The weekend of April 4–6 2014: Christine Getz journeyed to San Antonio for the annual meeting of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, where she presented a paper titled, “At the Sacred Font: Federico Borromeo, Giovanni Battista Cima, and the Milanese Sacred Concerto.” Trevor Harvey drove north to Lawrence University, where he gave a paper titled “Avatars, Authenticity, and Live Musical Performances in Second Life” at the Midwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology. An entire UI delegation of musicology students, faculty, and music librarian travelled to University of Northern Iowa to participate in the first annual Iowa Musicology Conference.  

James Bungert's article “Bach and the Patterns of Transformation” (after Laurence Dreyfus’s Bach and the Patterns of Invention (1996)), is slated for publication in Music Theory Spectrum in fall of 2015 (37/2). He also landed a tenure-track job teaching music theory and music history at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana, to begin Fall 2014.

Ph.D. candidate Shih-Ni Prim presented a paper titled “Maurice Abravanel and Gustav Mahler: The Reception of Early Mahler Recordings by Abravanel and the Utah Symphony Orchestra” at the 2014 AMS-Southeast Chapter Spring meeting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

With support from the UI School of Music and International Programs, Matthew Arndt attended the Seventh International Conference on Music Theory January 8–11 in Tallinn and Pärnu, Estonia. Arndt gave a paper on a problem of unrest in Arnold Schoenberg’s Little Piano Piece, op. 19, no. 2.

A number of new titles in the Oxford Handbook series feature contributions from University of Iowa faculty: Trevor Harvey, Nathan Platte, Robert C. Cook, Mary Cohen, and Jennifer Iverson.

Musicology students play “White Christmas” and other holiday music on historical string instruments in the viola da gamba family at a noontime concert in the UCC.

Marian Wilson Kimber has recently written about the role of poetic recitation in concert life at Musicology Now, the blog of the American Musicological Society. 

The annual meetings of the American Musicological Society (AMS), Society for Music Theory (SMT), and Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) are great places to share new research and keep current with scholarship and reconnect with past and present students, colleagues, and friends: Kimberly Beck, Joseph Matson, Michael Accino.

In late October Nathan Platte will join forces with Colin Roust (Roosevelt University) at the College Music Society in Cambridge, Mass., where they will lead a pre-conference pedagogy workshop on film music. From there Nathan will travel to Syracuse University to participate in the “Belfer Audio Archive at 50” Symposium. He will present a paper that explores the use of preview scores or “temp tracks” in both films.

Jennifer Iverson recently presented “Ligeti and the Evolution of Klangfarbenmelodie” at the 2013 Ligeti Symposium and Festival. The paper traces the dual lineages for the reception history of “sound-color-melody, from Schoenberg and Webern through Adorno to Ligeti.