SOMD welcomes two new faculty members
The University of Oregon School of Music and Dance is pleased to announce the hire of two new tenure-track faculty members.
Starting with Fall term 2013, Dr. Rodney Dorsey and Juan Eduardo "Ed" Wolf will join the SOMD faculty. Dorsey will be director of bands, conductor of the UO Wind Ensemble, and a member of the conducting faculty. Wolf will enter as an assistant professor of ethnomusicology.
Dr. Dorsey is currently the associate director of bands at the University of Michigan, and conductor of the Michigan Youth Band and the Concert Band. Previously, Dorsey was on the faculty at DePaul University and Northwestern University. He attended Florida State University, where he earned his Bachelor of Music Education, and Northwestern University, where he earned his master's and doctor of music degrees in conducting.
Wolf is currently completing his PhD in folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University, where he also earned his master of arts. Over the past two years Wolf has taught introductory courses in ethnomusicology, folklore, and Latino history, as well as an upper-level class on the history of U.S. immigration offered through the Latino Studies Program.
April 3, 2013: UO choir seeks gold on the Emerald Isle
EUGENE, Ore.—(April 3, 2013)—Oregon fans disillusioned by the Ducks being knocked out of the NCAA Tournament after making it to the Sweet Sixteen may want to dust off their garb of green and gold. There's another UO team that needs their support.
On May 4, the award-winning University of Oregon Chamber Choir, the most select ensemble in the university's eight-choir choral arts program, will compete in the annual Fleischmann International Trophy Competition at the Cork International Choral Festival in Cork, Ireland.
The UO Chamber Choir is one of only eleven ensembles competing, from a field of thirty choirs (hailing from seventeen countries) that auditioned, and is the sole representative of the United States. Leading up to the competition, the Chamber Choir will present concerts in Dublin, Kells, and Loughrea.
Happily for hometown fans of choral music, the Chamber Choir will present their tour program in a public concert on April 25 at 8 p.m. in historic Beall Concert Hall on the UO campus. The one-hour performance features sacred and secular repertoire spanning 400 years, sung in seven languages, with styles as varied as Italian madrigals to bluegrass-influenced gospel, from composers including Monteverdi, Schütz, Debussy, Sydney Guilaume, and Eric William Barnum.
Tickets for the April 25 concert in Eugene are $7 general, $5 for students and seniors, available at the door or in advance from the UO Ticket Office in the Erb Memorial Union, 1222 E. 13th Avenue, 541-346-4363 or tickets.uoregon.edu.
The Ireland trip will be the Chamber Choir's second international tour. In April of 2011 the ensemble toured Estonia and Finland, competing in the Tallinn International Choral Competition, where they took top honors in the Renaissance-Baroque and Chamber Choir categories.
"After the wonderful experience the Chamber Choir had singing in Estonia in 2011, I wanted a similar kind of opportunity for them to hear lots of good choirs from all over the world," said UO Chamber Choir conductor, Professor Sharon Paul.
"The singers really bring their 'A game' when they know that they have auditioned into a competition, and that they will be getting feedback from an international panel of judges who are well respected choral musicians," Paul continued.
"This is what I am most looking forward to—watching our students evolve through this process."
Feb. 1, 2013: Frank Diaz's Research Gaining National Attention
SOMD Assistant Professor Frank M. Diaz is gaining national attention from science and psychology research media outlets for his research exploring how mindfulness meditation may enhance both music engagement and performance. The study drawing so much attention appeared recently on the the journal Psychology of Music’s website, and will appear in print in their forthcoming issue.
In his study, Diaz had 132 participants listen to a 10-minute excerpt of Giacomo Puccini’s opera "La Boheme" after listening to a 15-minute recording of a segment produced by the Duke University Center for Mindfulness Research.
Overall, 97 percent of the participants had either one or several moments of flow or aesthetic response. Of the 69 subjects who engaged in mindfulness, 64 percent thought the technique had enhanced their listening experience.
More information on Diaz’s research and methods can be found on Around the O, Science Daily, PsychCentral, and Compelling Wellbeing.
Jan. 11, 2013: Winners of the 2013 UO Concerto Competition
Sean Fredenburg
Concertino da Camera pour Alto Saxophone by Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) Fredenberg played saxophone and was accompanied by Svetlana Kotova.
Clarissa Osborn
Clarinet Concerto by Aaron Copland (1900-1990) Osborn played clarinet and was also accompanied by Svetlana Kotova.
