Alec Hall (DMA, Composition, 2016) is featured as a composer in the Manifeste 2016's Chamber Music Composition Workshop concert in Paris this evening at 7pm. More information here. Congratulations, Alec!
Harald Kisiedu (PhD, Historical Musicology, 2014) has been appointed Post-Doctoral Fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland's International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation for 2016-2017.
The Department warmly congratulates Dr. Nicholas Chong, who successfully defended his PhD dissertation, Beethoven's Catholicism: A Reconsideration, on Friday, June 3, 2016. Dr. Chong's dissertation was advised by Professor Elaine Sisman, and his committee included Professors Susan Boynton, Euan Cameron (UTS), James Hepokoski (Yale), and Walter Frisch.
Congratulations, Dr. Chong!
The Mivos Quartet will premiere Carl C. Bettendorf's (DMA, Composition, 2009 & current adjunct professor) String Quartet No. 2, Yggdrasil (commissioned by the Ralph Kaminsky Fund for New Music) and Kate Soper's (DMA, Composition) Nadja on Tuesday, June 7 (tomorrow!) at 6 p.m in Miller Theater.
Admission is free and on a first come, first served basis. Check out more information about the concert here on Miller Theater's website.
Maja Cerar will be a featured performer in the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival at the National Sawdust in June 2016. NYCEMF 2016 will showcase electroacoustic music and video art from around the world, and Professor Cerar will perform Tania León's Axon, Ken Ueno's Vedananupassana, Elizabeth Hoffman's Fastenings (world premiere), Liubo Borissov/Maja Cerar's Autopoiesis and Paolo Gatti's Poltergeist.
For more information, please see the NYCEMF's webpage.
Professor Zosha Di Castri's piece "Patina" for solo violin, commissioned by Jenny Koh for the concert "Shared Madness" that took place at the National Sawdust on May 31, was reviewed by Corinna da Fonseca-Wallheim for the New York Times: "Zosha Di Castri's 'Patina' wove contemporary preoccupations -- with microtonal shadings and the relation of music to noise -- in a score tense with wild fluctuations in temperament."
Here is the full text of the review.
The Columbia University Department of Music extends heartfelt congratulations to our 2016 graduates:
Undergraduate Music Majors
Columbia College
Christopher Browner
Jacob Chapman
Ilana Deresiewicz
Quinn Devlin
Fernanda Douglas
Robert Fernandez
Amber Ferrell
Nansong Huang
Chengxi Li
Javier Llaca Ojinaga
Cameron MacCabe
Hannah Murphy
Maya Priestley
Quinn Squyres
Alessandra Urso
School of General Studies
Katherine Cartusciello
Marion Harache
Barnard College
Esther Adams
Eleanor Debreu
Anna Ehrman
Mark King
Jenny Payne
Delaney Ross
Angela Scorese
Graduate Students
Natacha Diels (DMA, Composition)
Shannon Garland (PhD, Ethnomusicology)
Alec Hall (DMA, Composition)
Geoffrey Holbrook (DMA, Composition)
Bryan Jacobs (DMA, Composition)
Ryan Pratt (DMA, Composition)
Alex Rothe (PhD, Historical Musicology)
Marceline Saibou (PhD, Ethnomusicology)
Sara Snyder (PhD, Ethnomusicology)
Lucie Vágnerová (PhD, Historical Musicology)
Jazz Special Concentration (Columbia College)
Sturdy Adams
Stephanie Gozali
Raphael Gilliam
Samuel Glick
Graham Jacobson
Chester King
Dean Marshall
Sound Arts MFA
Alice Emily Baird
Cameron Perry Fraser
Chatori Shimizu
Frank Andrew Spigner
We warmly congratulate Dr. Marceline Saibou, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation on popular music in Togo on Friday, May 13, 2016. Dr. Saibou's dissertation was sponsored by Prof. Aaron Fox, and her committee included Profs. Alessandra Ciucci and George Lewis (Music, Columbia), and distinguished Columbia ethnomusicology alumniProf. Ryan Skinner (Music and African Studies, OSU) and Prof. Andrew Eisenberg (Music, NYU Abu Dhabi).
Congratulations Dr. Saibou!
