Matthew Arndt has been named the 2010–2011 recipient of the David Kraehenbuehl Prize, which is a $2,000 award for the best article in the Journal of Music Theory over a two-year period by an untenured author.

Aaron Perrine–who successfully defended his dissertation and graduated with a Ph.D. in composition in Spring 2014–recently won the prestigious Sousa-Ostwald Award from the American Bandmasters Association for his 2013 wind ensemble composition Pale Blue On Deep. Perrine, who is a previous winner of the also highly competitive Outstanding TA Award from the University of Iowa, will begin a tenure-track job as Assistant Professor at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa in Fall 2014.

Take a look at this short article and vid about the laptop orchestra that the students in the composition program have created.

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.