Kelly Quesada
Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op.104 by Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) Quesada played cello and was accompanied by Ednaldo Borba.
Nattapol Tantikarn
Piano Concerto No.1 in Eb Major by Franz Liszt (1811-1886) Tantikarn played piano and was accompanied by Julia Lin.
Jan. 4, 2013: SOMD Announces its 2013 Distinguished Alumni
Dance
Karen Kohn Bradley ’77 (left) is Associate Professor of Dance and Director of Graduate Studies in Dance at the University of Maryland. She is a Certified Movement Analyst in Laban Move
ment Analysis and is on the Board of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York City.
Music
Since 1991, Dr. Margaret Quackenbush ’76 (right) has been the president and executive director of the Hochstein School of Music and Dance in Rochester, NY. Hochstein is a private community art school founded in 1882. It offers dance and music classes to community members from 5 to adult.
Dec. 6, 2012: UO Professor Wins Musicology Prize
Download photos: http://bit.ly/Rp1S43
EUGENE, Ore.—(Dec. 6, 2012)—Lori Kruckenberg, an associate professor of musicology at the University of Oregon, has been awarded the prestigious Noah Greenberg award by the American Musicological Society.
Kruckenberg and her co-recipient, Michael Alan Anderson of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, accepted the award on Nov. 3 at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in New Orleans.
The award, which was established in 1978 by the American Musicological Society and is accompanied by a $2,000 monetary prize, is intended “to stimulate active cooperation between scholars and performers by recognizing and fostering outstanding contributions to historical performing practices,” according to the AMS website.
The award-winning project, entitled “Sounding the Neumatized Sequence,” is a collaborative effort of Kruckenberg, Anderson, and the Schola Antiqua, a Chicago-based professional vocal ensemble dedicated to the performance of music before the year 1600.
As part of the project, the Schola Antiqua will record and archive a set of special liturgical sequences that feature melodies both entirely without text or long wordless passages, a practice called “neumatizing” from the Latin neumatizare. The scholarly impetus behind the project is Kruckenberg’s 2006 article “Neumatizing the Sequence: Special Performances of Sequences in the Central Middle Ages,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
In the award presentation, the Greenberg Committee Chair, Professor Tom Beghin of McGill University, wrote:
“The committee found the project's fusion of performance and scholarship tremendously exciting and the expertise and musicianship of the collaborators of the highest level. We endorse them with utmost enthusiasm.”
“Receiving the Noah Greenberg Award is a wonderful honor, and I am thrilled to share the award with Michael Alan Anderson,” said Kruckenberg. “Professor Anderson and the Schola Antiqua of Chicago are ideal collaborators,” she continued, “and I look forward to working with them as they bring to life sonically some of the findings of my research on this medieval tradition of singing.”
Kruckenberg has been a member of the University of Oregon music faculty since 2001. She teaches the undergraduate and graduate music history surveys of the medieval and Renaissance periods, as well as specialty courses in the history of music theory and early music notations. She has published articles in several international journals, conference proceedings, and lexicons.
Kruckenberg received her B.A. from Bethany College in 1985, and her M.A. in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Iowa. In 2008-09 Dr. Kruckenberg was a senior Fulbright scholar at the Bruno-Stäblein-Archiv at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg, Germany. Other recent awards include an Oregon Humanities Grant and the Oregon Community Credit Union Research Fellowship.
More information on Kruckenberg is available at http://music.uoregon.edu/people. More information on the Noah Greenberg Award is available at http://www.ams-net.org/awards/greenberg.php.
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About the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance
The University of Oregon is a world-class teaching and research institution and Oregon's flagship public university. The UO School of Music and Dance presents approximately 300 concerts and events during the academic year featuring scholars, guest artists, faculty artists, and student ensembles. The incredible wealth of concert material ranges from contemporary dance to African dance, early and classical music to contemporary music, world music, and jazz. http://music.uoregon.edu
Media contact for reporters: Aaron Ragan-Fore, 541-346-1163, aprf@uoregon.edu
Public number for general inquiries: 541-346-5678
Sept. 24, 2012: Dance alumna appears in new UO TV ad
Michelle Friend, '12, has now appeared in two commercials for the UO. The 2010 commercial "Be Bold" and now the 2012 commerical, "You Will" (left), which premiered during the first Duck Football game on Sept.1. For more on the students who appeared in "You Will", watch the behind the scenes video here.