Professor Zosha Di Castri and pianist Julia Den Boer have won the 2016 Yvar Mikhashoff Trust competition, whose goal is "to encourage the composition and performance of new works for solo piano reflecting and continuing the legacy of the distinguished American pianist, Yvar Mikhashoff" (http://www.mikhashofftrust.org/).

Professor Di Castri will be collaborating with Dr. Den Boer next year to write a new work for solo piano that will be premiered at the Banff Center for the Arts. Congratulations, Professor Di Castri!

Columbia Sounds: A New Concert Series at Columbia Global Centers | Paris

At Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Department of Music offers a new concert series featuring Department faculty, students, and alumni. Held at Reid Hall (4, rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris), the performances will be free of charge.

Columbiana, on February 15, 2016, at 7 pm, will present the cellist Anssi Karttunen and the violinist Marina Chiche. The program includes music of Edmund Campion, Tan Dun, Fred Lerdahl, Bryan Jacobs, Taylor Brook, Zosha Di Castri, Yoshiaki Onishi, Pablo Ortiz, Nina C. Young, Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, and Henri Dutilleux. Karttunen, widely praised as the most distinguished cellist performing new music today, has collaborated extensively with Columbia composers of several generations. After the concert, Karttunen will join Nina C. Young (Columbia DMA student and Fellow of the American Academy in Rome) in a conversation about the Creative Dialogue project that gave rise to several of the works on the program.

Ensemble Pamplemousse: This is the Uplifting Part, on March 15, 2016, at 7 pm, will feature the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse in a program of experimental new music by the collective’s members, including prominent Columbia DMA alumni Natacha Diels and Bryan Jacobs. Diels, now Assistant Professor of Composition at UC San Diego, founded the Ensemble in New York in 2003. Each of the Pamplemousse members specializes in a unique aspect of composition, from micro-detailed instrumental writing to experimental theatre with electronics to electro-mechanical musical robotics. Their performances combine weirdness and beauty with pop culture and classical virtuosity. After the concert, the musicians will discuss their work in conversation with Susan Boynton (Chair, Department of Music and organizer of the series).

Event Sponsors: Columbia Global Centers | Europe; Department of Music, Columbia University; Office of Global Programs, Columbia University; Alice M. Ditson Fund

The Department of Music joins millions of fans, friends, and colleagues around the world in mourning the passing of David Bowie.

(Photobra|Adam Bielawski)

Read Jon Pareles' obituary in The New York Times.

The Department of Music at Columbia University invites applications for (two) Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowships.

Appointment will be at the rank of Mellon Teaching Fellow/Lecturer, for a period of two years to begin July 1, 2016.

A PhD, DMA or the equivalent is required. The degree must have been received between January 1, 2012 and July 1, 2016. Fellows will be expected to do research, participate in the academic life of the Department of Music, and teach one course per semester in each of the two years(three in Columbia's Core Curriculum and one in the candidate's area of specialization).

Review of applications begins January 19, 2016 and will continue until the positions are filled.

Please visit the following link (Columbia University RAPS) for detailed information and to apply:

https://academicjobs.columbia.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=61975

Columbia University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer -- Race/Gender/Disability/Veteran.

Tina Frühauf, along with her co-editor Lily E. Hirsch, won the American Musicological Society's Ruth A. Solie award this year for their edited volume, Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and Postwar German Culture (Oxford University Press, 2014). Solie Committee Chair Professor Colleen Reardon (UC Irvine) described the volume at the award presentation:

"The Solie award winner this year tackles themes of transnationalism, displacement, and memory by examining the fascinating and often problematic relationship between Jewish music and German culture in the shadow of the Holocaust. An introduction that leads naturally into a survey of postwar writings on Jewish music, and an illuminating postscript on the “represence” of Jewish music in Germany frame a collection of essays that elegantly mirror the theme of the volume by traveling backwards and forwards in time, by exploring music in the camps and outside its borders, and by tackling such difficult topics as the discourse of avoidance and narratives of survival."

At Columbia, Dr. Frühauf teaches Jewish Music of New York (MUSI V2030) and Masterpieces of Western Music (Music Humanities).

Professor Georg Friedrich Haas' new opera, Morgen und Abend, premiered at Covent Garden on Friday, November 13. Professor Haas' new work received a very positive review from the New York Times. Read the review here.

Congratulations to Prof. Haas!

Prof. George Lewis (Case Professor of American Music) gave the President's Endowed Plenary Address at the 2015 meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) to a capacity crowd. The lecture, entitled “Putting Scholarship into (Art) Practice: Four Cases," was described in the AMS program as follows:

“This talk troubles the bright line separating creative work from academic research, through an examination of four cases from my own work as a composer and interactive artist. The works themselves are diverse in content and affect, and range from computer music performance and interactive installations to opera. Each of these works, however, was developed through a combination of ethnographic method, historical and archival work, analysis of musical practice, and critical examination. The results are serving in turn as the impetus for my musicological writing—on the works themselves, on histories of larger networks of musical practice that these works draw upon, and on still larger socio-technological networks and practices that all of us encounter every day. Thus, the talk affirms the fact that the world continues to draw critically important lessons from music—often cryptically, and despite an ongoing and deleterious trope that portrays music as peripheral to American intellectual life. In staunch opposition to this trope, musicologist Jann Pasler has proposed that ‘music can serve as a critical tool, activating and developing multiple layers of awareness... I invite the reader to listen for music’s resonance in the world and, through music, to help us imagine our future.’ My talk makes common cause with Professor Pasler’s view, echoing philosopher Pierre Hadot’s understanding that ‘in philosophy, we are not dealing with the mere creation of a work of art: the goal is rather to transform ourselves.’”

Congratulations to Prof. Lewis!