We warmly congratulate Dr. Sara Snyder, who successfully defended her dissertation on Cherokee language translational poetics and early childhood immersion education on Friday, May 6, 2016. Her dissertation was sponsored by Prof. Aaron Fox, and her committee included Profs. Bambi Schieffelin(Anthropology, NYU), David Samuels (Music, NYU),Ana Maria Ochoa (Music, Columbia), and CU ethno alumna Prof. Amanda Minks (Anthropology, Oklahoma).
Dr. Snyder has also recently been appointed as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology and sociology at Western Carolina University in 2016-17.
The Department warmly congratulates Dr. Lucie Vágnerová, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation, Sirens/Cyborgs: Sound Technologies and the Musical Body on Thursday, May 12, 2016. Dr. Vágerová's dissertation was advised by Prof. Ellie Hisama, and her committed included Profs. George Lewis, Benjamin Steege, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Alondra Nelson.
Congratulations Dr. Vágnerová!
The Center for Ethnomusicology's project to "repatriate" Native American recordings made by collector Laura Boulton in the 1930s and 40s and purchased by Columbia in the 1960s to their source communities has been featured as part of an extensive radio feature on BBC Radio 3 (UK). The feature includes interviews with Columbia ethnomusicologist Prof. Aaron Fox and former Columbia students Kristina Jacobsen (MA, Music, 2006, now Assistant Professor of Music at the University of New Mexico) and Nanobah Becker (MFA, Film, 2008, now a prominent, Sundance-winning Native American filmmaker). The feature runs for about 45 minutes.
Listen to it here. (Flash Player Required)
Taking It All Back Home, Sunday Feature - BBC Radio 3
(Photo: Tagiugmiut Iñupiat Dancers, Barrow Alaska, 2009; Photo by A. Fox)
The Department of Music warmly congratulates Ethnomusicology PhD Alumnus Dr. Timothy Mangin, who has been appointed Assistant Professor of Music at Boston College. Timothy Mangin completed his PhD in Ethnomusicology at Columbia in 2013. Prof. Mangin is an ethnomusicologist and musician researching the intersection of popular music, race, ethnicity, religion, and cosmopolitanism in West Africa and the African Diaspora. He has received fellowships from the Columbia University’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society, St. Lawrence University’s Department of Music, Mellon Foundation, the Foreign Language Areas Studies Program and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Program. He taught at Columbia University, New York University, St. Lawrence University, and the City University of New York. An improvisational flutist, Tim founded St. Lawrence University’s Jazz and Improv Ensemble and also studies mbira and is a member of Capoeira Brasil. His writings have appeared in the edited volumes Begegnungen: The World Meets Jazz and Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies as well as reviews in The Yearbook for Traditional Music and Ethnomusicology On-Line. Tim is working on a book examining indigenous cosmopolitanism through the intersection of the Senegalese urban dance music called mbalax and the practice of black, Wolof (the dominant ethnic group), gendered, and Muslim identities. He is also exploring blackness in Senegalese hip hop and the dynamics of improvisation in New York City’s underground hip hop and jazz scene. The Digital Humanities is a key part of Tim’s pedagogy and research that began when he worked at Columbia’s Institute for Research in African American Studies on the Malcolm X Project, under the direction Manning Marable, and further developed with students at The City College of New York. Dr. Mangin's Columbia PhD dissertation, on Senegalese mbalax, was advised by Prof. George Lewis.
The Department of Music warmly congratulates PhD alumna Dr. Lauren Flood, who has been appointed as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lauren Flood earned the Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia in 2015. She researches sound technologies and experimental instrument building practices in the contexts of the do-it-yourself ethos, maker culture, and popular and experimental music scenes. She held a Whiting Fellowship for her dissertation, “Building and Becoming: DIY Music Technology in New York and Berlin,” with fieldwork supported by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies and the National Science Foundation. Lauren’s work is situated at the nexus of music, anthropology, sound studies, and science and technology studies. She engages with dialogs on critical organology, creativity and knowledge production, histories and aesthetics of sound and recording practices, vernacular technologies and everydayness, ethics and labor in the music industry, alternative methods in science and technology education, and the contemporary sense of self as mediated through the arts.
At Columbia, she has been a teaching fellow in Music Humanities and Asian Music Humanities, the graduate assistant for the Center for Ethnomusicology, an editorial board member and reviews editor for Current Musicology, and on the organizing committee of the Columbia Music Scholarship Conference. She has presented her work at annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and the EMP Pop Conference.
