RESEARCH & CREATIVE ACTIVITIES

Amidst the heated fray of the Culture Wars emerged a scrappy festival in downtown New York City called Bang on a Can. Presenting eclectic, irreverent marathons of experimental music in crumbling venues on the Lower East Side, Bang on a Can sold-out concerts for a genre that had been long considered box office poison. Through the 1980s and 1990s, three young, visionary composers--David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe--nurtured Bang on a Can into a multifaceted organization with a major record deal, a virtuosic in-house ensemble, and a seat at the table at Lincoln Center, and in the process changed the landscape of avant-garde music in the United States.

The works on this album are a series of four Baroque transcriptions for horn and organ. Drew's intention in transcribing and recording these works was to add to the horn repertoire, giving the greater horn community access to new Baroque solo literature. Two transcriptions (Marcello and Albinoni) were taken from oboe concertos and two (J.S. Bach and Telemann) from oboe d’amore concertos. All of these works were originally accompanied with small string ensemble and continuo. Drew chose music originally composed for oboe and oboe d’amore because the melodies were both beautiful and accessible for the modern-day horn player. These melodies also embody four different types of Baroque style and melodic mastery. The organ was chosen to accompany the horn because it is an instrument that was prominent to the period in which these works were written. This pairing of the organ with horn provides a sense of historical balance; the horn, as a modern instrument, reflects the present, while the organ honors the past.

Since the late 1960s, the Andean conjunto has served as Bolivia’s paramount expression of “national” folkloric-popular music. This book illuminates how this musical tradition obtained such an elevated status in Bolivia, arguing that it represented the culmination of over four decades of criollo-mestizo musical activities that framed Andean indigenous music as the roots of national culture. More broadly, Panpipes & Ponchos offers the first book-length study of the Bolivian folkloric music movement that chronicles how it developed in close dialogue with state projects and transnational artistic trends for the critical period spanning the 1920s to 1960s.

Through talk and performance, participants in the genre of jazz manouche articulate Manouche (French Romani/“Gypsy”) ethnoracial identities. This article takes a semiotic approach to exploring how ethnoracial differences are perceived sonically and reified through language about jazz manouche guitar technique. By analyzing interlocutors' sensory descriptors such as power, rawness, and even the feeling of ethnoracial identity itself, this article reveals continuities between individual sonic perceptions of race and ethnicity and broader semiotic ideologies about race and ethnicity. These discourses can serve or compromise Manouche interests as they naturalize ideas about social difference.

On "Beauty Crying Forth," flutist Sarah Frisof and pianist Daniel Pesca present repertoire spanning one and half centuries for flute by female composers. Including music by Clara Schumann, Lili Boulanger, Kaija Saariaho, Tania León, Shulamit Ran and Amy Williams, Frisof and Pesca, with guest cellist Hannah Collins, chart two parallel lineages: the evolution of flute repertoire from the Romantic era to the current day, and the overlooked role of female composers in shaping that repertoire.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of music practice instruction on middle school band students’ ability to articulate and incorporate practice strategies. Participants were middle school band students at a large suburban middle school (N = 105). Using a pretest–posttest quasi-experimental design, participants were divided into control (n = 53) and experimental (n = 52) groups. Participants in the experimental group received 3 weeks of practice strategy instruction during ensemble warm-up time, and the control group continued with their typical warm-up routine. Pretest and posttest data included self-reported practice strategy lists (N = 105) and video of individual practice sessions (n = 20). Both self-reported and video data were coded and analyzed using descriptive statistics as well as pretest–posttest within-groups comparisons. Thirteen hours of video data were further analyzed using an observational measure of self-regulation. Analyses revealed that experimental group participants identified and utilized significantly more practice strategies following the instructional intervention. Posttest experimental group practice sessions also revealed a more mature approach to practicing, including more strategic behaviors, greater variety in musical objectives, and longer periods spent focused on short excerpts of music. Implications for future research and middle school instrumental classroom practice are discussed.

Annapolis Opera and its Board of Trustees announced today that Maestro Craig Kier will become the company's next Artistic and Music Director. Craig Kier will succeed Ronald J. Gretz, who announced his retirement in February 2019 after serving as Artistic Director of the Annapolis Opera for 37 years. Kier will assume his role on July 1, 2020 and opens the Annapolis Opera 2020-2021 season conducting Giacomo Puccini's La bohème. Kier will continue to serve as the director of the School of Music's Maryland Opera Studio alongside his new role.

William Robin's (musicology) article, "Horizons ’83, Meet the Composer, and New Romanticism’s New Marketplace," was recently published in the journal Musical Quarterly. Drawing on archival research, the article explores the ramifications of the New York Philharmonic's 1983 Horizons festival, and its theme of New Romanticism, on the world of contemporary composition.

Andrea Brown (conducting & ensembles) has presented three different clinics at various conferences in the past six months. In May, she presented “Mentoring Female Leaders” at the CBDNA Athletic Band Directors Conference in Seattle, WA. In August, she presented “Using Technology to Improve Kinesthetic Skill Learning & Confidence of Music Conductors” at the Oxford Conducting Institute International Conducting Studies Conference in Sydney, Australia. In November, she presented “Yes, It Matters! Moving to Match What We Teach and Hear” at the VMEA In-Service Conference in Hot Springs, VA.

Barbara Haggh-Huglo (musicology) gave one of three invited keynote lectures with translation into Chinese at a triennial Chinese musicology conference on Western music at the China Conservatory in Beijing on November 9. During her stay in Beijing, she taught a graduate seminar class on Western plainchant and Parisian polyphony of the thirteenth century and attended some sessions of a conference on arts management education also held at the China Conservatory.