RESEARCH & CREATIVE ACTIVITIES

Siv B. Lie (ethnomusicology) won the 2022 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe for her book "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Fernando Rios (ethnomusicology) presented his paper “Escuchen Nuestras Voces (Hear Our Voices): Salvadoran Refugee Songs and the Challenge of Using ‘The Music of the People’ in Social Justice Movements” at the 2022 Annual National Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in New Orleans in November 2022, where he also served as chair and organizer of a panel titled “Transnational Solidarity in Latinx and Latin American Social Justice Movements in the US.”

Andrea Brown (conducting and ensembles) was a 2022 recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Jessica Grimmer (musicology) received the Best Paper award for her presentation of “Community-Centered Sustainability: A Case Study of the Music Encoding Initiative” at the Music Encoding Conference in May 2022. Co-authored with UMD iSchool assistant professor Katrina Fenlon, the paper is a part of the ongoing Sustaining Digital Community Collections project, which has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Composer Mark Edwards Wilson and Ravello Records present Time Variations, a stirring journey through the dimensions of musical style. Wilson blends soprano vocals with piano and electroacoustic synthesizers, flute with electronic tape, and experiments with the stylistic boundaries of solo violin and chamber ensembles in works inspired by poetry, Greek mythology, and various musical expressions throughout time. By fusing the idioms of early music with contemporary compositional concepts, Wilson has created a modulating and continuously transforming stylistic synthesis that awaits listeners.

In this article, Haggh-Huglo argues that documents recording foundations of saints' offices permit a more accurate dating of late medieval liturgical manuscripts than paleography. Haggh-Huglo discusses several liturgical books from Cambrai that were misdated with paleography. A problem is that scribes used scripts based on earlier models.

The second volume of Thomas DeLio's collected essays, Analytical Studies About Music, has been published by The Edwin Mellen Press. As with the first volume, this second collection consists of reprints of his essays from the past 40 years initially published in major theory journals in the United States and Europe.

This article explores how music professionals promote interdiscursive oppositions between musical aurality and musical literacy to unsettle the terms of their racialization. For many French Manouches (a subgroup of Romanies/“Gypsies”), music is a source of pride, profit, and public recognition. Manouche musicians often valorize their own sensorially centered pedagogical approaches in distinction to music literacy as espoused by French schools and conservatories. In doing so, they link notions of expressivity, naturalness, and ethical behavior to their Manouche identity in contrast to White French society. They construct parallel contrasts between Black and White musicalities in the jazz world to convey their value as racialized musicians, pointing to transnational formations of race and White supremacy. Because French color-blind policy constrains speech about race and racism, advocacy for an aurally centered approach to music pedagogy becomes a way for speakers to denounce the discrimination Manouches face as racialized subjects. For these musicians, self-exoticization is a multifaceted tactic to develop a market niche, to prove themselves as good neoliberal subjects, and to disrupt the racial logics that render such alterity both an asset and a burden. Their discourse remains powerful even if, in practice, some make use of the very music-theoretical frameworks they critique.

The responsory verses of early chant (Gregorian, Old Roman, Ambrosian, Beneventan, and Old Hispanic) were sung to recitation tones more elaborate than the tones of antiphonal psalmody. Eight standard responsory verse tones were in use in the ninth century on the Continent, but new melodies gradually replaced them. At first, these retained some characteristics of the old tones, then later abandoned them. Comparison of responsory verse melodies from offices for Irish, Anglo-Saxon, and selected Continental saints shows similar changes in the melodies over time, but also distinct stylistic characteristics in the treatment of text and in the development of melody within the prescribed tonal space. Cantors often sang responsory verses on the Continent in the earlier Middle Ages. This study reveals the musicianship of the corresponding medieval Irish and Insular singer-composers.

Justin Drew was named a national finalist in the professional division of the 2022 American Prize in Instrumental Performance for his first solo album, “The Corno D'Amore,” released under the Tonsehen label. The "nation's most comprehensive series of contests in the performing arts," the American Prize is "designed to recognize and reward the best performing artists, directors, ensembles and composers in the United States."