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.

The Journal of the Society for American Music (JSAM) has recently published three articles by Iowa faculty and alumnus: Robert C. Cook, Nikki Malley, Nathan Platte, and Marian Wilson Kimber.

Faculty members are making a strong showing at the 2014 joint national conference of the AMS (American Musicological Society) and SMT (Society for Music Theory) in Milwaukee: Robert C. Cook, Marian Wilson Kimber, and Jennifer Iverson.

With help from the School of Music and International Programs, Matthew Arndt presented a paper on Arnold Schoenberg at the European Music Analysis Conference (EuroMAC), held in Leuven, Belgium, September 17–20. 

The faculty at the University of Iowa use the time away from teaching during the summer to make rapid progress on research projects, when there is more time for intensive archival research, analysis, composition, and writing. Here are some of the things the musicology, theory, and composition faculty Marian Wilson Kimber, Zack Stanton, and Jennifer Iverson have been working on in Summer 2014.