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 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 DMA candidate Christopher Trapani who has been awarded a 2016-17 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

The Rome Prize is "awarded to about thirty emerging artists and scholars who represent the highest standard of excellence and who are in the early or middle stages of their working lives." Mr. Trapani is the second Columbia DMA student to win the Rome Prize in as many years.

Learn more about Mr. Trapani and his music at:

http://christophertrapani.com/

A composer with a genuine international trajectory, Christopher Trapani maintains an active career in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in Continental Europe. Commissions have come from the BBC, the JACK Quartet, and Radio France, and his works have been recently heard at Carnegie Hall, the Southbank Centre, IRCAM, and Wigmore Hall.

Christopher’s music synthesizes disparate influences, weaving both American and European stylistic strands into a personal aesthetic that defies easy classification. Snippets of Delta Blues, Appalachian folk, dance band foxtrots, and Turkish makam can be heard alongside spectral swells and meandering canons. As in Christopher’s hometown of New Orleans, diverse traditions coexist and intermingle, swirled into a rich melting pot. Consonance is a central preoccupation; microtonality and just intonation are often employed. Timbral explorations are also manifold, from experiments with a wide range of mutes and preparations to an unusual instrumentarium, with scorings that call for electric guitar, dulcimer, qanûn, stroh violin, and retuned autoharps. Several of Christopher’s compositions bear the mark of his training in literature, influenced by novelists and poets including Thomas Pynchon, Geoff Dyer, and C. P. Cavafy. Many recent works also incorporate an idiosyncratic use of electronics, expanding the possibilities of color, pitch, and timing beyond the acoustic realm.

Christopher was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1980. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard, where he studied composition with Bernard Rands and poetry under Helen Vendler. He spent most of his twenties overseas: a year in London, working on a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music with Julian Anderson; a year in Istanbul, studying microtonality in Ottoman music on a Fulbright grant; and seven years in Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM, both on the composition cursus and later on a musical research residency.

Christopher is currently based in New York City, where he has worked on a doctorate at Columbia University, studying with Tristan Murail, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fred Lerdahl, and George Lewis.

Christopher is the winner of the 2016 Rome Prize, as well as the 2007 Gaudeamus Prize, the first American in over 30 years to win the international young composers’ award. Other recent honors include an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2015), a nomination for a British Composers Award (2014), and a grant from the French-American Cultural Exchange (FACE) towards a new piece for ICE and Ensemble L’Itinéraire. He has also won the Julius F. Ježek Prize (2013), three Morton Gould Young Composers Awards from ASCAP (2005, 2006, and the Leo Kaplan Award in 2009), and a BMI Student Composer Award (2006). His scores have been performed by ICTUS, Ensemble Modern, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Nieuw Ensemble, Asko Ensemble, Ensemble L’Itinéraire, Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, Ensemble Mosaik, Talea Ensemble, Argento Ensemble, Wet Ink, Earplay, Yarn/Wire, Atlas Ensemble, pianists Sergey Schepkin and Marilyn Nonken, and the American Composers Orchestra.

tIn March 2011, Christopher was featured in a portrait concert on the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Music of Today series at the Royal Festival Hall in London. His music has also been programmed in international festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Ultraschall Festival in Berlin, Musica Nova Helsinki, and IRCAM’s festival Agora. He has held residencies at Copland House (New York), Récollets (Paris), and Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), and was a 2013-15 fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart).

Recent and upcoming projects include a commission for the Quatuor Béla and GRAME in Lyon, a new orchestral work for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a commission for orchestra and electronics (IRCAM) for the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Festival Présences 2015, and a new work for Ensemble Modern for the 2015 cresc… Biennial for Modern Music in Frankfurt.

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!

Professor Terence Pender was interviewed by the Columbia Spectator last week: the interview recognizes his prowess and skills as both a musician and an educator. Read the interview here. Congratulations, Dr. Pender!

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.