The word “retirement” may conjure images of naps, gardening, reading, travel, and other leisurely pursuits, but the scholarly and artistic work of many retired School of Music faculty continues unabated after their exit from professorial duties at the University of Washington. Below are just a few recent updates from former longtime professors who have retired in recent years. Many thanks to Professor Emerita Patricia Campbell, Music Education, for instigating this report!
George Bozarth, Music History
Upon retiring in 2018 from a forty-year stint teaching about music history and culture, George Bozarth, with his wife, fortepianist Tamara Friedman, moved to the lovely little fishing and farming town of La Conner, WA, with an inspiring view from his study's window of the beautiful Skagit Bay and, on clear days, the majestic Olympic Mountains. In addition to producing concerts of Classical and Romantic music on period instruments for Musique du Jour Presents (Seattle) and Anacortes Early Music, and offering recitals and teaching tours at the Skagit Historical Keyboard Museum, he is spending his "permanent sabbatical" finishing work on three very contrasting book-length projects:
- “The First of his Profession in this Kingdom”: The Life and Times of Ferdinand Weber, Organ-Builder, Harpsichord-Maker and Forte Piano-Inventor in Dublin
- Brahms in Boston: A Study in the Reception of Art Music in Nineteenth-Century America
- "Ticket to Ride": Becoming Cathy Berberian: The Intimate Letters to David Greene, 1948–1982
Patricia Shehan Campbell, Music Education
Now in her third year as professor emeritus, Patricia Shehan Campbell lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she continues her scholarly pursuits at the nexus of Music Education and Ethnomusicology. She retired from the UW in June 2022 after 33 years on the School of Music faculty. In 2022-23, she was named Fulbright Research Professor at Carleton University, Ottawa. In spring 2024, she held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Munich’s Ludwig Maxmillian University. In 2024-25, Campbell has been engaged in a whirlwind of lecturing on music, culture, and learning at Seoul National University (September), the University of Limerick (October), and Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University and Mahidol University (November). This year, she also was keynote speaker at the Music China conference in Shanghai (China’s equivalent of NAMM: the National Association of Music Merchants) and at the Hong Kong conference on Xiqu and Intangible Cultural Heritage. She will be keynote speaker this spring at the European Association of Schools in Portugal. Her invited on-campus residencies since retirement have also included those at the University of North Texas, University of Florida, University of Arkansas, University of Texas, Syracuse University, UCLA, Universite Laval (Canada), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Levinsky College of Music (Israel). Still an active researcher, Campbell has accepted two book contracts and is committed to the supervision of UW PhD students in Music Education and Ethnomusicology (five of whom have now graduated since her retirement, with three more coming to the finish line soon).
Larry Starr, Music History
Larry Starr is active in retirement, offering talks to local musical organizations and interest groups in Seattle, and writing. He retired from the School of Music in 2018 after 41 years on the School of Music faculty. In 2021 his book Listening to Bob Dylan was published as a volume in the University of Illinois Press series “Music in American Life.” This book, like all of Starr’s current work and his pre-retirement teaching at the UW, reflects his passionate concern with the experience of active, attentive listening to music—an experience too often neglected in music scholarship of many kinds. With his work, he seeks to reach the music specialist and non-specialist alike.
Carole Terry, Organ Studies
Carole Terry, professor emerita of Organ and Harpsichord, retired from the School of Music in 2019 after 40 years on the faculty. She was visiting professor at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music in Fall semester of 2022. Every week she taught the Sacred Music students on various pipe organs throughout the campus and held a weekly historical seminar on various organ-related topics. Topics included the organ works of Brahms, Mendelssohn, J.S. Bach’s Leipzig chorale preludes, Frescobaldi’s performance directions for toccatas, and German romantic organ registration. She also worked with students individually on body position, finger technique, and muscular usage to create musical gestures and a beautiful melodic line in their chosen repertoire.
In November of 2023, Terry participated in the Max Reger Festival in Worcester, Massachusetts. At All Saints Episcopal Church, she played a recital of Reger and other German romantic composers. During the festival she also lectured on Reger’s important collection of chorale preludes, Opus 67.
Terry's focus in the last couple of years has been the production of an upcoming article entitled “The Body and Practice” in a book about practice for Oxford University Press. This article highlights the muscles used for organ playing in different types of repertoires. She has lectured to the piano performance students at the School of Music on this subject and in January 2024 gave a lecture demonstration to the American Guild of Organists, Seattle Chapter, on the “Physiology of Organ Technique.” She will continue to lecture and write on “How the body works when playing the organ: A study in muscular usage.
Terry and her husband have been traveling frequently to New York and Los Angeles to see their son and daughter and three grandchildren-all under the age of four.