We are pleased to announce that Woodrow Steinken won the West Virginia University Press Award for Best Student Paper for his paper "From the Depths: The Invented Interiority of Alban Berg's Lyric Suite." The award is presented annually by the Allegheny chapter of the American Musicological Society. The committee released the following statement about Steinken’s paper:
The Department of Music is pleased to announce that four of our doctoral candidates have been selected as Andrew Mellon Pre-doctoral Fellows for the 2017–18 academic year. Jazz studies doctoral candidate John Bagnato, composer/theorists Ryan McMasters, and Brian Riordan, and musicologist Juan Fernando Velásquez Ospina are each poised to complete innovative research and creative work during their fellowship years.
The Music Graduate Student Organization at the University of Pittsburgh is pleased to announce its first annual conference, to be held on Saturday, February 4, 2017
In the fall semester of 2014, the students in Music 1270: Music, Culture, and Technology studied sound recording from a cultural perspective. Led by Assistant Professor Rachel Mundy, they learned about phonographs as furniture, stethoscopes as headphones, and mix tapes as memories. At the end of the class, students ventured forth into Pittsburgh with handheld recorders in seven teams and created a podcast that they felt captured Pittsburgh's sonic culture. They designed, edited, and narrated what they found. For most of the class, this was the first time they had ever held a recorder.
We are pleased to offer hearty congratulations to Don O. Franklin, Professor of Music Emeritus. Professor Franklin has been named an Honorary Member of the American Bach Society.
The Music-GSO (Graduate Student Oranization) sponsors grants for travel to an academic conference to present a composition, paper or a poster. To be eligible you must be enrolled as a graduate music student in the Dietrich School of Arts at the time of your travel. Details and contact information are available on the application. Download the Application.
The Department of Music is a community that is often bursting with energy and life, and so it is difficult to face the reality of some of our treasured colleagues passing on from this life. It is with sadness and a deep sense of loss that we remember three colleagues who left us in the last year: Professor of Music, Emeritus Robert Sutherland Lord, saxophone instructor James “Buster” Alston, and receptionist Janet Vogt.
At the recent Music Library Association’s annual conference in Atlanta the MLA Citation was awarded to James P. Cassaro, Head of the University of Pittsburgh’s Theodore M. Finney Music Library and Assistant Professor of Music. The MLA Citation is the Association’s tribute for lifetime achievement and is awarded in recognition of distinguished service to music librarianship over a career. Citation recipients become Honorary Members of the Music Library Association.
Emily Zazulia, assistant professor of music, has been awarded a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support 12 months of research. Professor Zazulia will use the fellowship to work on her first monograph: a wide-ranging study of notational aesthetics, ca. 1300-1520. In this study, entitled Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing, she argues that music writing of this period exhibits a dynamic interplay between notated music and the transformations it undergoes in performance.