Teaching Music History Conference 2017: Presenter Biographies

C. Matthew Balensuela was the founding editor of The Journal of Music History Pedagogy and his essays on pedagogy have appeared in Vitalizing Music History Teaching and Musica Docta, and he has presented papers on pedagogy at conferences of the College Music Society and the International Musicological Society. He is the editor of the forthcoming Norton Guide to Teaching Music History. His research in early music theory includes Music Theory from Boethius to Zarlino (2007), a critical edition of the Ars cantus mensurabilis mensurata per modos iuris (1994), and articles in Grove Music Online and Acta musicologica.

Daniel Barolsky is an associate professor of music at Beloit College. His recent scholarship and research focuses on the relationship between performance and analysis and the role of performers in music history. Daniel is currently the editor of Open Access Musicology.

Samantha Bassler is an alt-academic and contingent faculty member based in Brooklyn, NYC; currently, she is teaching at New York University, Rutgers University at Newark, and Molloy College. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in sacred music from Nyack College, and the M.St. in Musicology from Merton College, Oxford, Samantha went on to pursue an MA in Musicology from Rutgers University and a PhD in Musicology from the Open University, with a PhD dissertation on the London Madrigal Society and antiquarian music-making in eighteenth-century London. Samantha is co-chair of the AMS Study Group on Music and Disability, and her current research is split between dual interests in early modern conceptions of music and disability and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of early music.

Matt Baumer is Associate Professor of Music History at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where since 2004 he has taught the music history sequence, graduate courses, and an online introduction to music; he also teaches in the Honors College. His research interests include 19th-century program music, Franz Liszt, African American gospel music, and music history pedagogy. He served as Chair of the Pedagogy Study Group of the American Musicological Society from 2009-2013. His article, “A Snapshot of Music History Teaching to Undergraduate Music Majors, 2011-2012: Curricula, Methods, Assessment and Objectives” recently appeared in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy; he also serves on the editorial board of that journal. He has presented at conferences in the U.S. and Europe and is currently working on a study based on live observations of music history classes.

Paula Bishop earned her PhD in musicology from Boston University in 2011. Her dissertation examined the life and work of the Everly Brothers, the first successful duo of the rock ‘n’ roll era. She has also written on the music of Hawai’i, shape-note practices in the US, and the role of television in early rock ‘n’ roll. She is currently an assistant professor in the music department at Bridgewater State University in Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Dan Blim is an Assistant Professor of Music at Denison University. He has published on the music of Bernard Herrmann, John Adams, and Harry Smith, and has forthcoming essays on music in the 2008 and 2016 elections as well as film adaptations of musicals.

Molly M. Breckling serves as an Instructor of Musicology at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton. She has previously taught courses in music history, popular music, and voice at several institutions in North Carolina and Tennessee. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina and Masters degrees from Austin Peay, the University of Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Her background is in vocal performance, and her research interests include issues of narrative and epistemology in the songs of Gustav Mahler, on which she has published several articles in journals such as MLA Notes, Ars Lyrica, and Music Research Forum, and is at work toward completing her first monograph, which examines Mahler’s musical and textual narratives in his lieder from Des Knaben Wunderhorn as platforms for cultural and political commentary.

Sarah Day-O’Connell is Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Music at Skidmore College. Prior to arriving at Skidmore in 2015 she was a member of the faculty for ten years at Knox College, and while a graduate student in musicology she was an instructor in the First-Year Writing Program at Cornell University. In 2009 she was awarded the Innovative Course Design Award by the American Association for Eighteenth Century Studies. Her pedagogical interests are focused mainly on the unique challenges and opportunities afforded by teaching music within the context of the small liberal arts college, now and in the future; inclusivity and the experience of first-generation college students; innovative and comprehensive curricular reform; and teaching students to communicate clearly, persuasively, and engagingly about music through writing, podcasting, and visual storytelling. Sarah’s scholarly research is on music and culture of the late eighteenth century, and in particular, theories of performance. Recent publications appear in Eighteenth Century Music and in the Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory. She is co-editor (with Caryl Clark, University of Toronto) of the forthcoming Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia.

Andrew Dell’Antonio is University Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Musicology/Ethnomusicology Division of the Butler School of Music and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has received numerous teaching awards. He is co-editor of the blog The Avid Listener (http://www.theavidlistener.com), “dedicated to the idea that music criticism can be literate and fun to read,” and co-author of the textbook The Enjoyment of Music with W W Norton; his collected edition Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing and monograph Listening as Spiritual Practice in early Modern Italy are both published by University of California Press. His foremost research interest is how different modes of listening influence the social uses and cultural meanings of music.

Louis Epstein is Assistant Professor of Music at St. Olaf College. His articles appear in Music & Politics and the Revue de musicologie and he received the 2016 AMS Teaching Award for his Musical Geography project.

Stephanie Espie is a first-year Masters Student in Ethnomusicology with a Secondary Concentration in Music Education at the University of Florida. She holds a Bachelor of Music Education from the University of Delaware. Her research focuses on world music pedagogy as well as Caribbean Music Education.

