Michigan Muse Summer 2023 > Faculty Updates

Faculty Updates

Colleen Conway (music education) is currently serving as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Music Teacher Education and recently completed her term as editor-in-chief of Arts Education Policy Review. She presented in winter 2023 at the Michigan Music Conference, the New Directions in Music Education Conference (with alumnae Jessica Vaughan Marra and Ann Marie Stanley) and the American Educational Research Association (with current PhD students Sean Grier, Dan Taylor, and Tiffanie Waldron). Her second edition of Musicianship-Focused Curriculum and Assessment (GIA Publications) will be available in November 2023.

Aaron Dworkin (entrepreneurship & leadership) published his second collection of poetry, The Poetjournalist. He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and was named poet-journalist-in-residence of Grantmakers in the Arts and of Complexions Contemporary Ballet.

During the 2022–23 academic year, Karen Fournier (music theory) published two articles. The first, “Gender, Rage, and Age in Alanis Morissette’s ‘Reasons I Drink,’” appears in the collection Gender and Age/Aging in Popular Culture, edited by Nicole Haring, Roberta Maierhofer, and Barbara Ratzenböck (Bielefelder Verlag, 2023). Papers in this collection engage with the comparatively new field of age/aging studies to examine how intersections of gender and age reflect what Susan Sontag (1972) termed a “social judgement” against women rather than a “biological eventuality.” In Fournier’s second paper, she returns to her established interest in punk rock with a critique of the subculture’s response to trans identity as recounted in two memoirs. This essay, “Jayne County, Laura Jane Grace, and the HerStory of Transgender Punks in America,” appears in the collection Women in Rock Memoirs: Music, History, and Life-Writing, edited by Cristina Garrigòs and Marika Ahonen (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Michael Hopkins (music education) was guest conductor for the Florida All-State High School Honors Orchestra, the Eastern Tennessee All-State Symphony Orchestra, and the University of Memphis Honors Orchestra. He had several new pieces published by Alfred and Kendor, and he presented string education sessions at the Texas Orchestra Directors Conference, the New York State School Music Association Summer Conference, and the national conference of the American String Teachers Association.

Nathan Martin (music theory) recently had an article, “Toward a ‘Global’ History of Music Theory,” published in Journal of Music Theory 66 (2022).

In spring 2023, Christianne Myers (theatre & drama) was the co-lead convener for the fourth ReDressing the Narrative Costume Pedagogy workshop. Last year, the workshop considered the sustainability of costume design, using “boundary thinking” to explore healthier relationships around teaching, design, and production. This year, the workshop investigated global aspects of sustainability and discussed questions such as, What are the ethical and ecological implications of costume production? As costumers and as educators, what are our responsibilities to climate justice and social justice? How can academic spaces work as laboratories for encouraging industry change towards “greening” our costume practice? Myers’s article published on the HowlRound website shared the Department of Theatre & Drama’s approach to including students in the season selection process.

In January 2023, Tiffany Ng (organ, carillon) toured Florida performing carillon concerts of compositions by Black composers and civil rights music in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In April, she taught master classes at Yale University followed by “inclusive repertoire office hours” to help students expand their repertoire with works by diverse composers.

Diane Oliva (musicology) published the article “Sonic Decency: Music in the Aftermath of Guatemala’s 1773 Santa Marta Earthquake” in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, which is the flagship journal for the discipline of musicology. The article examines the ways that music marks and is marked by natural events. It expands the relationship between music and nature, weaving a history of music that intersects with environmental history. The article centers on the Santa Marta earthquake of 1773 and its effects on music and musicians in the colonial capital of Santiago de Guatemala. Archival work for this article included research at numerous archives in Guatemala and Spain, supported by a CLIR-Mellon Fellowship for Research in Original Archival Sources.

The new innovation developed by Amy Porter (flute), My Breathing Buddy, is on the market through her new company Anatomy of Sound™. Mentored by U-M Innovation Partners mentor-in-residence MJ Cartwright, and funded by SPARK Ann Arbor, UMOR, and MSBA, Porter has developed and patented a lung/rib cage/diaphragm simulator as a teaching tool to educate and inform about the origins of breathing and sound and to help better understand breathing for music, sports, mental health, and more.

Ellen Rowe (jazz & contemporary improvisation) conducted the Idaho All-State Jazz Ensemble February 1–4, also presenting a clinic, “Selection Criteria for Secondary School Jazz Ensemble Libraries,” at the Idaho Music Educators Association conference. On March 21, Rowe’s critically acclaimed octet Momentum performed at Dizzy’s Club in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex. They were also featured performers at the Amazonas Jazz Festival in Manaus, Brazil, in July. The U-M Jazz Ensemble, under Rowe’s direction, toured the East Coast in the first week of May, giving clinics and concerts at 10 schools and after-school programs as well as performing at Dizzy’s Club.

Ed Sarath (jazz & contemporary improvisation) traveled to South Africa last December for performances of His Day Is Done, his work for symphony orchestra, choir, and soloists. Featuring 150 musicians, the piece sets to music Maya Angelou’s poem of the same title that she dedicated to Nelson Mandela. The Imbumba Freedom Orchestra premiered the work, with the Johannesburg Philharmonic performing it shortly thereafter. Soloists included NEA jazz master Regina Carter and South African legend Dizu Plaatjies. The Brazilian premiere of the piece took place in June. Sarath’s book, Music Studies and Its Moment of Truth, is forthcoming.

In recent months, Kirk Severtson (voice) conducted workshops of two new operas: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Joby Talbot and Gene Scheer) at the Dallas Opera and Hobson’s Choice (Tom Cipullo) with SMTD students. He guest-conducted Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen for Manhattan School of Music’s Graduate Opera Theatre, and he returned to the Dallas Opera to serve on the music staff for a new production of Das Rheingold (Wagner).

Dance Piece Performed in China

Fangfei Miao (dance) presented her new dance piece Hereafter at the Power Center in February. She took the student casts to perform this work in China in late May, a trip that involved an education exchange with Shanghai Theatre Academy and Heilongjiang Art Academy. Her paper “A Corporeal Epistemology of US-China Transnational History” was selected among a very competitive pool to present at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference. She published the essay “Writing ‘Chinese Dance’ in the West” in the new issue of the Dance Studies Association’s annual journal publication. Miao received the 2023 Scholarship Award from the SMTD Office for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.

For Louise Stein (musicology), 2023 had an energetic start with public talks about the music of G.F. Handel and Alessandro Scarlatti. Stein’s latest monograph, The Marqués, the Divas, and the Castrati. Gaspar de Haro y Guzmán and Opera in the Early Modern Spanish Orbit, will soon appear as an open-access monograph from Oxford University Press, thanks to a TOME subvention from the U-M Library and the LSA Research Office. A Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from Chicago’s Newberry Library will support the inclusion of color illustrations. Recently published is a retrospective recordings review essay, “Hidalgo’s golden age in sound: Hispanic songs on recordings since 1966,” invited by the journal Early Music for the May 2023 50th anniversary issue.

In addition to concerts in Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Providence, Jeremy David Tarrant (organ) performed on February 14 at the St. Mark’s School of Texas for the Robert T. Anderson series hosted by the Dallas Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. He gave a master class for the students at Southern Methodist University on February 13. Tarrant is the organist and choirmaster of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Detroit, and he conducted the Cathedral Choir’s residency in Ely Cathedral in England in July.