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Summer 2020 Student and Alumni Notes

Submitted by Joanne De Pue on June 25, 2020 - 4:09pm
Music Ed PhD candidate Juliana Cantarelli Vita
Music Ed PhD candidate Juliana Cantarelli Vita (Photo courtesy UW Music Education).

University School of Music students and alumni report recent academic appointments, performances, career milestones and other notable achievements.

Ethnomusicology doctoral student Jocelyn Mory was recently selected to receive a UW Graduate School Presidential Dissertation Fellowship to fund her dissertation writing for one quarter during the 2020-21 year. Her working title: Reclaiming the Archives: Matepe Music Sustainability in Zimbabwe’s Northeastern Borderlands.

Graduating senior Lucas Zeiter (BM Orchestral Instruments)  has been accepted into the master of music program at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City. He begins his studies in Autumn 2020. 

Flannery Youngblood (’20 BM Piano Performance) is also headed to New York state this autumn to begin a dual master’s program in Piano Performance and Pedagogy at New York University Steinhardt, where she has been awarded scholarships and a teaching assistantship to help fund her studies.

Emily Acri (’20 DMA Strings) moves to Carbondale, Colorado in late July to begin work as an ArtistYear fellow. ArtistYear is the first national AmeriCorps program for artists to dedicate themselves to a year of service to the country. This job will be a year-long service to a Title I school partner, implementing arts curriculums to underserved communities in the Roaring Fork Valley region of Colorado. 

Juliana Cantarelli Vita, violinist and PhD candidate in Music Education, received the Elizabeth May (Slater) Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology for her paper on the topic of archived field recordings for teaching music to children at the UW’s Music Partnership Program at Laurelhurst Eementary School. She received a substantial research grant from the American Orff-Schulwerk Association for continuing work in 2020-21 on collective song-writing within the UW Music Education Music Alive! in the Yakima Valleyprogram. Cantarelli Vita was appointed to The Orff Echo Editorial Board, and has received acceptances for proposals for conferences of the International Society for Music Education and the National Association for Music Education.

Giuilana Conti, violist and PhD candidate in Music Education, completed her second and last year of Presidency for the UW Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS) after five years of service on behalf of the School of Music and all 16,000 graduate and professional students at the University. In the spring 2020 term alone, she developed a three-year strategic plan for the organization, rebuilt the UW’s cross-campus Liaison program, developed and disseminated a COVID climate survey to all UW Seattle students, worked with the governor's office to support graduating professional students with temporary licensure, and produced a 21-session online Grad Career Symposium for all grad students in light of COVID-19 and changes in the job market.

Elisabeth Crabtree, singer, harpsichordist, and PhD student in Music Education, is currently under contract with Schott-Music publishing company to write a book on Orff Schulwerk for children that is based upon Carl Orff’s five volumes of Music for Children,first published in Munich in 1950. She is also the current president of the Northern California chapter of the American Orff-Schulwerk Association.

Ke (Kelsey) Guo,pianist, singer, performer of Chinese dizi (transverse flute), and PhD student in Music Education, is specializing in the study and performance of Sephardic song. She was named the Robinovitch Family Fellow by the Stroum Center in Jewish Studies Graduate Fellowship Program for the Academic Year 2020-2021 and was awarded two scholarships to support her study in Ladino language. She also was invited to offer an individual concert of Sephardic music at Castle Fuensaldaña, Spain.

Kaity Cassio Igari, MA student of Music Education, co-authored "Beyond the Music: Collaboration towards Anti-Racist Elementary Music Education," which is set to appear in the Winter 2020 issue of The Orff Echo.

In a jointly authored article for the Autumn 2020 issue of the Journal of Folklore and Education,students Kaity Cassio Igari, Juliana Cantarelli Vita, Cameron Armstrong, Jack Flesher, Skuli Gestsson, andProfessor Patricia Shehan Campbell(of the Music Education and Ethnomusicology program) discuss the current decolonial partnership between the university’s Music Alive! in the Yakima Valley program and the Yakama Nation Tribal School. The article’s title pays tribute to the collective song written by the Yakama students in collaboration with the music education group, “’Let’s stand together, Rep my tribe forever’: Teaching towards equity through collective songwriting at Yakama Nation Tribal School.”

Alumnus Eric Smedley (DMA Wind Conducting) has been named director of athletic bands at The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he is associate professor of music. As director he leads the university’s 300-member Marching Hundred. Former chair of the school’s Department of Bands and former associate director of the Marching Hundred, Smedley joined the Jacobs faculty in fall 2011.

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