnus Tyler Bickford (PhD, 2011, With Distinction), who has been appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of English (in Children's Literature and Childhood Studies) at the University of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Bickford has been a Core Lecturer teaching Contemporary Civilization at Columbia since 2011, and was awarded the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching (Columbia's highest honor for a graduate student instructor). He is also a past winner of the Lise Waxler Prize (SEM) and the Hewitt Pataleoni Prize (MACSEM).

Dr. Bickford's Columbia ethnomusicology dissertation, entitled "Children's Music, MP3 Players, and Expressive Practices at a Vermont Elementary School: Media Consumption as Social Organization among Schoolchildren," is an ethnographic study of the media ecology of K–8 schoolchildren at a small, rural, public school in New England.

You can read an article about Dr. Bickford in the Columbia Spectator here. Dr. Bickford's personal website (with several of his publications) is here.

Jazz.Covers.Politics -- Album Art in an Age of Activism
 
On view from April 11–August 23, 2013
 
at The Nathan Cummings Foundation
475 10th Avenue, 14th Floor
New York, NY 10018
 
Opening Reception
Thursday, April 11, 6:00pm–8:00pm
 
Live music and refreshments
RSVP by April 8 at exhibits@nathancummings.org
 

Cross-posted from the Barnard News website; full article here.

In a recent podcast, Professor Gail Archer and alumna Ebonie Smith (Barnard '07) discuss the challenges they've faced—and the successes they've had—as women in the music world. They'll also talk about how technology is helping women musicians connect and collaborate.

Archer is the director of Barnard's music program and a celebrated classical organist who performs and records the works of musicians such as Bach and Liszt. Smith is a music producer who creates mostly hip-hop and R&B. She is also the 2012-2013 Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) Alumnae Fellow.

Listen to the podcast on Soundcloud.com

Columbia's Computer Music Center and the new School of the Arts MFA Program in Sound Arts are featured in an article in the Feb. 7, 2013 Columbia Spectator.  The article, by Derek Arthur, is entitled:  "Computer Music Center combines technology, music in experimental setting."

An accompanying video clip, featuring Prof. Brad Garton and Douglas Repetto, can be viewed below or on YouTube.

New Program Announcement!

SOUND ARTS

A new Interdepartmental MFA Program offered by the Columbia University School of the Arts in association with the Department of Music and the Computer Music Center.