Fall 2019 Faculty and Staff Notes

Submitted by Joanne De Pue on October 16, 2019 - 9:23am

Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir has been nominated for the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize
Saxophonist Michael Brockman performed at the closing of Tulas jazz club.
Ted Poor is wrapping up some recording projects with L.A. based musicians and producers.

Recent honors, accolades, research highlights and other news from the School of Music faculty and staff.

Jonathan Bernard, Music Theory

Professor Bernard presented a paper, “Composing with Intervals: Elliott Carter’s Negotiation of the Pitch / Pitch-Class Nexus,” at the symposium New Concepts in Harmony in Musical Composition, 1945–1975, convened by Gianmario Borio, Pascal Decroupet, and Christoph Neidhöfer at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice last June. He also read a shorter version of this paper on a session drawn from this symposium at the meetings of the American Musicological Society in Boston in November. His most recent publication, “What the First Minimalists Learned—or Didn’t—from Webern,” appears in Neue Perspektiven: Anton Webern und das Komponieren im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Pietro Cavallotti et al. (Vienna: Lafite, 2019).

Michael Brockman, Saxophone

The UW’s classical saxophone instructor celebrated the opening weekend of Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra's 25th Anniversary Season with concerts, receptions, and other festivities. “It is a very big year for the SRJO,” he reports. "Mayor Durkin declared October 5th as Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra Day, and SRJO is the three-time winner of the Earshot Jazz award for NW Concert of the Year." Brockman also performed as part of the final, closing night of Seattle's famous Tula's Jazz Club, which served for 26 years as the home base for Seattle's jazz community, but lost its lease in the midst of fast-paced building and development in Seattle's Belltown district. The final night was both a celebration and farewell to the iconic venue.

Patricia Shehan Campbell, Music Education/Ethnomusicology

Patricia Shehan Campbell was keynote for the 50th anniversary meeting of the Japanese Society for Music Education, Tokyo, in October 2019. She is completing her work as editor of two books, Global Music Cultures (Oxford) and Teaching World Music in Higher Education (Routledge), both set for publication in 2020.

Shannon Dudley, Ethnomusicology

The book Professor Dudley co-wrote with UW colleagues Marisol Beríos Miranda and Michell Habell-Pallán, American Sabor: Latinos and Latinas in US Popular Music/ Latinos y latinas en la musica popular estadounidense (University of Washington Press), is the winner of Best History in the 2019 Association for Recorded Sound Collection’s (ARSC’s) Awards for Excellence in the category Best Historical Research in Recorded Rock or Popular Music. ARSC, a nonprofit organization devoted to the preservation of recorded sound, awards the honors annually to recognize and elevate the finest work being published in the field of recorded sound research. Winners will be recognized during an awards banquet at ARCS’s annual conference, to be held in Montréal, Canada in May 2020.

Robin McCabe, Piano

Following the ten-year anniversary session of the Seattle Piano Institute in July, Professor McCabe joined the faculty of the New York University’s “Piano Intensive” Festival in New York, performing and teaching there this past August. In October, Dr. McCabe presented a lecture-performance, “What is Music Actually About?” to Seattle Rotary. In November, she and her sister, Rachelle McCabe, presented a duo piano recital for Bellevue’s East Side Music Teachers’ Association, a benefit concert towards scholarships for aspiring music students.

Michael Partington, Guitar

Chair of the UW guitar studies program spent a busy summer performing, presenting, and teaching at festivals in Carrión de Los Condes, Spain; Sauble Beach, Ontario; and Kaslo, British Columbia, as well as directing the third year of his own intensive workshop at the School of Music. He also performed solo engagements in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Partington is currently at work on a new CD featuring music written for him since 2015 by British and American composers.

Ted Poor, Jazz Studies

The drummer and assistant professor at the School of Music continues his work as a member of the band of Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter Andrew Bird, appearing on and touring the albums Are You Serious and My Finest Work Yet (Loma Vista/Concord). Recent collaborations with L.A.-based producers and artists such as Michel Froom, Blake Mills, Tony Berg, and Madison Cunningham included an appearance on Cunningham’s recent release Who Are You Now (Verve). Poor also continues to perform regularly on the live radio broadcast of Live From Here with mandolinist/host Chris Thile, and he recently completed “You Already Know,” his debut release with record label New Deal (Verve/Universal). The set is a collaboration with saxophonist Andrew D’Angelo and producer Blake Mills.

