This Thursday, October 29, from 12:30-1:45, students in Trevor Harvey‘s first-year seminar course, Iowa City Live: Local Music Cultures, will be holding their final class meeting at Public Space One (120 N. Dubuque St.), where they will be presenting their own contributions to Iowa City’s live music culture.

Musicology and Theory Faculty and Students are delivering papers this fall: Marian Wilson Kimber, Jennifer Iverson, and Kelsey McGinnis.

Jennifer Iverson, assistant professor of music theory, has won an External Faculty Fellowship from the Stanford Humanities Center. Iverson will spend the year in Palo Alto working on her book project, Electronic Inspirations: The WDR Studio and Musical Thought at Mid-Century.

Composer Christopher Jette is joining us this year as a Grant Wood Fellow.  In addition to creating new work, he will direct the Laptop Orchestra of the University of Iowa. Jette will also teach Composition, Composition Seminar, and co-teach Collaborative Performance with faculty from the Department of Dance.

Musicology, Music Theory, and Composition faculty members have been hard at work during the summer months developing their scholarly and creative projects: Matthew Arndt, Michael Eckert, Lawrence Fritts, Christine Getz, Jennifer Iverson, Nathan Platte, Zack Stanton, and Marian Wilson Kimber.

Trevor Harvey (ethnomusicology), Jennifer Iverson (music theory), and Nathan Platte (musicology) and their families collaborated to host the first annual Front Porch Music Festival on Saturday June 20, 2015. The festival encouraged residents of the Longfellow neighborhood in Iowa City to play music together on their front porches.

Matthew Arndt is organizing a music/dance/spoken word recital based on Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, op. 19, (1911). 

The Society for American Music has recently chosen musicologist Marian Wilson Kimber as the recipient of a publication subvention–an award that will defray the costs of publishing a book–for her monograph Feminine Entertainments: Women, Music and the Spoken Word (forthcoming from University of Illinois Press). At the same meeting, music theorist Robert Cook received an honorable mention for the Irving Lowens Memorial Article Award for his article “The Vocal Ecology of Crumb’s Crickets” in JSAM volume 7. Current and former University of Iowa faculty and students also made strong research presentations: Nathan Platte, Katheryn Lawson, Michael Accinno, and Olly Wilson.

Two members of the music theory faculty, Matthew Arndt and Jennifer Iverson have recently been honored as Fellow-in-Residence at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. This award gives them a space to work on their research and writing at the Obermann Center, the chance to share and discuss work with other Fellows, $1000 for research, and the opportunity to apply for funding for interdisciplinary projects.

Kati Meyer, a PhD candidate in Music Theory, traveled to Bristol, UK to give a paper at the RMA Student Conference January 8-10, 2015. Kati’s paper, ‘I Hope You Don’t Mind That I Put Down in Words’: The Cognitive Strategies in the Music of Elton John, was well attended and well received by her peers at this exciting conference.