PhD students win award and fellowship

Camp Algona Branch Band

Two musicology Ph.D. students have received special recognition for their ongoing research. Kelsey McGinnis accepted a Graduate Research Excellence Award from UI’s Research Council and Graduate College. Cited by the selection committee for her highly original work, Kelsey is writing a dissertation on the role of music in the U.S. military’s reeducation program for German POWs during WWII.

Hang Nguyen, whose dissertation explores the use of social media by American orchestras and opera companies, received a Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Fellowship. This competitive fellowship from UI’s Graduate College provides funding for students who are completing their dissertations.

Hearty congratulations to Hang and Kelsey!

 

 

 

Anne Leonard to Speak on Romantic Iconography

Wednesday, March 21, 4 pm, in Vox 2. In cooperation with the European Studies program of the University of Iowa, the Musicology and Music Theory Colloquium will present a special lecture by Anna Leonard, Lecturer and curator Curator of European Art at the Smart Museum of Art of the University of Chicago. Leonard specializes in 19th-century European art, particularly that of France and Belgium. Her research interests include Symbolism and Wagnerism, attention and modes of aesthetic experience, time in painting, and nationalism and internationalism. A primary area of scholarly focus has been the relations between visual art and music, which are the subject of a book she co-edited with musicologist Tim Shephard, The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture (2014), the first comprehensive reference work in this field. She has published six exhibition catalogues at the Smart Museum, chapters in several edited volumes, and an article in the Art Bulletin.  Leonard’s presentation is entitled “Present at the Creation: The Romantic Iconography of the Turned Canvas,” and the abstract follows.

Abstract: This paper addresses the motif of the turned canvas or canvas seen from the back, found in certain portraits of artists at work c. 1810–25, as a manifestation of Romantic theories of the work of art. The turned canvas invited beholders to complete the concealed work of art in their imaginations, just as artistic creation itself was viewed at the time as a largely internal process rather than a physical or manual one. My presentation explores the implications of these ideas for Romantic representations of artists at work. It pays special consideration to what were perceived to be the raw materials of creative inspiration, not just for painters but for composers as well. Evidence shows that the conception of painting as an imitation of nature—prevalent in classical aesthetics from the Renaissance onward, and particularly the seventeenth century—underwent significant revision in the Romantic period, drawing closer to non-mimetic processes of musical creation. The phenomenon of Beethoven portraiture is brought in to show how understandings of his compositional process not only influenced the representation of pictorial artists but also encouraged a redefinition of the work of art, following musical paradigms, as something essentially immaterial and even invisible.

Musicology takes road trip to SAM

Andrew Tubbs, Arthur Scoleri, C. A. Norling, Dr. Sarah Suhadolnik, and Lisa Mumme, ready to hit the road for SAM

Musicology students and faculty attended the annual meeting of the Society for American Music, held in Kansas City, February 28 through March 4.  Professor Sarah Suhadolnik appeared as a speaker for a workshop, organized by the Committee on the Conference, entitled “Strategies for Designing, Doing, and Discussing Digital Humanities Projects.”  Professor Marian Wilson Kimber, along with doctoral piano student Natalie Landowski, presented a  lecture-recital, “In a Woman’s Voice: Spoken-Word Compositions by American Women.”  The recital highlighted compositions discussed in her recent book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (University of Illinois Press, 2017).  At the student lunch and business meeting, master’s student Andrew Tubbs was elected co-chair of SAM’s student forum for the upcoming year.  Congratulations Andrew! 

Alumna Now Music Librarian at Alabama

Katherine E. Ramsey, MA in Musicology (2015), has taken a position as the Research and Instructional Librarian for Music, the Arts, and the Performing Arts at Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library at the University of Alabama. Ms. Ramsey recently received a Master of Science degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also holds bachelor’s degrees in flute and English. Ms. Ramsey has a special interest in fostering information literacy in the digital age.