School of Music faculty report recent performances, honors, appointments, presentations, and more.
Michael Brockman, saxophone
Faculty artist-in-residence Michael Brockman was featured on the cover of the November 2025 issue of Earshot Jazz magazine as he prepares to “pass the torch” to new leadership of the Seattle Jazz Repertory Orchestra, which he co-founded with drummer and educator Clarence Acox and has led for the past 30 years. Three finalists for the next artistic director have been identified and will lead the orchestra’s concerts in the 2025-26 season. Brockman will perform and lead the group’s annual Sacred Ellington concert on December 27 and takes his final bow with the group in May 2026 over two nights of performances with illustrious jazz bassist Christian McBride. Though he’s retiring from SRJO, Brockman says he will remain focused on his teaching duties at the School of Music and mentoring the musicians of the UW saxophone studio.
Robin McCabe, Piano
Professor Robin McCabe judged the semifinals of the 2026 Hilton Head International Piano Competition, held in Hilton Head, South Carolina in November.
John-Carlos Perea, Ethnomusicology
Ethnomusicology chair John-Carlos Perea was invited by Green Tukwila Partnership to play flute at a recent bilingual community gathering dedicated to salmon restoration and education. Billed as an afternoon of family-friendly science activities, Salmon Saturday (Sábado del Salmón) supported Green Tukwila’s mission of hosting hands-on events and work parties in Tukwila’s parks to help residents learn about local wildlife, native plants, tool use, and how to care for urban forests and waterlands. The partnership is supported by Forterra, EarthCorps, Duwamish Alive Coalition, Partner in Employment, the Service Board, Dirt Corps, King County Parks, and dedicated volunteers, including Perea, who volunteered his time to the festival.
Stephen Price, Organ Studies
Stephen Price, head of the UW Organ program, led a small group of current and prospective students on an organ study-abroad opportunity in Göteborg, Sweden in early October. Price performed a solo recital at the Göteborg International Organ Festival titled “Visions: American and Swedish Organ Music,” which he performed on two separate organs. Part one of the recital, featuring Symphony No. 2 by contemporary composer Erland Hildén, was performed on a North German Baroque Organ and part two, featuring pieces by Calvin Hampton, Florence Price, Leo Sowerby, George Shearing, and Charles Ives, was performed on an English organ built by Henry Willis in 1871.
Days after returning from the festival, Price and students performed at a celebration at Seattle’s St. Alphonsus church of the 40th anniversary of the installation of the church’s historic Fritts-Richards Organ. The event paid tribute to both the organ and the organ builder and philanthropist Paul B. Fritts. The evening also featured performances by faculty and students of the UW Organ Studio, remarks by Professor Emerita Carole Terry and Price (the Paul B. Fritts Faculty Fellow in Organ Studies at the UW), and a post-concert reception hosted by the School of Music. The event was co-sponsored by the School of Music, the Seattle Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, and St. Alphonsus Church.
David Rahbee, Orchestral Activities
Associate Professor David A. Rahbee was guest conductor for the second straight year at the Bar Harbor Music Festival Orchestra in Maine, where he conducted two performances of works by Sibelius, Richard Strauss, and Mozart, and collaborated with piano soloist Pyotr Akulov.
Frederick Reece, Music History
Assistant Professor of Music History Frederick Reece delivered a paper, “Contagion and Commemoration in Fanny Hensel’s Cholera Cantata,” and chaired a panel, “Beyond Misinformation: Early Nineteenth-Century Dubious Sources and the Historical Post-Truth,” at the annual joint meeting of the American Musicological Society (AMS) and the Society for Music Theory (SMT), held in November in Minneapolis. Reece’s faculty colleague, Stephen Rumph, chair of UW Music History, delivered “Extraction, Commodification, Circulation: Topical Representation and Modernity.”
Carrie Shaw, Voice
Voice program chair Carrie Shaw performed an art song recital of music, mostly by women of the African diaspora, at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in August with pianist Peter Cartwright.
Melia Watras, Strings
Professor Melia Watras’s latest album "The almond tree duos" was featured in Bandcamp Daily’s “The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, May 2025.” A new review of her disc "Play/Write" describes Watras's work as "a remarkable achievement, weaving music, text, and narrative into a cohesive and engaging whole” by the Journal of the American Viola Society in its Fall 2025 Volume. That same issue of JAVS includes an article authored by Watras, “A View of fantaSies,” which is an in-depth look at Watras’s composition "Fantasies in alto clef," commissioned by the American Viola Society. Over the summer, Watras was a faculty member at the Sarasota Music Festival, where she performed and taught viola and chamber music.
Giselle Wyers, Choral Conducting
Former conducting students of Giselle Wyers collaborated with the UW’s head of choral conducting recently as part of her research in Laban movement. The Giselle Wyers Choral Festival in Edina, Minnesota in early October featured collegiate and community ensembles led by Wyers’ former graduate students premiering five new works depicting different aspects, or “drives,” of Rudolf Laban’s method of analyzing human motion. The pieces were composed by Wyers during her Spring 2025 sabbatical. Choirs led by alumni conductors Jennifer Rodgers (’20 DMA, Choral Conducting, now at Iowa State University), Elisabeth Cherland (’19 DMA, Choral Conducting, now at Minnesota State University Mankato), Richard Carrick (DMA, Choral Conducting, now at College of St. Scholastica), and Bret Amundson (’12 DMA, Choral Conducting, now Dean of Arts at College of St. Scholastica) were among participating ensembles.
Professor Giselle Wyers reunited with former graduate conducting students for the Giselle Wyers Choral Festival in Minnesota in early October.