Friday morning features Society for American Music presentations from Iowa graduate students and faculty. At 10:00 a.m. (CDT) you can take in Ph.D. candidate Megan Small’s talk on “Minnesota Mermaids: Exoticism in the Aquatennial’s Aqua Follies Water Ballet.” At 10:30, toggle over to “Rhythmic Techniques in Signed Rap” from Drs. Anabel Maler and Robert Komaniecki. 

Dr. Platte’s most recent book, Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood, is featured in the Wall Street Journal‘s “Five Best” column, where biographer Steven Smith (Music by Max Steiner) shares his favorite books on film music.

The Society for American Music recently announced that Dr. Wilson Kimber was the recipient of its 2020 Sight and Sound Subvention! “In a Woman’s Voice: Musical Readings by American Women Composers will be a video recording of musical readings for spoken word and piano by women composers, performed by Marian Wilson Kimber, reciter, and Natalie Landowski, piano.

This spring Kelsey McGinnis successfully defended her dissertation and received her Ph.D. in Musicology. Titled “A Captive Enemy Audience: Music and the Reeducation of German POWs in the United States,” Dr. McGinnis’s dissertation draws on research conducted at the U.S. National Archives and the Iowan Camp Algona POW Archive to consider how musical activities in the camps were experienced and valued differently.

Just in time for summer reading, Prof. Marian Wilson Kimber has published two articles: "Miss Austen Plays Pleyel: An Additional Source for the Jane Austen Family Music Collection?" and "Reciting Parsifal: Opera as Spoken Word Performance in America."

As we work from home and reckon with COVID-19 in a thousand different ways, it may help to recollect the activities of the previous month, when “social” was not inevitably paired with “distancing.” The graduate students in musicology, theory, and composition collaborated beautifully through their hosting of the 2020 Midwest Graduate Music Consortium. Nathan Platte and undergraduate researcher Anastasia Scholze cohosted a mini-course at FilmScene titled “Contenders and Composers of the Fifties.” 

Congratulations to Ryne Carlson, who successfully defended his masters thesis! Ph.D. student Cody Norling recently completed a review of Alexandra Wilson’s Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain,  now available in the Journal of Musicological Research.

The Plymouth United Church of Christ in Des Moines recently hosted Dr. Suhadolnik as a featured speaker in their study group devoted to The New York Times’ 1619 Project.

Marian Wilson Kimber’s article, “Musical Iowana: Iowa Women’s Clubs’ Promotion of Iowa Composers,” recently appeared in The Annals of Iowa.  As part of the duo, Red Vespa, Wilson Kimber continues to perform women’s spoken-word compositions. In November Wilson Kimber was honored with a distinguished Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she received her undergraduate education.

Dr. Matthew Arndt has just gotten back to Iowa City after spending the summer and fall months conducting new research and contributing to workshops.