Renaissance Department

The musicology department at Blair is a place where scholars flourish

Fall 2008 — Featured  |  Share This  |   E-mail  |   Print  | 

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

It would seem that to be a musicologist, one must be a scholarly jackof- all-trades, a proverbial “Renaissance” man or woman, for the discipline takes its direction from multiple viewpoints and employs multiple modes of inquiry. Sociology, art history, literary studies, aesthetics, psychology—not to mention musical performance—all inform what the Grove Music Dictionary defines as the “scholarly study of music.” 

The Blair School is fortunate to have many “scholars of music” who are contributing to various specialties within the discipline. From how music informs AIDS education in east Africa to studies of how music was taught during medieval times, from the popular music of the barrios of LosAngeles to the complete works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach—Blair’s musicologists are covering new territory and contributing to intellectual history at an astonishing rate through their scholarship and recordings.

Greg Barz, associate professor of musicology (ethnomusicology), is known for his studies of how music contributes to education and healing, particularly in regard to HIV/AIDS in Africa. His CD Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing and HIV/AIDS in Uganda, released last year through Smithsonian Folkways, was nominated for a Grammy Award this winter in the Best Traditional World Music Album category. His most recently produced CD, God in Music City, accompanied a class offered through the transinstitutional Center for the Study of Religion and Culture. Recent publications include: Music, Medicine, and Culture: Medical Ethnomusicology and Global Perspectives on Health and Healing, associate editor (B. Koen, editor) (NY:Oxford University Press, 2008); Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, 2nd Edition, co-editor with T. Cooley. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Singing for Life: Music and HIV/AIDS in Uganda (NY: Routledge, 2006).

Joy Calico, associate professor of musicology, has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships for her research focusing on music and politics in former Soviet-bloc countries, particularly the former German Democratic Republic. An NEH summer stipend helped support research for her most recently published book, Brecht at the Opera, released in August by the University of California (Berkeley) Press as volume 9 in the California Studies in Twentieth Century Music series. She also was the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, in support of the Brecht book. Two external fellowships are supporting her current book project,Musical Remigration: Schoenberg’s ‘Survivor fromWarsaw’ in Postwar Europe (also for the University of California Press): an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for which she will be a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard in 2009-10 and a Howard Fellowship fromthe George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation for summer research in 2008-09.

Dale Cockrell, professor of musicology, focuses onAmerican musical idioms.He has written extensively on blackface minstrels and his book Demons of Disorder: Early BlackfaceMinstrels and TheirWorld (CambridgeUniversity Press,1997) received the Hugh Holman Award for best book in Southern Studies for that year.His current work includes The Pa’s Fiddle Project, which, in collaboration with Butch Baldassari, adjunct associate professor of mandolin, has produced two CDs—Happy Land: Musical Tributes to Laura Ingalls Wilder and The Arkansas Traveler: Music from Little House on the Prairie. He has published articles in academic journals, such as The Bulletin for the Society forAmerican Music and Theatre Annual, and for reference works, such as the Encyclopedia of New England Culture,The Harvard Dictionary ofMusic, The New Grove Dictionary ofMusic andMusicians (second edition), and the Encyclopedia of Country Music.

Cynthia Cyrus, associate dean and associate professor of musicology, takes an approach to her scholarly work that combines musical, historical and gender studies. Her most recent work focuses on women as writers, scribes and teachers of musical literacy in medieval and renaissance Europe. Her book, The Scribes for Women’s Convents in LateMedieval Germany, forthcoming from University of Toronto Press, looks at the control women monastics had over their own intellectual life, identifying over 400 women scribes and 38 women’s scriptoria. She has two other books coming in 2009 for which she is co-editor: Reading and Writing the Pedagogy of the Past: Studies in Musical Learning in the Early Modern Era (with SusanWeiss of Peabody Conservatory and Russell E. Murray of the University of Delaware, Indiana University Press) and Music, Dance and Society: Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Memory of Ingrid G. Brainard (withAnn Buckley ofNational University of Ireland—Maynooth,Medieval Institute Publications).

Douglas Lee, professor of musicology, emeritus, retired from teaching a number of years ago, but his research on 18th century and modern orchestral music has continued.Most specifically, his work has focused on Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second son of J.S. Bach. Prof. Lee is one of several contributing editors to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach:The CompleteWorks, published by The Packard Humanities Institute of Los Alto, Calif., in cooperation with the International Bach-Archiv, Leipzig; the Saechsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig and Harvard University.The work will comprise 114 volumes when completed for the 300th anniversary of C.P.E. Bach’s birth in 2014. Prof. Lee has currently completed Sei concerti per il cembalo concertato (1772) (Series III, vol. 8, the first volume in the series, which came out in 2005),Arrangement of OrchestralWorks I (Series I, vol. 10.1, 2007) and the upcoming Keyboard Concertos in G and D,Wq. 44/5 (Series II, vol. 9.15, 2009).

Jim Lovensheimer, assistant professor of musicology, has worked in musical theatre as an actor, playwright,musical supervisor and director, and dramaturge, so it is no surprise that his scholarly research focuses on musical theatre as well. He has had encyclopedia articles, chapters and reviews in The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, The Encyclopedia of the Midwest (forthcoming), The Sondheim Review and The Kurt Weill Newsletter, and he is currently writing South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten forOxford University Press (2009). Prof. Lovensheimer is the 2008 winner of the Ellen Gregg Ingalls Award for Excellence in Classroom Teaching at Vanderbilt, one of only two faculty teaching awards given each year at Vanderbilt.

Melanie Lowe, associate professor of musicology and chair of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, has contributed articles and reviews to numerous journals and books, including the Journal ofMusicology, AmericanMusic, PopularMusic and Society, Beethoven Forum, The Cambridge Companion to Haydn (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Popular Music Scenes (Vanderbilt University Press, 2003). Her book Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony was released last year by Indiana University Press. Prof. Lowe is a past winner of theMadison Sarratt Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Vanderbilt.

Helena Simonett, adjunct assistant professor ofmusic literature and history, studies ceremonialmusicmaking and dancing among indigenous people of northwestern Mexico and also looks at indigenous cultural identity in contemporary Mexican society. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters in publications such as Popular Music Studies Reader,TransculturalMusic Review, and Historia Temática de Sinaloa, vols. 5 and 6.Her books include Banda:MexicanMusical LifeAcross Borders (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and En Sinaloa Nací: Historia de laMúsica de Banda (Asociación de Gestores del Patrimonio Histórico y Cultural deMazatlán, 2004). She recently edited TheAccordian onNew Shores,which is forthcoming.

© 2009 Vanderbilt University | Photo credit: John Russell

Leave a Reply