Christopher Roberts, Music Education

Christopher Roberts, lecturer and coordinator of music teacher preparation, recently published a book chapter, “World Music Pedagogy in Early Schooling: Issues of Implementation," in the Springer publication Music in early childhood: Multi-disciplinary perspectives and interdisciplinary exchanges.

Timothy Salzman, Wind Conducting

Professor Timothy Salzman served as an adjudicator and master class presenter at the Illinois State University Concert Band Festival in late April. This past October, he conducted ’The President’s Own’ United States Marine Band in the world premiere of Peter Boyer’s “Silver Fanfare” in Meany Hall on October 2, the first concert of the Marine Band’s 30-day West Coast concert tour.

JoAnn Taricani, Music History

Professor Taricani will publish a recording of improvisatory performance of pieces from a 1661 song collection titled Soundscape for a Coronation: An Antidote against Melancholy, to be issued by Centaur Records, to accompany a critical edition of the same collection. This project was presented with the American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award in 2017. She also was quoted in a recent article in Early Music America regarding a revival of the 1737 opera The Dragon of Wantley by the Haymarket Theatre in Chicago this October. Read the article here. Professor Taricani is slated to appear as a panel member at the national annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in January 2020, discussing outreach for the humanities with the executive director of the MLA.

In other news, Professor Taricani has received support from the UW's Simpson Center for the Humanities for "Re-Envisioning Giselle," a symposium on the reconstruction of the 19th-century ballet Giselle. The all-day symposium, co-directed with UW alumnus Doug Fullington of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, is set for April 17, 2020, in the Walker-Ames Room in Kane Hall, with support from the PNB, School of Music, and the Princeton University Department of Music, also participating in the symposium. A companion symposium will be held at Princeton later in April. More details will be announced soon here. Professor Taricani also has organized a panel discussion on arts criticism to be held on April 16, 2020, 3 pm, in the Peterson Room of the Allen Library, with the critics Alastair Macaulay (dance critic at The New York Times); Marina Harss (dance critic who writes for the New Yorker, The New York Times, and Dance Tabs magazine); and Melinda Bargreen (music critic, Seattle Times); the panel will be moderated by Professor Simon Morrison of Princeton University.

Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, Cello

The UW faculty cellist was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize, a $50,000 prize awarded to performers bi-annually. She also launched the first UW Chamber Music Institute this past summer on the UW campus, an intensive one-week exploration of chamber music repertoire led by Thorsteinsdóttir with guest faculty artists Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano; Benjamin Peled, violin; and new UW colleague Rachel Lee Priday, violin.

Cristina Valdés, Piano

The faculty pianist has given several performances in the Seattle Symphony's new performance space, Octave 9, including the U.S. premiere of Heiner Goebbel's "Under Construction" for piano and playback, and a solo program of all living composers as part of Octave’s Contemporary Music Marathon. She also performed Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Sammamish Symphony this past June and recorded Kotoka Suzuki's "Shimmer, Tree| In Memoriam Jonathan Harvey” for piano and fixed media this past summer for a project funded by New Music USA.

Giselle Wyers, Choral Conducting

Professor Wyers conducts three all-state choruses in the coming season: Kansas Women’s All-State, Nevada All-State Mixed Choir, and Wisconsin Treble All-State chorus. She also serves as guest conductor at the California Catholic College Choral Festival in November, 2019. She has been commissioned to compose five choral works in the 2019-20 season on relevant socio-political themes, including “A Roof and a Bed,” on the theme of homelessness, premiering in June 2020 via the Portland Lesbian Choir; “May Our Eyes Remain Open,” premiering in December 2019 via Gilroy High School Chamber Singers, remembering victims of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting; and “Water is the Soul of the Earth,” premiering in spring 2020 via Hobart and William Smith College Cantori, on the theme of water pollution. A fourth commission on the theme of the climate crisis incorporates texts from activist Greta Thunberg and naturalist Jane Goodall and premieres in Boston in April. Finally, the Port Angeles High School choir and band program has commissioned Wyers to set Maya Angelou’s powerful poem “Continue” in honor of the retirement of spouses Doug and Jolene Gailey, both public school teachers at Port Angeles Hight School.

Staff Notes

Katie Hollenbach, Admissions and Recruitment

Her article "Teenage Agency and Popular Music Reception in World War II-Era Frank Sinatra Fan Clubs" was accepted for publication in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. It examines wartime Sinatra fan clubs through the lens of fan club newsletters and correspondences, providing insight into how this specific fan community used their adoration of Sinatra as a base to explore international relationships, develop professional skills, and engage in personal expression during World War II. In other news, Hollenbach also recently became the book review editor for the Society for American Music's triannual newsletter, the Bulletin.

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