Jayhawks of Note

A look back at some of our most recent accomplishments from students, faculty, and staff at the KU School of Music!

Tuba professor wins teaching award

Photo: Scott Watson

Scott Watson, professor of tuba and euphonia, was named the winner of the 2022 International Tuba and Euphonium Association (ITEA) Daniel Perantoni Teaching Award. The ITEA recently made the announcement on their website, pointing to Watson’s solo efforts on his CD, “Thoughts of a Cow,” as well as educational recordings “Stepping Stones for Tuba, Volume I & II.” He was the inaugural Music Director and Conductor of the Free State Brass Band since 2014 and plays Eb tuba in the Fountain City Brass Band of Kansas City. He previously served as the Principal of Tuba of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2018, where he taught at the Conservatorium of Music of the University of Melbourne/Victoria School for the Arts.

KU Musicology Professor receives Chancellors Club Teaching Award

Photo: Paul Laird

Paul Laird, professor of musicology at the University of Kansas, is known for his creative, energetic teaching style filled with movement and music. After teaching a class at KU’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, the university’s continuing education center, Laird received a review from a participant that said, “Nail his shoes to the floor!”

Laird was undeterred. “I said, ‘Hey! I’ll just take ’em off. You’re not going to keep me in one place!’”

His enthusiasm and memorable style in large part earned Laird the 2021 Chancellors Club Career Teaching Award. Since joining the KU faculty in 1994, he has gained the admiration and trust of countless students he has taught, mentored and guided through undergraduate, postgraduate and postdoctoral endeavors.

Robert Walzel, dean of the School of Music at KU, didn’t hold back when nominating Laird for the award.

“Professor Paul Laird is the single most outstanding university faculty member I have worked with or otherwise encountered in my 30-year career in higher education,” Walzel wrote in his nomination letter.

Laird is proud of being part of a large state university, which attracts students with varying life experiences — from farms and neighborhoods to high school graduating classes with single, double and even triple digits in metropolitan areas.

“When this job came up, I was really interested. I wanted to make a difference in the lives of students who came from different backgrounds,” Laird said. “It seemed like the kind of democratizing place I wanted to be.”

Spencer Huston received his doctorate in musicology from KU in 2017, and Laird was his doctoral adviser. In his letter of support, Huston wrote that few professors capture students’ attention the way Laird does.

“Dr. Laird’s unselfish passion for sharing and teaching his subjects is mesmerizing, awe-inspiring and infectious,” Huston wrote. “Imagine an entire class eagerly soaking up every detail and then waiting in anticipation for 48 hours until the class meets again.”

The professional recognition the award brings is an honor, Laird said.

“When you’re as passionate as I am about teaching, to win an award like this is incredible,” he said. “It’s validation for what I’ve done with my life, and for students to take the time to write letters about me makes

Hannah Collins (left) and Michael Compitello are New Morse Code. Credit: Tatiana Daubek

me very happy. It also is very humbling. There are so many deserving instructors at KU.”

Music absorbs much of Laird’s professional time. He teaches, plays Baroque cello, advises undergraduate and graduate students, writes and publishes books and research, and serves the university with performances and lectures outside of his faculty obligations. All of those things together build support and interest in the music and ideas that drive him.

“When you publish a book, somebody emails you to say something appreciative or ask you a question, and you realize there’s a conversation going on out there and you are part of it,” Laird said. “It’s even more thrilling in the classroom because it’s immediate. We’re talking in a class, and I see light bulbs go on, and it’s just thrilling to be part of forming that conversation about something I care about so deeply.”

The Chancellors Club was founded in 1977 and recognizes donors who give $1,000 or more annually to the Greater KU Fund. As an honoree, Laird will receive a $10,000 award.

Performance Prize Winners focus on Climate Change

Photos: Hannah Collins and Climate Change Winner

It’s a lot to ask a cellist and a percussionist – even aided by the electronics wizardry of their composer pal – to address climate change in a meaningful way.

But Hannah Collins, the cellist, is excited about an opportunity to do just that after her New Morse Code duo won the inaugural Impact Performance Grand Prize of Ariel AVANT, a competition run by the Boston-based Ariel Artists management company.

