Graduate Student News
July 2014
Gina Bombola will conduct archival research for her dissertation (tentatively titled “Hollywood Goes Middlebrow: The Female ‘Operatic’ Voice in the Movies, 1930-1955”) via a 2014 Sylvia Thayer Short-Term Fellowship from the UCLA Library.
Megan Eagen will present “‘Dulcis meri poculum: A Confessional Reading of Two Medieval Parodies Set by Orlando di Lasso” at the Medieval-Renaissance Music Conference at the University of Birmingham, UK.
June 2014
Chris Reali will participate in the Junior Faculty Symposium sponsored by the Popular Music Interest Group of the American Musicological Society, held at the University of Richmond.
Kristin Turner will present “Carmen in America” at the Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music.
Oren Vinogradov will present “The Contesting of Faust: Composer Networks and the Status of Program Music in 1850’s Germany” at the Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music.
Chris Wells will attend this year’s Mellon Summer Institute in Dance Studies. The institute will take place at Stanford University.
May 2014
Sam Brannon was awarded a Charles Montgomery Gray Fellowship from the Newberry Library of Chicago in support of his dissertation, “Writing about Music in Early-Modern Print Culture: Authors, Readers, and Printers.”
Cathy Crone‘s paper “‘It’s Over Now, the Music of the Night’: Taking the Music out of Phantom of the Opera” was accepted to the Restaging the Song conference, which will take place in Sheffield, UK.
Matthew Franke‘s paper “‘Mio Werther!’ The Translation and Reception of Werther in the Fin de Siècle” was accepted to the Translation in Music: An International Interdisciplinary Symposium, which will take place in Cardiff University, UK.
Kristen Turner‘s article “‘A Joyous Star-Spangled-Bannerism’: Emma Juch Opera in English Translation, and the American Cultural Landscape in the Gilded Age” was accepted for the “Music before 1900” special issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music.
April 2014
Brian Jones presented “‘Screaming Out of a Transistor Radio’: PJ Harvey, Steve Albini, and Gendered Aesthetics of Rock Fidelity” at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle.
March 2014
Erin Maher presented “Opus Americanum: Darius Milhaud Encounters the American Music Business” at The Society for American Music conference in Lancaster, PA.
Chris Reali presented “The Land of 1000 Dances: How Muscle Shoals Got Its Groove Back” at The Society for American Music conference in Lancaster, PA.
Chris Reali presented his paper “The Singing River: Music & Myth in Alabama” at IASPM-US in Chapel Hill.
Josh Busman presented “‘God’s Great Dance Floor,’ Or Why You Don’t Need Ecstasy to Have an Ecstatic Good Time” at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music – US Branch meeting at UNC-Chapel Hill, and “From Hipster to Hillbilly: Death, Bluegrass, and Gospel According to David Crowder” at the Society for American Music meeting in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
February 2014
Chris Bowen presented his paper “‘Savage Sumptuousness’ in the City of Lights: The Paris Premiere of The Bartered Bride,” at the American Musicological Society-Southeastern chapter meeting on Sunday, February 23 at UNC-Chapel Hill. For more information about the conference, please click here.
Stacey Garrepy presented her paper, “Modern Mohawk ‘Medicine Man’: Jonathan Maracle and the Healing Ministry of Broken Walls” at the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music conference in Palos Heights, Illinois.
Will Robin published “Beethoven, Again” in The New Yorker online. Also, the North Carolina Symphony announced that he will serve as its inaugural scholar-in-residence in its 2014-2015 season.
November 2013
Kristen Turner presented “‘For the Musical Elevation of a People’: The Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company Crosses the Color Line” at the American Musicological Society conference in Pittsburgh, PA.
October 2013
Will Robin presented his paper “Post-Prohibitive or Post-Minimalist? Minimalism as Technique and History in the Music of Muhly, Mazzoli, and Greenstein” at the 4th International Conference on Music and Minimalism at California State University, Long Beach.
September 2013
Molly Barnes presented her paper “John Sullivan Dwight at Brook Farm: The Transcendentalist Beginnings of a Pioneering Music Critic” the fall meeting of the American Musicological Society–Southeast Chapter (AMS-SE) at East Carolina University.
