As fall classes get underway, we take a moment to share some of the activities our students and faculty pursued over the summer.
With the assistance of an Arts and Humanities Initiative Grant, Marian Wilson Kimber traveled to six libraries and archives to research the women composers’ concerts organized by Phyllis Fergus in the 1930s. The concerts took place under the auspices of the National League of American Pen Women, a professional organization for female writers, artists, and composers. To see the papers of various Pen Women branches, Wilson Kimber traveled to the Chicago History Museum, the University of Vermont, and the Minnesota History Center. She examined the papers of Pen Women composers Amy Beach at the University of New Hampshire and Frances Copthorne at the Sibley Library of the Eastman School of Music. The culmination of her summer travels was a visit to the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, to locate materials related to two concerts held at the White House for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Wilson Kimber has been awarded a career development award for fall 2016, during which she will continue her research as a fellow-in-residence at Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.
With help from School of Music Travel Awards and an International Programs Travel Award, Matthew Arndt presented a paper on harmony in Georgian chant at the Fourth International Analytical Approaches to World Music Conference in New York. He also presented a paper at the History–Theory–Pedagogy conference in Nottingham that applied Heinrich Schenker’s and Arnold Schoenberg’s theories to analysis of polyphonic music. The photo, from Salisbury Cathedral, was taken on Dr. Arndt’s way back from Nottingham.
Trevor Harvey assisted by University of Iowa School of Music students Grace Coleman and Todd Johnson, continued collaborating with KRUI to produce the podcast, Ethnomusicology Today.
The series is published by the Society for Ethnomusicology and may be heard here.
Kelsey McGinnis, a PhD student in musicology, spent the summer in the National Archives undertaking research on the musical lives of German POWs interned in the U.S. during WWII. In August, she published an essay in Lacuna entitled “Singing with our ancestors and descendants: Music-making and intergenerational justice theory at COP21.”
Cody Norling, a new MA student in musicology, assisted with a forthcoming essay by transcribing passages from John Williams’ score to Catch Me If You Can. Cody also pushed ahead on a current research project addressing Puccini’s opera, La fanciulla del west.
Nathan Platte presented at “21st-Century Music School Design,” a College Music Society Summit hosted at the University of South Carolina. The intensive summit brought to together two hundred music professors and administrators from across the country to contemplate different strategies for adapting pedagogy, curricula, and degree programs to better prepare music students for dynamic careers in and beyond the arts.
Professor Christine Getz spent June and July 2016 in Northern Italy working on a new research project entitled Economic Partnerships, Marketing Strategies, and International Relations in the Music Prints of Filippo Lomazzo with the support of a 2016 Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society. On July 1 she presented a paper on the Lomazzo prints containing seventeenth-century sacred works by Conventual Franciscans from San Francesco Grande, Milano, at a conference sponsored by A.M.I.S. Como and the Centro Studi Antoniani at the Basilica del Santo in Padova, and on July 16 she presented a paper on the Lomazzo anthologies as travel writing at the 17th biennial International Conference on Baroque Music in Canterbury, Kent, UK. Professor Getz also finished the manuscript of a modern edition of Andrea Cima’s Il secondo libro delli concerti (1627) that is forthcoming in the series Recent Researches in Music of the Baroque Era published by A-R Editions.