Peter M. Susser, Director of Undergraduate Musicianship, attended The Xi'an Conservatory of Music Ear Training Conference and Sight Singing Competition as a lecturer and judge from November 5-9, 2012. Susser also taught Master classes in improvisation and sight singing for actors at The Beijing Dance Academy.

Next to Susser is Prof. Wang Gaofei, Director of the Soffeggio Department.

The Department of Music warmly congratulates Professor Kevin Fellezs, whose book, Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion, is this year's Co-Winner of the International Association For Popular Music's Woody Guthrie Book Award. In making the award, The awards committee observed, in making the award,  it considers Birds of Fire "the most accomplished monograph of the contenders. It is an engaging, well researched and argued interdisciplinary study of a long vilified musical movement . . . [and] a crucial contribution to jazz studies and rock studies, but most importantly it de-stablilizes the concept of genre itself."

At the recent national meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Professor Ellen Gray (Ethnomusicology) has been awarded two major prizes for her groundbreaking 2011 article "Fado's City" (Anthropology and Humanism 36(2): 141-163).   The article was awarded the prestigious Jaap Kunst Prize by the Society, in recognition of "the most significant article in ethnomusicology written by a member of the Society" in the prior year.  It was also awarded the Richard Waterman Junior Scholar Prize by the Popular Music Section of the SEM. 

The Department of Music warmly congratulates Professor Gray!

Professor Susan Boynton was presented with the 2012 Robert M. Stevenson award from the American Musicological Society for her book Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Oxford University Press, 2011). The Stevenson Award recognizes outstanding scholarship on music composed, performed, created, collected, belonging to, or descended from the musical cultures of Spain, Portugal, and all Latin American areas in which Spanish and Portuguese are spoken.

http://www.ams-net.org/neworleans/awards.php

J-DISC: The Technology of Discovering Jazz

Digital technology and the Web are bringing treasures, both new and newly discovered, to music lovers every day. Using and enjoying these vast riches is a different story: the prospect overwhelms listeners and even stumps experts. Nowhere is this dilemma perhaps more exquisite than in jazz, which has a ninety-five year legacy of recordings and a persistent drive to innovate through recording technology.

The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, is leading an interdisciplinary team to find better ways to access, organize, and evaluate information about jazz on record and on the Web.

Jazz studies experts at the Center and specialists in information management and engineering at Columbia and other institutions are working together to build J-DISC, an Internet database application. The site went live in June of 2012 (jdisc.columbia.edu) and will continue to grow in scope and functions during the next two years. J-DISC will provide rich information on jazz recordings with demographic and cultural information free of charge to the public. Yet, as it gathers more data, J-DISC will eventually offer a depth of knowledge on jazz not achieved by more familiar online resources such as iTunes, MusicBrainz, or Pandora. Researchers, educators, and students can mine this data for insights on improvisation, artists' careers, changes in jazz styles, the recording industry, and various other topics.

Prof. John Szwed, Director of the Center for Jazz Studies, believes that “because much of it is improvised, it’s difficult to imagine telling the history of jazz without reference to what gets recorded. Yet a wealth of data about jazz recordings is in danger of being lost, due to changes in the industry and the shift away from print media. We need to transform discography to deal with a new world without discs.”

2009 Barnard College Music Alumna & Singer/Songwriter Marina Evans Releases Debut Record Dogtown: The EP

**Marina Evans performs in NYC 9/22,10:30PM, Ella's Lounge (see info below)**

This September, 2009 Barnard College Music alumna Marina Evans is releasing Dogtown: The EP,  an original album written and recorded in her hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Combining Ms. Evans' jazz-influenced vocals with folk forms and rock instrumentation, Dogtown has a unique sound that she proudly calls her own. The first single, "One of Two," is available now for stream or download.

Ms. Evans put together her band (Dave Borge on bass; Jack Tomaiolo on guitar; Pete Lindberg on drums) in the summer of 2011 upon her return to the States from Florence, Italy, where she had been writing and touring. "After years of performing as a solo acoustic act, I was ready to take things to the next level," Evans says. "Playing abroad had given me lots of new ideas, and really lit a fire under me to get things off the ground."

Over the course of the next year, Ms. Evans traveled with her band from Gloucester to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia before wrapping up the record this summer.

Evans' performance career began at age 17, when she gigged around the Massachusetts North Shore as the vocalist in a jazz duo, My Ship. Only after she moved to New York to study at Barnard did she she pick up a guitar and begin writing, recording, and performing her own music. "I decided to teach myself guitar as a vehicle for songwriting after listening to Eva Cassidy," Evans says. "I couldn't explain with words to a guitarist what I was hearing in my head, so I had to figure it out myself. It was definitely an uphill battle, but I found it so liberating!"

As a junior at Barnard, Ms. Evans took a semester abroad in Florence, Italy. There, while playing at an open mic, she met an Italian producer who was interested in recording her songs. "He didn't speak a word of English, and seemed very focused on making things as complicated as possible," Evans relates. "By the time August rolled around, I had an unsigned 80-page contract in legal Italian and two original folk songs that had been transformed into ambient pop music. Needless to say, the contract is unsigned to this day. And when I got back to Barnard in September, I signed up for Terry Pender's "Recorded Sound" class (in the Music Department's Computer Music Center) as a means of self-defense!"  Ms. Evans was also very active as a vocalist in Columbia's Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program.

