Faculty Notes Three conservatory faculty were honored with Oberlin College Excellence in Teaching Awards for the 2018-19 academic year. The recipients are La Tanya Hall, teacher of jazz voice; Catharina Meints, associate professor of viola da gamba and cello; and Alexa Still, associate professor of flute. In June, Deborah Campana completed a five-year term as editor of the Music Library Association’s quarterly journal, Notes. Campana, head of the Conservatory Library, spoke on the panel “Publishing Opportunities in Music Librarianship” at MLA’s annual meeting in Norfolk, Va., in February. She now chairs the organization’s publication committee. In fall 2019, music theory professor Jan Miyake was a senior visiting scholar at the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music at Tel Aviv University. She delivered a talk titled “A-flat as Beethoven in the Funeral March from the Third Symphony” and was a lead participant in an international workshop on corpus studies and musical grammar, presenting her work on “Syntax and Form in Haydn’s Symphonic Last Movements.” TIMARA Technical Director and Lecturer Abby Aresty was a 2019-20 Faculty Fellow with Oberlin College’s Bonner Center for Service and Learning. In summer 2019, she taught a workshop on multimodal interactive storytelling for 40 college students from around the world as part of an institute on humanitarian entrepreneurship at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University. She also founded the Girls Electronic Arts Retreat (GEAR), a day camp for local third- to 58
fifth-grade girls that fosters curiosity, creativity, and confidence through playful, collaborative projects integrating science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. The program is a collaboration between the conservatory and the Oberlin Center for the Arts. Teachers for GEAR included current TIMARA majors, graduating seniors, and Oberlin College students.
In August 2019, jazz voice teacher La Tanya Hall released Say Yes (Blue Canoe), her first full-length album in a decade. “Though her gorgeous, emotionally intuitive vocals take center stage, the expansive collection is, at heart, a collaborative effort with Andy Milne and Unison,” Jazz Times wrote. Associate Professor of Piano Pedagogy Andrea McAlister presented two webinars for the Frances Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy on the topic of teaching during COVID-19. They were titled “Teaching Collegiate Class Piano Online” and “Effective Teaching in Challenging Times and Beyond.” McAlister also contributed to the special COVID-19 issue of Piano Magazine. TIMARA assistant professor Aurie Hsu ’96 performed at Fata Morgana, a three-day festival of experimental music and film, artist talks, and multimedia performances hosted at the
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Arts and Humanities Institute in October 2019. She presented three different sets with collaborator Steven Kemper, including pieces featuring interactive dance and EMMI robotic instruments, others with artist CandyStations improvising interactive video, and a new piece for dance, wings, and amplified processed motors with toy harp. Associate Professor of Music Theory Megan Kaes Long was awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies that supports a 2020-21 research sabbatical. Her project, “Complicating the Modal Paradigm in the Music of William Byrd,” develops a historically grounded model of pitch structure in the composer’s music. Long also published a monograph, Hearing Homophony: Tonal Expectation at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2020), which explores how the regular rhythms and text setting of 16th-century popular song encouraged a kind of listening that we now think of as tonal. Oboe and English horn professor Robert Walters is featured on the April 2020 Oberlin Music release Rands at Oberlin in Bernard Rands’ Concerto for English Horn. The work was commissioned by Oberlin Conservatory and the Cleveland Orchestra for Walters, who performed it with the Oberlin Orchestra under the direction of conducting professor Raphael Jiménez. Musicology professor Steven Plank presented the paper “Seeking the Historical Listener” to the graduate colloquium in
historical performance practice at Indiana University in November 2019. Plank also offered it in Oberlin as part of the Richard Murphy Colloquium Series in the Department of Musicology. He was the subject of a profile in the online music and arts magazine Imparted (April 2020).
Jazz saxophone professor Gary Bartz celebrated the 50th anniversary of his album Another Earth at the 2019 Newport and North Sea jazz festivals. The original recording was made with Pharoah Sanders (tenor sax), Charles Tolliver (trumpet), Stanley Cowell ’62 (piano), Reggie Workman (bass), and Freddie Waits (drums). For this Revive Music production, Tolliver and drummer Nasheet Waits (son of Freddie) joined Bartz, along with Ravi Coltrane (clarinet, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone) and others. Kathleen Abromeit, the Conservatory Library’s public services librarian, was named a senior fellow for Advancement of Grinnell College Excellence, where she is mentoring a staff member from an underrepresented group for three years. Abromeit served as editor of the Music Library Association’s Basic Manual Series during the past academic year. She also participated in a panel on “Publishing