With assistance from the University of Iowa School of Music, Matthew Arndt presented a poster on musical sentences at the First Biennial Conference on Expression, Music, and Language, held at the University of Connecticut August 20–22, 2022.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve also witnessed a gaggle of conference presentations and publications from graduate students. Hearty congratulations to all who shared new work, organized conferences, and supported their peers!

The Fall meeting of the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society took place virtually during the last weekend of September. Planning, managing, and hosting the conference brought together colleagues from across many Midwest institutions.

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. 

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.” 

The 24th annual Midwest Graduate Music Consortium will be hosted here at Voxman, March 6-7, 2020. The website for the conference and the call for papers and scores is now live! The Midwest Graduate Music Consortium invites paper and performance submissions.

Finals just finished here in Iowa City, and already the Summer term has begun. As students and faculty transition to new courses and research projects, here’s a few highlights from the latter half of Spring term: Megan Small, Ben Owen, Nathan Platte, Marian Wilson Kimber, Kelsey McGinnis, Cody Norling, Andrew Tubbs, Christine Getz, Lisa Mumme, and Natalie Landowski.

With assistance from the University of Iowa School of Music and International Programs, Matthew Arndt presented a paper entitled “The Dark Side of Oz as Allegory of Spiritual Transformation” at the annual meetings of the New Zealand Musicological Society at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch and the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.

Students and faculty have already contributed to a variety of conferences this summer: Cody Norling, Andrew Tubbs, Megan Small, Nathan Platte, Kelsey McGinnis, Sarah Lucas, Michele Aichele, Jessica Kizzire, and Marian Wilson Kimber.

Dr. Sarah Suhadolnik was among the presenters who gathered in Cleveland, Ohio for the “Beyond Genre: Jazz as Popular Music” conference at Case Western Reserve University in April. Dr. Suhadolnik’s talk, “Friendly Meetings Abroad: Navigating Geographies of Genre on Basin Street” used the 2018 “United We Swing” release by New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Wynton Marsalis Septet as a springboard for her place-based examination of popular arrangements of Spencer Williams’s “Basin Street Blues,” a tin-pan-alley-hit-turned-jazz-standard.

The musicology faculty and students at the University of Iowa are looking forward to the fourth annual Iowa Musicology Day, to be held on April 14. Participants include: Lisa Mumme, Nathan Platte, Marian Wilson Kimber, Megan Small, and Cody Norling.

Musicology students and faculty attended the annual meeting of the Society for American Music, held in Kansas City, February 28 through March 4: Sarah Suhadolnik, Marian Wilson Kimber, Natalie Landowski, and Andrew Tubbs.