Are you considering applying to one of our graduate (PhD or DMA) programs this fall (2012 application for 2013 matriculation)?  Here are some important informational links and points of advice for the 2012 application cycle to guide your application process. We highly recommend that you review this 2012-specific information before you apply, and before you make personal contact with Department faculty members!

Also see our page of general information for applicants.

Undergraduate Theory and Ear Training Guidelines at a Glance for Spring 2013:

Please read on for important information on placement, enrollment restrictions, scheduling and advising for all students taking basic Music Theory classes ("Fundamentals of Music," MUSI V1002; "Diatonic Harmony and Counterpoint," (V2318 - 19); and "Chromatic Harmony and Counterpoint," (V3222 - 23), and for students  planning to enroll in Ear Training at any level (Intro, I, II, III, and IV) this Spring.

Some of these policies are new for 2012-13.  If you are a music major, minor, or concentrator, or otherwise planning to enroll in basic theory or ear training courses this year, please familiarize yourself with these policies.

Please note that in the document below, the acronym "MMC" stands for "Music majors, minors, and concentrators."

For more information contact:
Prof. Peter M. Susser,
Director of Undergraduate Musicianship
pms3@columbia.edu

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Musicianship/ET First Day of Class for Spring 2013

• All students who were enrolled in Fall 2012 ET classes advance to the next level for Spring 2013.
• Students new to the ET sequence regardless of experience must attend Intro ET or ET I to take a diagnostic exam for placement into the appropriate ET level.
• Students are REQUIRED to attend one of these sections for placement if you have not previously taken any Ear Training at Columbia and wish to do so this year:

1.  Tuesday, January 22, 3:10 – 4PM, Dodge TBA

2.  Tuesday, January 22, 12:10 – 1PM, Dodge TBA

Columbia University News features an article on Prof. David Sulzer (Depts. of Psychiatry, Neurology and Pharmacology), a neuroscientist at Columbia who has been working with Prof. Brad Garton at Columbia's Computer Music Center on a project to create music from brain waves. The piece is by Adam Piore, and is entitled: Neuroscientist David Sulzer Turns Brain Waves Into Music

The Department of Music congratulates Daniel Callahan, a  PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at Columbia, who has been appointed as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Music at The University of Chicago.  Mr. Callahan will defend his dissertation, entitled  "The Dancer from the Music: Men, Modern Dance, and Choreomusicalities on the U.S. Stage, 1910-2010," this summer.  The dissertation, advised by Prof. Karen Henson,  combines  work in dance, film, music, and  gesture that functions at the disciplinary interstices of musicology, cinema and media studies, theater and performance studies, and gender studies.  In the dissertation, Mr. Callahan engages in choreomusical analysis, sound reconstruction for dance film, and archival and oral history, among other methods. He is also a recipient of the prestigious Selma Jeanne Cohen Award from the Society of Dance History (2011).

Mr. Callahan has worked on Merce Cunningham, Ted Shawn, and Mark Morris, and has also written about Arnold Schoenberg, Tina Turner, and Leonard Bernstein (the subject of his most current research).

As a  Mellon Fellow in Music at Chicago, Mr. Callahan will devote himself to intensive research and writing and will teach two courses per year.  His primary appointment will be in Music,  but he will also be teaching courses cross-listed in such other units as Theater and Performance Studies and will be collaborating at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and teaching at the Logan Center for the Arts.

The Department of Music at Columbia University warmly congratulates all of our graduating majors, concentrators, and graduate students and their families on the occasion of the 2012 Columbia University Commencement.

The Music Department's Academic Department Administrator, Anne Gefell, is profiled in the current issue (vol. 3709) of the Columbia Record, celebrating her 16 year career at Columbia and her many activities and accomplishments beyond the Department.   Congratulations to Anne!

"WHAT SHE DOES: Anne Gefell manages the Department of Music’s office and its staff of four in Dodge Hall. On any given day, she handles payroll, talks with prospective students and their parents, troubleshoots technology issues in the classrooms, investigates leaks and other building problems, and interviews candidates for staff and work-study positions in the department. As the academic year winds down, Gefell is already busy preparing next year’s budgets, pre-registration and courses, and monitoring the faculty hiring processes.
Gefell is also a part of the seven-member steering committee of academic department ad- ministrators of Arts & Sciences at the University. And she manages the Alice M. Ditson Fund, a grant program that supports performances and recordings of works by American composers, and sits on the advisory board of the department’s journal, Current Musicology. Founded in 1965, it is the oldest musicology journal run by graduate students in the country."

Read more . . . Download the full article (PDF)

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded Fellowships to Columbia Composition (DMA) alumni Kate Soper, Alex Mincek, and Huck Hodge.  Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the 181 successful candidates for 2012 Guggenheim Fellowships were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

The Columbia University Gagaku program is profiled this week in an article by Nicholas Obourn in the "On Campus" news section of the University's main website. The article is entitled: Healing the Universe With Japan’s Ancient Court Music.

The article includes a video profile of the Gagaku program:
http://blip.tv/play/hNVhgvDMNwA.html?p=1

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