Kathryn M. Fenton has taught as Eastern Illinois University since 2013. She teaches the three-semester music history survey sequence, American music, Interacting with Music, Graduate Research Methods and the Graduate Music History Seminar. Her research focuses on the music of the long nineteenth century, particularly French and Italian opera. Her book, Frontier Encounters: The Reception of La fanciulla del West in New York City explores the intersection of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and nativism in the early New York City reception of Giacomo Puccini’s opera La fanciulla del West (1910). She is also a contributor to the Cambridge Verdi Encyclopaedia (2013).

Dana Gorzelany-Mostak is an Assistant Professor of Music at Georgia College. She holds a PhD in musicology from McGill University, and she has taught courses on the history of western music, opera in the 21st century, music and politics, music since 1900, popular music, and historiography. Her research explores various facets of American musical culture—the role of popular songs in presidential campaigns, the reception of music prodigies in the age of reality television, and the untold history of music performance on the “freak” show stage in the 19th century. Her research on music and electoral politics appears in the summer 2015 issue of Music & Politics and the May 2016 issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her work on Jackie Evancho appears in the edited volume Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music: Performance, Authority, Authenticity (Routledge, 2016).

Naomi Graber is an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, where she teaches classes on American Popular Music and Music After 1900. She is currently working on a book exploring Kurt Weill’s shifting conceptions of “America,” with side projects on the intersection of gender and genre in film music. Her work has appeared at Musicology Now, Trax on the Trail, and Studies in Musical Theatre, and is forthcoming in Journal of the Society for American Music, Musical Quarterly, and American Music.

Andrew Granade is the Chair of Composition, Music Theory, and Musicology and Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance. His research focuses on the American Experimental tradition, particularly the music of Harry Partch; music and media, particularly the music of science fiction film and telelvision; and music history pedagogy. In his teaching, Granade offers seminars and classes in his research areas, but most importantly, leads the freshman experience class for all UMKC Conservatory student where he has the opportunity and privilege of introducing them to music study.

K. Dawn Grapes is an Assistant Professor of Music History and currently serves as the coordinator of undergraduate studies for the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Colorado State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Specialty areas include the music of Early Modern England, music history pedagogy, and flute history. She is author of the “John Dowland” and “Recorder” entries for Oxford Bibliographies and serves as Reviews Editor for NABMSA Reviews. National conference paper presentations include those for the College Music Society, the North American British Music Studies Association, Renaissance Society of America, the National Flute Association, CEMERS Binghamton, and the Midwest Conference on British Studies. International conferences include those in England, Wales, and Canada. Before joining the faculty at Colorado State, Dr. Grapes taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Front Range Community College, and Southern Utah University. She is currently a board member of the North American British Music Studies Association and formerly served as President of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the American Musicological Society.

Sara Haefeli is assistant professor of music history at Ithaca College where she teaches music history and philosophy of creativity courses. Her pedagogy scholarship has been published in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy and the forthcoming book Information Literacy in Music: an Instructor’s Companion.

Elina G. Hamilton is a musicologist who specializes in the history of English music theory during the transition between the Ars antiqua and Ars nova at the turn of the 14th century. She received her doctorate from Bangor University (UK) and is a faculty member of the Music Division at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Alex Ludwig is an assistant professor in the Liberal Arts department at the Berklee College of Music. His interests include Joseph Haydn and Sonata Theory, the history of film music, and music history pedagogy, and has published essays on using Twitter in the classroom (in the first volume of “Engaging Students”) and the marginalization of Joseph Haydn at the hands of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy.

Chris Macklin is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has at various times published on the use of music during epidemics, performance of poetry in medieval Wales, the dynamics of mnemonic retrieval, and the square root of 2. Today he’s talking about none of those things.

Matteo Magarotto holds a PhD in Musicology with a cognate in Music Theory from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. His dissertation, advised by Mary Sue Morrow, combines Hepokoski and Darcy’s Sonata Theory with Gjerdingen’s theory of musical schemata in a detailed analytical study of Mozart’s keyboard sonatas. Matteo has presented related research on Mozart at meetings of the AMS Midwest Chapter and the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, and has recently published an article on “Nonlinear Temporality in Mozart’s Instrumental Music” (Music Research Forum). In the area of pedagogy, he has led a workshop on Team-Based Learning at the 2015 Teaching Music History Conference, and during his doctoral studies he was President of the Graduate Association for Teaching Enhancement, collaboratively organizing workshops for teaching assistants. For those efforts, he received the University of Cincinnati’s 2016 Exemplary Initiative Award.

Rebecca Marchand is Professor of Music History at Boston Conservatory at Berklee where she founded and directs the Graduate Music History Writing Center. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in both early music and contemporary music history, and is a W.W. Norton digital author for student assessment activities. Dr. Marchand was recently named an ETUDE (Enhancing Teaching through an Understanding of Diversity and Equity) Fellow for the Spring 2017 semester at Berklee. She holds a PhD in Musicology and a Certificate in College and University Teaching from the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a PSC in Arts Administration from Emerson College.