The juried award was announced in September 2020, but because of restrictions then in place to stem the spread of COVID-19, the winners were not immediately able to take advantage of the travel and outreach opportunities that are part of the prize. Their tour starts March 30 in Norfolk, Virginia, and includes an April 3 concert at the Lied Center of Kansas.

New Morse Code consists of Collins, assistant professor of music, and Michael Compitello, percussionist and former KU assistant professor of music, now at Arizona State University. Their debut album, “Simplicity Itself,” came out in 2017 on New Focus Recordings.

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Given their unusual instrumentation, New Morse Code has been compelled to seek out commissions for original works, like “The Language of Landscapes” by St. Louisbased composer Christopher Stark, which they debuted in 2015. It forms the nucleus of their Ariel AVANT prizewinning performances.

“That was commissioned for us by Chamber Music America,” Collins said. “We spent time building this piece together where we took samples of sounds from the natural world in a lot of different locations, including my hometown in upstate New York and Chris’ hometown in Montana, and other locations that we’ve traveled to together. And Chris created a long-form piece that has four different scenes that create opportunities for us to interact with these sounds.”

They’ve recorded the piece and have performed it live more than a dozen times. The 20-minute composition will form the first half of the upcoming concerts, along with an eight-minute, newly-commissioned work, as yet untitled, by composer Viet Cuong.

The second half of each concert will feature a new composition by Andy Akiho inspired by NASA’s ongoing OSIRIS-REx mission to retrieve a sample from asteroid Bennu.

The two new compositions are being funded by the Ariel AVANT prize’s commission component.

Prize applicants were urged to submit “performance proposals and engagement events designed to generate productive conversation and offer positive means of action around a social justice issue, particularly one related to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals prioritized to be achieved by 2030.”

So Collins and Compitello submitted a plan for a series of concerts and related public-engagement events designed, in the words of Ariel AVANT’s announcement, to “engage the audience in a conversation about the challenges and urgencies of climate action and responsible consumption while also presenting optimistic possibilities for renewable energy, scientific discovery and innovative technologies in space exploration.”

Collins praised Ariel AVANT founder Oni Buchanan for “incentivizing things that I think a lot of artists are very much wanting to do and just need the opportunity. These are the issues that we’re trying to grapple with ourselves.”

Collins explained that in the “Language of Landscapes” performance, she and Compitello will be joined onstage by Stark.

“Chris uses electronics to blur the line between real and synthetic sound,” Collins said. “He takes the natural sounds that we recorded and manipulates them sometimes to the point that they sound synthetic. And then he takes the sounds that we’re making, like, for example, Mike blowing on a beer bottle or hitting a Styrofoam bowl, and that might sound like the most natural sound in the world, even though it’s coming from a manmade object. So there’s this confusion and a sort of dialogue between that spectrum of sounds.”

Between Stark’s “Landscapes,” which focuses on the environment, and Akiho’s composition, which is inspired by space travel, the intervening piece by Cuong will focus on the forest ecosystem and was inspired by the poetry of Mary Oliver.

Before each concert, Collins said, she and Compitello will facilitate an interdisciplinary “engagement event” that attempts to highlight the particular environmental challenges of that region of the country.

“We’re trying to create a space where we can ... think together and communicate with each other about how the climate crisis is affecting that community specifically. We’ll be traveling to Norfolk, Virginia, which is a coastal community that deals with flooding as a major concern, whereas the concerns in Lawrence are much different, obviously. And the same will be true in Denver and elsewhere. So we’ll be experiencing conversations and exchanges with communities all across the country about how the climate crisis is affecting them.”

Collins said those conversations started when she and Compitello had a two-week “incubation residency” at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in fall 2021.

“We filmed interviews with experts from many different fields, including a public-policy specialist, a scientist who studies natural disasters, an astronomer, a botanist, and a visual artist and museum curator. We asked them about how the humanities and sciences intersect, especially in the challenge of trying to communicate information about how our world is changing,” Collins said. “We discussed how a community can come together and process that information and decide collectively how to respond. We’re going to continue to have these conversations and share some of them on our website, so that even if people don’t see us play the concert, they’ll be able to see some of the interactions that we have as we’re traveling the piece around.”