Molly Barnes presented her paper “The Other Founding Member: Ray Manzarek’s Legacy with the Doors” at the South Central Graduate Music Consortium at Duke University.
Ryan Ebright presented his paper “Doctor Atomic or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sound Design” at the fall meeting of AMS-SE at East Carolina University.
Ryan Ebright was awarded a Graduate Student Transportation Grant from the UNC-Chapel Hill.
Ryan Ebright‘s reviews of Britten’s Billy Budd and Turnage’s Anna Nicole were published in Notes: Quarterly Journal of the American Library Association.
Kristen Turner presented her paper “Opera as Uplift and the Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company” at the fall meeting of AMS-SE at East Carolina University.
David VanderHamm presented his paper “Broadcasting ‘Hillbilly’ Virtuoisty: Showcasing Musical Skill in a Down-Home Way” at the fall meeting of AMS-SE at East Carolina University.
August 2013
David VanderHamm completed his MA degree, with a thesis entitled “The Listening Moment: Ludic Wit in Haydn’s String Quartets.” (Mark Evan Bonds, thesis advisor)
Oren Vinogradov completed his MA degree, with a thesis entitled “Dressing Both Sides: American Masculinity in the Films of Fred Astaire.” (Tim Carter, thesis advisor)
Chris Wells received a research grant from the Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Jazz Research Fund to facilitate his continued research on Chick Webb and the culture of early swing music and dance in Harlem. This research is to be conducted at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Chris Wells submitted a successful application for Carolina Courses Online’s “CCO Blended” pilot program. His proposal for MUSC 145: Intro to Jazz was one of four selected in a university-wide competitive call for proposals.
July 2013
John Caldwell co-directed the UNC Summer in India study abroad program for the 17th year. Students spent six weeks studying Hindi language and Indian cultural history in Delhi, Aligarh, Agra, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Ludhiana and Amritsar. John also accompanied Prof. Afroz Taj on his Carolina Performing Arts Curatorial Fellowship, traveling to South India (Kerala, Bangalore, Hyderabad) to audition performing artists for a series of concerts in 2014–15.
Kristen Turner presented “The Toreador Goes to Hollywood” at the North American Conference on 19th Century Music in Fort Worth, TX.
May 2013
Christa Bentley received the the UNC Folklore Department’s Wilgus Fellowship, which will fund dissertation research in Los Angeles during the summer of 2013.
Gina Bombola received the MA degree, with a thesis entitled “The Trouble with Leitmotifs: Aaron Copland and The Heiress (1949).” (Annegret Fauser, thesis advisor)
Christopher Bowen received the MA degree, with a thesis entitled “‘What a Wonderful Kiki’: Dance Music and Queerness at Mixtape, a Washington DC Gay Dance Party.” (David Garcia, thesis advisor)
Naomi Graber received the PhD degree, with a thesis entitled “Found in Translation: Kurt Weill on Broadway and in Hollywood, 1935–1939.” (Tim Carter, dissertation advisor).
Tim Miller received the PhD degree, with a dissertation entitled “Instruments as Technology and Culture: Co-constructing the Pedal Steel Guitar.” (Mark Katz, dissertation advisor)
Will Robin received the MA degree, with a thesis entitled “Pleyel’s Hymns Across the Atlantic: Migration, Travel, and American Psalmody Reform in the Early Nineteenth Century.” (Phil Vandermeer, thesis advisor)
Will Robin traveled to Moscow in May and presented a talk, “Stravinsky in North Carolina: Celebrating The Rite of Spring at 100” at the Musical College of the Moscow Conservatory.
April 2013
Chris Bowen presented “Where’s the Kiki?: Music, Technology, and Queerness in the Scissor Sisters’ ‘Let’s Have A Kiki'” to the biennial Queer Studies Conference at UNC-Asheville (4–6 April 2013).
Sam Brannon was awarded a Summer Research Fellowship from the UNC Graduate School in support of his dissertation, “Reading Music Theory and Early Modern Print Culture.”
Sam Brannon received the AMS-SE Chapter student paper prize for 2012-13 for his paper, “‘Full of a Thousand Beautiful and Graceful Inventions’: The Compilation of Gardano’s 1545 Willaert Motet Print.”
