New Publications from Music Department Alumni

Braxton Shelley (PhD '17), Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Harvard University and the Stanley A Marks and William H Marks Assistant Professor in Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, recently published Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination. Combining Shelley's perspectives as a minister, musician, and musicologist, the book "explores the vamp's essential place in black gospel song, arguing that these climactic musical cycles turn worship services into transcendent events."

Linda Austern (PhD '84), Associate Professor of Music at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, published Both From the Ears and Mind: Thinking About Music in Early Modern England with University of Chicago Press in 2020.

"Both from the Ears and Mind offers a bold new understanding of the intellectual and cultural position of music in Tudor and Stuart England. Austern brings to life the kinds of educated writings and debates that surrounded musical performance, and the remarkable ways in which English people understood music to inform other endeavors, from astrology and self-care to divinity and poetics. Ultimately, Austern illustrates how music was an indispensable frame of reference that became central to the fabric of life during a time of tremendous intellectual, social, and technological change."

Daniel Barolsky, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at Beloit College, Open Access Musicology with Lever Press. Seeking to make musicology with academic rigor accessible to a general audience, Open Access Musicology provides critical essays that are free and written with its audience in mind. Barolsky encourages any U of C alumni interested in this blend of pedagogy and musical scholarship to contact him.

In addition to publishing Open Access Musicology, Barolsky reports that has been in the fortunate position to significantly revise and restructure the music curriculum at Beloit College in was that have anticipated some of today's current trends. He has also had the opportunity to teach or co-teach classes on Music and Authenticity, Music and Whiteness, Music and Psychology, Music, Sound and Theory, and a few other courses that he says are "well outside of my comfort zone but in which I've learned an immense amount."

J. Peter Burkholder (MA '80, PhD '83), Distinguished Professor Ermitus at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, has published a new book in February 2021 titled Listening to Charles Ives: Variations on His America (Amadeus Press). A guide for nonspecialist listeners, Listening to Charles Ives provides an introduction to the composer's diverse musical output and unusual career, discussing about forty of the best and most characteristic pieces framed with biographical sketches.

In addition to his new book, Burkholder's essay "Making Old Music New: Performance, Arranging, Borrowing, Schemas, Topics, Intertextuality" is forthcoming this year in the volume Intertextuality in Music: Dialogic Composition, edited by Violetta Kostka, Paulo F. De Castro, and William Everett and published by Routledge.

Robert Carl (PhD '83) recently published a collection of essays with Bloomsbury Academic reflecting on issues of aesthetics, ideology, and technique in contemporary classical practice. Titled Music Composition in the 21st Century: A Practical Guide for the New Common Practice, the collection is the culmination of several decades of thinking, writing, composing, and teaching.

Carl has also recently released a new recorded collection of his orchestral music of the last decade, performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under conductor Gil Rose. Titled White Heron for the opening tone poem on the disc, the collection also includes What's Underfoot for chamber orchestra, Rocking Chair Serenade for string orchestra, and Carl's Symphony No. 5, titled "Land".

Hedy Law (PhD '07), recently promoted to Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia in July 2019, has published her monograph titled Music, Pantomime, and Freedom in Enlightenment France. Placing the cultural phenomenon of pantomime in the intellectual context of the Enlightenment, the book explores the question of how composers and performers used the lost art of pantomime to develop and promote the Enlightenment (and pre-revolutionary) ideas of free expression.

Five years into retirement from teaching, Ralph P. Locke (MA '75, PhD '80) continues to edit a book series for the University of Rochester Press (Eastman Studies in Music) and to write articles for scholarly journals, such as Revue de musicologie and Music and Politics. The latter article explores musical aspects of Renaissance and Early Modern courtly tournaments and processions that evoked or portrayed (sometimes in caricaturish, mascarade-like fashion) various exotic peoples and places.

Locke has articles forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Music (on exoticism in nineteenth-century French opera—a long, two-part article divided between successive issues) and Musical Quarterly. The latter—a collaborative project with Locke's longtime Eastman School of Music colleague Jürgen Thym—is an annotated translation of a wide-ranging interview that Harvard musicology professor Reinhold Brinkmann gave to the German-language site beckmesser.de in 2001 after he won the Siemens Music Prize.

Locke now also writes essays and reviews of opera recordings, aiming them at the fabled ‘educated music lover.’ These appear in American Record Guide, Naxos Musicology International (part of Naxos Music Library, to which many libraries subscribe), and such online arts-magazines as The Arts Fuse and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. Here, too, Locke tries to leverage some of the advantages of Open Access to reach a wider readership.

Locke says "I remember that my professors at Chicago (notably Hans Lenneberg and Phil Gossett) appreciated and encouraged my early efforts at music journalism. Here I am, still at it, but now I think of it as a form of Public Musicology!”
 

Andrew Mall (PhD '12), Assistant Professor of Music at Northeastern University, has two books out in 2021. The first, God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Music (University of California Press, 2021) is a monograph based in part on Mall's dissertation work with Associate Professor Travis Jackson. Drawing on ethnographic research, historical archives, interviews with music industry executives, and critical analyses of recordings, concerts, and music festival performances, Mall explores the tensions that have shaped the evolving market of Christian music and frames broader questions about commerce, ethics, resistance, and crossover in music that defines itself as outside the mainstream.

The second, a volume co-edited by Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt (PhD '05), and Monique Ingalls, offers a critical examination of methods and theories employed in researching congregational music-making. Titled Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2021), the volume is the first to help scholars think through the complexities of interdisciplinary research in the role of music-making within religious congregations.

Composer and oboist Patricia Morehead (PhD '05) is set to premiere a new work for oboe and piano in a streaming concert with HotHouse Chicago on March 13. Titled Lockdown Unravelling, the piece is part of a program celebrating Women's Heritage Month, presented by 6Degress Composers. Morehead is joined on the program by Regina Harris Baiocchi, Kyong Mer Choi, Alex Klein, and Janice Misurell-Mitchell.

Morehead is also the recipient of a Canada Council Grant to compose a new orchestral work honoring the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth. Due to COVID-19, the premiere of that piece has been delayed.