Prior to her graduate studies, Lauren completed her undergraduate degree at Drexel University, with a major in music industry and a minor in anthropology. While living in Philadelphia, she studied and performed as a guitarist, worked in copyrights and licensing, and assisted with research at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She also completed field schools in Latin American ethnomusicology and archaeology, maintaining a long-standing interest in Mesoamerica and the modern Mayan region.
Dr. Flood's Columbia PhD dissertation was advised by Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 175 Fellowships this year, three of whom are Composition DMA alumni from our very own department:
Edmund Campion (DMA, Composition, 1993)
Anthony Cheung (DMA, Composition, 2010)
Bryan Jacobs (DMA, Composition, 2015)
Congratulations to all three composers on their well-deserved fellowships!
On April 7, Professor Zosha Di Castri's piece "Near Mute Force," a setting of an adapted text by Rivka Galchen, for two sopranos, viola, piano, and drumset, commissioned by the Women's Musical Club of Toronto, will be premiered in Dannthology, a concert featuring violist Steven Dann taking place in Toronto. Read the Toronto Star's write-up about the upcoming concert here.
Hearing is Believing
Musicianship and ear training at Columbia are the focus of a newly-mounted exhibition in the Music & Arts Library. On display are original student and faculty work, as well as textbooks, training manuals, and compositions from around the world that are used to enhance and inspire the musical imagination. Curated by Professor Peter M. Susser, DMA, Director of Undergraduate Musicianship at Columbia University, the exhibit will be on display in the Library through graduation 2016.
Courtney Bryan (DMA Composition 2014) will be participating in a number of performances this spring. More detailed information below -- if you're in the area, check these concerts out!
Friday, March 25, 10:30am/11:45am
Relation: A Performance Residency by Vijay Iyer
I. "Songs of Laughing, Smiling, and Crying" for solo piano and recorded sound
II. Courtney Bryan and Brandee Younger, originals and music of Alice Coltrane
The MET Breuer Lobby Gallery of The Metropolitan Museum of New York
http://www.metmuseum.org/events/programs/met-live-arts/vijay-iyer-met-br...
Friday, March 25, 7:30pm
Counterpoint: Classical Music and Nina Simone
Courtney Bryan and Eun Lee
Online concert and discussion
Fundraiser for #SingHerName concert, see link:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/singhername#/
https://www.facebook.com/events/1564305780564073/
Thursday, March 31, 8:00pm event (with 7:00pm reception)
HER (in honor of): a performance and discussion
Paul Robeson Center for the Arts
102 Witherspoon Street
Princeton, NJ 08542
HER (in honor of): a performance and discussion, co-sponsored by the Arts Council of Princeton, Princeton University Department of African American Studies and Princeton University Department of Music, will include a live performance byHER (in honor of) -- vocalist Sarah Elizabeth Charles, harpist Brandee Younger, pianist Courtney Bryan, bassist Mimi Jones, and drummer Kimberly Thompson -- and a discussion with the musicians on the history of women in jazz and related contemporary issues, to be moderated by journalist, Rajul Punjabi.
http://artscouncilofprinceton.org/
Thursday, April 7 and Friday, April 8 at 7:30pm/9:00pm
(Courtney will perform April 8 at 9:00pm, "A Presence" for solo piano and recorded sound)
Fromm Players at Harvard University
Creative Music Convergences, curated by Vijay Iyer
John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Department of Music
Harvard University, Cambridge MA
FREE and OPEN TO ALL! No tickets required. First come, first seated.
http://frommfoundation.fas.harvard.edu/fromm-players-at-harvard
Daniel Lazour, a recent graduate of Columbia College who finished his degree in music this past December, is among the recipients of the Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater, administered by the Academy of Arts and Letters, for the musical We Live in Cairo, which he wrote with his brother, Patrick Lazour. We Live in Cairo "tells the story of six student revolutionaries coming of age in today's Middle East, who confront the past in their search for freedom. Young men and women, armed with laptops and cameras, guitars and spray paint cans, inspire millions to take to the streets of Cairo to overthrow their president, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak."
For more information, please see Playbill's announcement: http://www.playbill.com/article/hadestown-a-modern-day-twist-on-the-orph... Congratulations, Daniel!