Megan Eagen was awarded a DAAD Intensive Language grant and a 10-month DAAD Research Grant to support her German language studies in Göttingen and her doctoral research on mid-sixteenth-century psalm motets in Munich and Augsburg.
Ryan Ebright, was awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship and Summer Research Fellowship from the UNC Graduate School in support of his dissertation, “Echoes of the Avant-garde in American Minimalist Opera.”
Naomi Graber was awarded the Department’s Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology for her dissertation, “Found in Translation: Kurt Weill on Broadway and in Hollywood, 1935-1939.”
Catherine Hughes was awarded an Off-Campus Research Award from the UNC Graduate School in support of her dissertation, “Crossroads of Musical Modernism: Brussels, 1918–1938.”
Erin Maher received support from the Bartlet Fund Award Committee of the American Musicological Society to conduct research on Darius Milhaud while in Paris.
Chris Reali, received a UNC Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the UNC Graduate School in support of his dissertation, “Lost Soul: Making Music in Muscle Shoals.”
Kristen Turner was awarded a Summer Research Fellowship from the UNC Graduate School in support of her dissertation, “Opera in English Translation in the United States between 1878 and 1910.”
March 2013
Will Boone presented “Souled Out’: Rituals of Worship and Consumerism in the Musical Practices of one African American Congregation.” at the Society for American Music (SAM) conference, Little Rock (March 6–10, 2013).
Chris Bowen received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) 2013 Summer Fellowship from the UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Chris also won a pre-dissertation fellowship through the Center for Global Initiatives, which will fund five weeks of pre-dissertation research in Prague and Brno.
Ryan Ebright presented “‘A Sort of Oratorio’: Dramatic Construction in John Adams’s Doctor Atomic” at the SAM, Little Rock (March 6–10, 2013).
Will Robin presented “‘A More Graceful Style’: Pleyel’s Second and American Psalmody Reform” at the SAM, Little Rock (March 6–10, 2013).
Kristen Turner presented “‘Which Side Are You On?’ Secular Music in the Civil Rights Movement” at SAM, Little Rock (March 6–10, 2013).
Kristen Turner will present “The Toreador goes to Hollywood” at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies conference in Charlottesville, VA (14–17 March, 2013).
February 2013
Christa Bentley presented “‘You Feel Like You’re Sitting Right Next to Her’: Carole King’s Live Albums and Demo Recordings” at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch (IASPM-US) conference in Austin (28 February–3 March, 2013).
Chris Bowen presented “Where’s the Kiki?: Music, Technology, and Queerness in the Scissor Sisters’ ‘Let’s Have A Kiki’” at the IASPM-US conference in Austin (28 February–3 March, 2013). was accepted to IASPM-US in February and to the biennial 2013 Queer Studies Conference at UNC-Asheville in April.
Josh Busman presented “Worship Under Erasure: David Crowder*Band and the Problem of Evangelical ‘Performance'” at the IASPM-US Branch conference in Austin (28 February–3 March, 2013).
Brian Jones presented “Immediate Media: Lo-Fi Aesthetics in Early Alternative Rock” at the IASPM-US conference in Austin (28 February–3 March, 2013).
Tim Miller was awarded the the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching by Graduate Teaching Assistants. This is a university-wide award given to five graduate students each year who are nominated by students, faculty, and staff.
Chris Reali won the Best Humanities Paper award for UNC’s 9th Annual University Research Day on February 26.
Chris Wells presented “‘My Feet are the Drums and My Shoes are the Sticks’: How Tap Dancers became ‘Musicians'” at the IASPM-US conference in Austin (28 February–3 March, 2013).
January 2013
David VanderHamm received a Berea College’s Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship to conduct research this summer on two projects related to musical variety radio shows from the 1930s and 1940s.
December 2012
Karen Atkins completed her MA thesis entitled “The Illusion of the Prima Pratica and Seconda Pratica in the Music of Willaert and Rore.”
Megan Eagen received a UNC Medieval and Early Modern Studies Research Travel Award to continue her research at the Bavarian State and City Archives of Munich and Augsburg this spring.
Matt Franke presented “Massenet’s Italian Trip of 1894 and the Politics of Cultural Translation” at the Massenet and the Mediterranean World conference, Centro Studio Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Lucca, Italy.
