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RESEARCH & CREATIVE ACTIVITIES

Our faculty and students engage in research and creative work that ranges from performances at the Kennedy Center to masterclasses in local schools, and from international conferences to community-centered workshops. Our scholarship results in recordings, articles, books and editions that reveal music’s beauty and complexity.

As individuals and in teams, our faculty perform across the globe, provide new research frameworks, engage students, explore archives and more. As performers, educators, composers and scholars, we create new knowledge and contribute to UMD's research enterprise.

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Middle School Music Uptake and Achievement: Evidence From the 2016 Arts National Assessment of Educational Progress

Kenneth Elpus' article is published in the Journal of Research in Music Education.

School of Music, College of Arts and Humanities

Author/Lead: Kenneth Elpus
Dates:

The purpose of this study was to examine the demographic characteristics and music achievement of eighth-grade students in the United States using evidence from the 2016 National Assessment of Educational Progress in the Arts (NAEP). Analyzing NAEP data from a nationally representative sample of 4,340 eighth graders attending public and private middle schools in the United States in 2016, The author estimated enrollment percentages in various kinds of music classes and compared Music NAEP scores across various individual characteristics. Results showed that 64% of eighth graders enrolled in a school music class, with 24% of eighth graders enrolling in an ensemble class. Among ensemble students, there was underrepresentation of Black and Latinx students and underrepresentation of students of lower socioeconomic status. Students who were enrolled in general music and not an ensemble did not follow this pattern: Black and Latinx students and students of lower socioeconomic means were overrepresented among general music students. Controlling for contextual and demographic characteristics, ensemble music students significantly outscored nonmusic students on the Music NAEP, but students enrolled in general music as their only music course scored statistically indistinguishably from their nonmusic peers. 

Ji Su Jung Honored with Avery Fisher Career Grant

Jung is the first-ever percussionist to receive the award.

School of Music, College of Arts and Humanities

Dates:

Ji Su Jung (percussion) is a 2022 recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant. Administered by Lincoln Center, honorees receive an award of $25,000 to be used towards furthering their careers. Up to five awards are given each year, and Jung is the first percussionist to receive the honor.

Transparent Waves

Album featuring Thomas DeLio's composition released by Neuma Records.

School of Music

Author/Lead: Thomas J. DeLio
Dates:

"Transparent Waves," an album featuring selected compositions by Thomas DeLio, has been released by Neuma Records. The CD is part of a series of DeLio’s collected compositions, which includes four CDs and two DVDs over the past two decades. "Transparent Waves" includes more than a dozen electroacoustic and instrumental works written between 1995 and 2021.

Barbara Haggh-Huglo Named Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society

Professor of musicology at UMD is a renowned and pioneering researcher of medieval and Renaissance music.

School of Music, College of Arts and Humanities

Author/Lead: Barbara H. Haggh-Huglo
Dates:

Barbara Haggh-Huglo, professor of musicology in the University of Maryland School of Music, was elected an honorary member of the American Musicological Society (AMS), the largest musicological organization in the world. Honorary members are those scholars “who have made outstanding contributions to furthering its stated object and whom the Society wishes to honor.” The award is the highest honor of the AMS, reserved for the most esteemed of scholars. Read more about this honor.

Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France

Assistant Professor Siv B. Lie's book is the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English.

School of Music

Author/Lead: Siv B. Lie
Dates:

Published in October 2021 with the University of Chicago Press, Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France shows how relationships between racial identities, jazz, and national belonging become entangled in France.

Jazz manouche—a genre known best for its energetic, guitar-centric swing tunes—is among France’s most celebrated musical practices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It centers on the recorded work of famed guitarist Django Reinhardt and is named for the ethnoracial subgroup of Romanies (also known, often pejoratively, as “Gypsies”) to which Reinhardt belonged. French Manouches are publicly lauded as bearers of this jazz tradition, and many take pleasure and pride in the practice while at the same time facing pervasive discrimination. Jazz manouche uncovers a contradiction at the heart of France’s assimilationist republican ideals: the music is portrayed as quintessentially French even as Manouches themselves endure treatment as racial others.

In this book, Siv B. Lie explores how this music is used to construct divergent ethnoracial and national identities in a context where discussions of race are otherwise censured. Weaving together ethnographic and historical analysis, Lie shows that jazz manouche becomes a source of profound ambivalence as it generates ethnoracial difference and socioeconomic exclusion. As the first full-length ethnographic study of French jazz to be published in English, this book enriches anthropological, ethnomusicological, and historical scholarship on global jazz, race and ethnicity, and citizenship while showing how music can be an important but insufficient tool in struggles for racial and economic justice.

Visit the book's multimedia companion website.

Larissa Dedova Releases Solo Album with Centaur Records

Album features all completed piano sonatas of Franz Schubert.

School of Music

Author/Lead: Larissa Dedova
Dates:

Larissa Dedova (piano) released a solo CD, "Schubert: Piano Sonatas," on Oct. 15, 2021 with Centaur Records. The album, which includes all of Franz Schubert's completed piano sonatas, follows Dedova's previous acclaimed recordings of the complete piano works of Debussy and Ravel, also with Centaur Records.

Hybrids, Hints & Hooks: Violin Music by Dan Dediu

Associate Professor of Violin Irina Muresanu releases an album with Divine Art records.

School of Music

Author/Lead: Irina Muresanu
Dates:

Muresanu teams up with pianist Valentina Sandu-Dediu for this album, which features music for violin and piano and for solo violin by Romanian composer Dan Dediu (b. 1967). Dediu's compositions feature a process he calls ‘hybridisation,' in which he combines pieces of existing music to create a new and individual work. On this album, Don Giovanni/Juan "SonatOpera," op. 53 is an example of this, combining elements of Mozart and Strauss. Both the "SonatOpera" and "A Mythological Bestiary" were written for and premiered by Muresanu and Sandu-Dediu.

Read More about Hybrids, Hints & Hooks: Violin Music by Dan Dediu

Chris Gekker Wins Award for "Moon Marked" CD

Chris Gekker's (trumpet) CD, Moon Marked (Divine Art Recordings), took second place at the American Prize competition.

School of Music

Author/Lead: Chris Gekker
Contributor(s): Mark Hill, Katherine Murdock, Rita Sloan
Dates:

Chris Gekker (trumpet) was awarded second place in the solo instrumentalist category by The American Prize for 2021 for his CD, “Moon Marked” (2020, Divine Art Recordings). This project featured faculty members Mark Hill (oboe), Katherine Murdock (viola) and Rita Sloan (piano) as well as Gekker's children and alumni Lianna Gekker ’15 (B.M. jazz piano) and Jason Gekker ’20 (M.M. double bass). The album includes compositions by Richard Auldon Clark, Alistair Coleman, Carson Cooman, Eric Ewazen, Lance Hulme and Franklin Kiermyer.

Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace

Assistant Professor of Musicology William Robin's book has been published by Oxford University Press.

School of Music

Author/Lead: William Robin
Dates:
Publisher: Oxford University Press

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.

Read More about Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace

The Corno D'Amore

French Horn Lecturer Justin Drew releases an album with Tonsehen.

School of Music

Author/Lead: Justin Drew
Dates:
Publisher: Tonsehen

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.

Read More about The Corno D'Amore