Michael Anderson
Michael Alan Anderson has won the 2012 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award in recognition of his article “Fire, Foliage, and Fury: Vestiges of Midsummer Ritual in Motets for John the Baptist,” published in Early Music History in 2011. At the 2012 AMS meeting in New Orleans, he will present a paper on a newly discovered set of plainchants in honor of Marguerite of Navarre entitled “Mass Propers for the Mother of the Renaissance.”
Corbett Bazler, newly appointed assistant professor in the Music Department at the College of the University of Rochester, presented a paper at the 2011 AMS meeting in San Francisco. The title, “Reforming Handel: The Failed Heroics of Imeneo (1740) and Deidamia (1741)”, reflects research contained in his recently completed dissertation at Columbia University.
Melina Esse has been granted a research leave for 2012-13 to work on her book, which deals with connections between poetic improvisation and operatic performance in nineteenth-century Italy.
Roger Freitas presented his paper, “The Art of Artlessness, or, Adelina Patti Teaches Us How to Be Natural,” at the 2012 Congress of the International Musicological Society in Rome. An article version is forthcoming in the festschrift for Ellen Rosand (Eastman Studies in Music, Univ. of Rochester Press). His article from 2002, “Towards a Verdian Ideal of Singing: Emancipation from Modern Orthodoxy,” was reprinted in the collection Classical and Romantic Music, ed. David Milsom, Ashgate Library of Essays on Music Performance Practice (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2011).
Lisa Jakelski gave a paper on the Warsaw Autumn Festival at the 2012 IMS Congress in Rome. In November 2012 she will be presenting at the annual meeting of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in New Orleans. Her title will be “Pushing Boundaries: Musical Exchange at the Warsaw Autumn Festival.”
Ellen Koskoff has recently been appointed editor of the journal Ethnomusicology and is awaiting the publication of her collected essays, A Feminist Ethnomusicology.
Kim Kowalke Professor of Musicology and the Richard L. Turner Professor in the Humanities in the College, is presenting a paper on The Miller’s Son at AMS in New Orleans. Two weeks later he’ll be the scholar-in-residence at Cincinnati College-Conservatory in conjunction with a year-long Weill Festival and the opening of Street Scene there. After conducting the Broadway opera for Eastman Opera in 1992, Kowalke has written extensively about the piece, and his 65-minute concert sequence, Street Scenes, has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, BBC Symphony at the Proms, and the Berlin Radio Symphony. Last summer he gave one of the “ShowTalk” lectures at Glimmerglass and wrote the essay on Lost in the Stars for the program book.
Jennifer Kyker has recently published an short article in the American Journal of Public Health, exploring musical approaches to HIV prevention in Zimbabwe. As part of the University of Rochester’s Humanities Project initiative “Looking at AIDS 30 Years On,” she also recently organized a concert featuring Zimbabwean musicians Musekiwa Chingodza and Zivanai Masango, with participation from students enrolled in her spring 2011 course, “Music, Ethnography, and HIV/AIDS.”
Ralph Locke presented a paper on early examples of musical exoticism at the quinquennial IMS meeting (in Rome) in July 2012: “Musical Exoticism 1500-1750: Some Methodological Considerations and Case Studies.” The paper summarizes some of the chief concepts in his 2009 book Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections (now available in paperback) and explores the distinctive ways in which they apply in musical works from before the era of alla turca style, such as operas and oratorios of Handel in which an Eastern tyrant is a central character. He has just published a chapter on “Orientalism in Music” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 366 (a volume devoted to the problem of Orientalism in literature, cultural criticism, and the arts). Several of his articles have recently been reprinted in books and journals—in English but also in Italian, Portuguese, and Russian.
Honey Meconi has prepared the “Hildegard of Bingen” entry for Oxford Bibliographies Online. Recent presentations include “Caveat cantor: Manuscript Differences in Hildegard’s Songs” presented at the IMS meeting in Rome in July 2012, as well as “The Unknown Alamire: Lost Manuscripts Reclaimed,” read at the Medieval/Renaissance Music Conference in Nottingham, England. The latter paper will be given at the AMS meeting in New Orleans as well. Other talks in the coming months include presentations on Hildegard at Wellesley College and Rhode Island College, as well as talks on La Rue at the Huis van de Polyfonie and the University of Leuven in Belgium.
Holly Watkins published an article entitled “Slavoj Žižek: Responding from the Void” in a 2012 issue of Contemporary Music Review devoted to music and philosophy.
