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Student/Alumni Update: Summer 2015

Submitted by Joanne De Pue on June 17, 2015 - 11:24am

Music Ed PhD student Cory Meals has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music Education at Kennesaw State University (Photo courtesy KSU).

Performance, scholarship, and new appointments are recurring themes for UW Music students and alumni as the arrival of summer marks  the conclusion of a most ambitious 2014-15 academic year.

Music Education PhD students Jamey Kelley and Cory Meals have been appointed to tenure track positions in the final stages of their respective PhD programs. Kelley has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music Education at Florida International University in Miami. Meals (also a member of the UW wind conducting program) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Music Education at Kennesaw State University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he will also be assisting with the launch of the school’s brand new athletic band program.

Katell Morand, post-doctoral researcher with the Laboratory for Music Cognition, Culture & Learning in the Music Education program, has been appointed an assistant professor at Université Paris Ouest Nanterre, where she will continue her work at the intersection of ethnomusicology, cognition and music learning.

UW Music Education alums are on the move as Sarah Watts joins the faculty of Pennsylvania State University and Sarah Bartolome relocates to Northwestern University after a successful tenure at Louisiana State University.

Doctoral composition student Kevin Baldwin will spend most of August in Stuttgart, Germany participating in the summer master class for young composers hosted by the public foundation and residency program Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Baldwin is among 16 composers from around the world chosen to take part in the master class, which will be led by Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin and Berlin-based composer/educators Rebecca Saunders and Ming Tsao. He was selected based on his piece titled 'the armless clock understands time [ii]' for Alto Flute, Bass Clarinet, Violin, Cello, and Piano.

While at the academy, Baldwin will participate in discussions, private lessons and group sessions about his and other students’ work. The course concludes with a residency by Freiburg-based Ensemble SurPlus, which will prepare and perform two concerts of the participants‘ compositions.

Choral conducting students are involved in a variety of performance and research activities this summer. DMA student Elizabeth MacIsaac is presenting a paper on Canadian choral music at Europa Cantat in Pecs, Hungary. DMA students Leann Conley-Holcom and Joel Bevington, meanwhile, are set to co-direct a youth choral workshop for three weeks in Beijing.

Alumnus Jonathan Pasternack (DMA Orchestral Conducting), who served as interim director of orchestral activities at the UW from 2010-13, has been appointed music director of the Port Angeles Symphony. In announcing the new appointment to the award-winning volunteer orchestra founded in 1932, the Symphony’s board of directors called Pasternack “only the sixth professional conductor of the orchestra’s 83-year history.”

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