Tegan Niziol is a second-year master’s student of musicology at the University of Toronto. She obtained her Bachelor of Music in 2014 and her Bachelor of Education in 2015 from Queen’s University in Kingston, ON. During her master’s degree, she completed research on the historiographical treatment of Sergei Rachmaninoff in narratives of Western music for which she was awarded the master’s-level Canada Graduate Scholarship. Her current research interests include intersections of Haydn and gender studies, music history pedagogy, and twentieth-century music historiography.

Colleen Renihan is Assistant Professor at the Dan School of Drama and Music, Queen’s University, where she teaches classes on opera, music theatre, and voice. Her research is focused on issues of memory, historiography, and temporality in American and Canadian twentieth- and twenty-first century opera. Her work has appeared in The Journal of the Society for American Music, Twentieth-Century Music, and Music, Sound and the Moving Image. She is currently at work on a book manuscript focused on American historically-based opera.

Misti Shaw is the Head of Public Services and Outreach for the Cook Music Library at Indiana University. She speaks and publishes widely on topics related to music reference, instruction, information literacy, and outreach. Forthcoming in Spring 2017 are several chapters in Information Literacy in Music: An Instructor’s Companion and a chapter in Information Literacy in Music: Ideas, Strategies, and Scenarios.

Meredith Schweig completed her MA (2009) and PhD (2013) in ethnomusicology at Harvard University, where she also received her BA (2003) in Music and East Asian Studies. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century musics of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on popular song, narrativity, and cultural politics in Taiwan and China. An assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Emory, she is currently working on a book about Taiwan’s hip-hop scene. Schweig was a 2013-2015 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Hyperstudio Fellow at MIT, and has received fellowships and grants from the Asian Cultural Council, Whiting Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. She has published in Ethnomusicology and CHINOPERL: Journal of Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, and was awarded the Rulan Chao Pian Publication Prize from the Association for Chinese Music Research for her 2014 article “Hoklo Hip-Hop: Re-signifying Rap as Local Narrative Tradition in Taiwan.”

Musicologist and pianist, Eunmi Shim is the award-winning author of Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music (University of Michigan Press), which received the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound and the Bronze Prize for the Independent Publisher Book Award in Performing Arts. Also a contributor to The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Shim is currently Associate Professor of Music at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

John D. Spilker holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from The Florida State University and is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Gender Studies at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He serves as the co-coordinator for the campus liberal education assessment initiative, a project sponsored by the Higher Learning Commission. In 2014 he received the NWU Exemplary Teacher Award. At the 2016 national meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Dr. Spilker presented his work on music history curricular revision and integration with NWU’s new liberal education program. He has presented his scholarship on writing pedagogy and alternative approaches to the music history survey at national meetings of the American Musicological Society. His research on dissonant counterpoint and Henry Cowell has been published in American Music and the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Robin Wallace is Professor of Musicology at Baylor University. He is the author of Take Note: An Introduction to Music through Active Listening, published by Oxford University Press, and is an authority on the critical reception of Beethoven. He is currently writing a book on Beethoven’s deafness.

Jonathan Waxman completed a Ph.D. in historical musicology at New York University with a dissertation titled “Prefacing Music in the Concert Hall: Composer Commentaries, Program Books, and the Conflict over Musical Meaning” and is currently on the faculty at Hofstra University. He has recently published an article in the journal Popular Music History which examined the influence of Ives’s music on the film scores and concert works of Bernard Herrmann. As Vice-President of the Greater New York City chapter of the American Musicological Society, Jonathan has supervised several scholarly conferences for the society, and has recently given papers on concert program books at the national meetings of the Society for American Music, and the American Musicological Society.

Christopher J. Wells is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute School of Music and Managing Editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies. He received his PhD in 2014 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where his dissertation on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb and swing music in Harlem during the Great Depression received the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and UNC’s Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology. He has also received Videmus’s Edgar A. Toppin Award for Outstanding Research in African American Music and a Morroe Berger/Benny Carter Jazz Research Fellowship from the Institute of Jazz Studies. A social jazz dancer for over a decade, Dr. Wells is currently writing a book about the history of jazz music’s ever-shifting relationship with popular dance.

Reba Wissner is on the music history faculty of Montclair State University, Westminster Choir College of Rider University, Ramapo College of New Jersey, New York University, and Berkeley College. She received her M.F.A. and Ph.D. in musicology from Brandeis University and her B.A. in Music and Italian from Hunter College. She is the author of A Dimension of Sound: Music in The Twilight Zone and We Will Control All That You Hear: The Outer Limits and the Aural Imagination. She is working on her third book, The Valley Where The Giant Mushrooms Grow: The Atomic Bomb in American Television, 1950-1969.

Trudi Wright is an assistant professor in the Music Program at Regis University (Denver, Colorado), where she explores American and European music history, musical theater history, and world music with her students. As an active musicologist, Wright has delivered papers based on her work in American musical theater at the national and regional meetings of the Society for American Music, The American Musicological Society, and the College Music Society. Her most recent article, “Lost in The Cradle: The Reconstruction and Meaning of Marc Blitzstein’s ‘FTP Plowed Under’ (1937),” was published in American Music (University of Illinois Press), Fall 2016.