The first half of the semester has been especially productive. Here are a few of the activities that students and faculty have been pursuing:
Dr. Marian Wilson Kimber has received a grant from the State Historical Society of Iowa for her research into Iowa women’s clubs promotion of the music of Iowa composers in the early twentieth century. She was interviewed about her research for an issue of The Little Village. In September Wilson Kimber presented a paper, “American Women’s Concerts and the Idea of a Middlebrow Canon” at the “Musicology Now” conference: “The Idea of the Canon in the 21st Century Canon,” held at Smith College.
Dr. Matthew Arndt recently attended a première performance of Heaven and Earth, a collaborative choral composition commissioned by the St. John of Damascus Society and part of the Psalm 103 project. The idea of the project is that “a setting of the Vespers psalm, collaborated on by six different Orthodox composers, will be performed and recorded by Cappella Romana, and then be used as the basis for a film project that will be an Orthodox meditation on science and faith.” The composers are Matthew Arndt, John Michael Boyer, Alexander Khalil, Kurt Sander, Richard Toensing, and Tikey Zes. The program also featured the première of Dr. Arndt’s setting of The Jesus Prayer, interpreted by one listener as an expression of postmodern spirituality, by another as an expression of apophatic theology.
Several graduate students also shared recent research at fall conferences.
Cody Norling presented “The Touchtone (1728) Revisited: James Ralph and the Polemical Politics in Early-Eighteenth-Century London,” at the Midwestern chapter of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Andrew Tubbs contributed to the “Broadway Bodies” conference at Washington University in St. Louis with a paper on eugenics and disability in Oklahoma!
The AMS Midwest conference featured multiple speakers from Iowa: Lisa Mumme spoke about onscreen musical performance in Mad Max, and Sarah Lucas (Ph.D. 2018, now at Drake University) gave a talk on Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.
Several new publications from faculty and students are also now available.
Dr. Platte has two new articles out. One is on “unheard” music and musicians from Gone With the Wind, published in The Southern Quarterly.
He has also contributed a chapter on music and special effects to the brand-new anthology, Adapting The Wizard of Oz: Musical Versions from Baum to MGM and Beyond (OUP, 2018).
Cody Norling’s introduction to a facsimile reprint of Spontini’s Julie, overture is out from Musikproduktion Hoeflich.
Dr. Trevor Harvey also released a new episode in the Ethnomusicology Today podcast series on embodying air guitar.
In it, he speaks with scholars Sydney Hutchinson and Byrd McDaniel.