Professor of Music, Emeritus Bell Yung was awarded an honorary doctorate from Chinese University of Hong Kong on December 6, 2012 as part of CUHK’s 72^nd Congregation for the Conferment of Degrees. Yung’s specific degree is Doctor of Literature, honoris causa and he was one of three conferees. CUHK honored Yung and the other conferess,

Music and Philosophy double major Jonathan Heins’s research on Mongolian folk rock appears in the debut issue of Forbes and Fifth, Pitt’s new journal of undergraduate research. You can read excerpts and listen to musical examples from “New Representations of the ‘Golden Lineage’: The Mongolian Folk Rock of Altan Urag” at OUR Pitt, the blog of the Office of Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity.

This year’s graduation marked the end of a particularly fruitful year for the Department of Music graduating class, current students, and alumni.

2012 Graduates and Current Students

If you are looking for new sounds to put on your iPod, look no further! Members of the Department of Music released four new CDs this spring, and they reflect the intellectual and cultural diversity that characterizes Music at Pitt.

The Men’s Glee released Lux: a Collection of Sacred Songs and Spirituals with songs recorded at First Baptist Church of Pittsburgh (where the Glee Club performs regularly) and at the University of Bologna, Italy during the group’s 2010 tour. Contact the Glee Club for information about how to purchase Lux.

The debut of the Fela Sowande Singers, led by music department alum Oyebade Dosunmu, will take place at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church on Tuesday night, April 10 at 8 p.m. The singers will perform a concert of sacred music by Nigerian composers. Along with Dosunmu, the concert will feature Richard Teaster (director of Pitt’s Glee Club and vocal instructor) and Ayo Oluranti (a doctoral candidate in composition and theory).

In celebration of Bell Yung’s 31 years of service at the University of Pittsburgh, the Department of Music has organized a series of events, including a reception on March 23 (by invitation only), a symposium on March 24, and a lecture-recital by Bell Yung on March 26. The symposium, with the title of “New Research in Asian and American Music,” will gather together Yung’s former students who have gone on to establish distinguished academic careers in the U.S. and elsewhere for a reunion.

Eric Beeko (Ethnomusicology, 2005) has two new publications to his credit spanning 2011 and 2012. Beeko’s article, titled “The Dual-Relationship Concept of Right-Ownership in Akan Musical Tradition: A Solution for the Individual and Communal Right-Ownership Conflicts in Music Production,” appears in the International Journal of Cultural Property (Vol 18. 2011 no. 3).

Ethnomusicology PhD candidate Benjamin Pachter is currently in the midst of a busy travel schedule while conducting fieldwork for his dissertation. A current recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, Pachter has rarely been in one place for very long, traveling to a wide variety of places as he conducts research on the transnational nature of contemporary Japanese taiko performance and how this has affected conceptions of tradition.