November 2012
Will Boone presented “‘Souled Out’: Rituals of Worship and Consumerism in the Musical Practices of one African American Congregation” at the Society for Ethnomusicology conference in New Orleans.
Josh Busman presented “‘Greater Things are Yet to Come’: Evangelical Worship Music and Prophetic Imagination” at the Society for Ethnomusicology conference in New Orleans.
Matt Franke presented “‘How is it possible to speak ill of a Frenchman’s work?’ The Reception of Massenet’s Thaïs in Milan, 1903” at the American Musicological Society conference, New Orleans.
Erin Maher won a research award from the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and the Off-Campus Research Dissertation Fellowship from the UNC Graduate School to research Darius Milhaud’s collections at Mills College and UC Berkeley.
Chris Reali presented “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues: Defining the Muscle Shoals Sound” at the American Musicological Society conference, New Orleans.
October 2012
Catherine Hughes won the American Musicological Society’s M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Fund for Research in France and the Belgian American Educational Foundation’s Fellowship for Study in Belgium.
September 2012
Molly Barnes presented “A New Audience for New Music: Copland’s ‘Imposed Simplicity’ and the American Middlebrow” at the American Musicological Society–Southeast Chapter (AMS-SE) Fall Meeting, Appalachian State University and the South Central Graduate Music Consortium (SCGMC) conference, University of Virginia.
Samuel Brannon presented “‘Full of a Thousand Beautiful and Graceful Inventions’: The Compilation of Gardano’s 1545 Willaert Motet Print” at the AMS-SE fall meeting, Appalachian State University and the SCGMC conference, University of Virginia.
Josh Busman presented “’Greater Things are Yet to Come’: Evangelical Worship Music and Prophetic Imagination” at the SCGMC conference, University of Virginia.
Matt Franke presented “Coming to America: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Third Violin Concerto,” at the Music Between Nation and Form: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and the Boundaries of Italianità conference, Brown University.
David VanderHamm presented “A Time for Wit: Listening to Haydn’s op. 76 Quartets” at the SCGMC conference, University of Virginia.
David VanderHamm presented “The Commodified Comprehensible: Schoenberg’s String Trio and the ‘Contemporary Classic’ Recording” at the AMS-SE fall meeting, Appalachian State University.
Oren Vinogradov presented “A Total Work of Misunderstanding: Competing Definitions of the ‘Wagnerian’ Gesamtkunstwerk” at AMS-SE fall meeting, Appalachian State University.
Chris Reali presented “Echo and Groove: Elements of the Muscle Shoals Sound” at the SCGMC conference, University of Virginia.
August 2012
Will Boone‘s review of Timothy Rommen’s “Mek Some Noise”: Gospel Music and the Ethics of Style in Trinidad was published in the latest issue of Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentacostal Studies.
Will Boone had a chapter accepted for the collection co-edited by Monique Ingalls, Carolyn Landau, and Thomas Wagner entitled Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity, and Experience, forthcoming from Ashgate.
Josh Busman had a chapter accepted in the edited collection “A Closer Walk”: Essays on Southern Gospel Music, forthcoming from the University Press of Mississippi.
July 2012
Megan Eagen presented “‘Il viene, ma non Canta’: Singers of the Duomo of Mantua Voice Their Concerns during the Council of Trent” at the International Musicological Society Congress in Rome.
June 2012
Megan Eagen, Will Robin, and David VanderHamm participated in the Summer Academy at the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna. Joined by Severine Neff, our students spent two weeks working with composers and musicologists from Russia and China in residence at the Center. Megan presented “‘Thinking in Two Materials’: Complementary Ideas and Imagery in the Writings of Arnold Schoenberg and Adolf Loos”; Will presented “Prater His First Love: Arnold Schoenberg’s op. 43 and the Austrian Military Band Tradition”; and David presented “‘Inexorable Foe’ turned Essential Ally: The Role of Recording and the String Trio, op. 45.”
May 2012
Oren Vinogradov presented “Towards a Resoned Enthusiasm: The Theological Origin of the Gesamtkunstwerk Idea and its Dissemination” at the Royal Musical Association’s annual conference.