Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez published an article in Piano Magazine titled “Mel Bonis and Her Album pour les tout-petits: Engaging Children’s Imaginations.” The article explores how the evocative character of Mel Bonis’ collection can spark children’s curiosity and invite them to create their own stories and imagery. Through the exploration of this repertoire, Dr. Hourez highlights the importance of nurturing imagination and creativity when introducing young children to music.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of Margaret Bonds’ “The Night Shall Be Filled with Music,” for soprano solo and mixed chorus, with ClarNan Editions (Fayetteville, AR). Written for use in a 1965 festival titled “Songs of Freedom” that was organized by Rabbi Abraham J. Klausner, who is noted for his role in helping Holocaust survivors in Dachau and elsewhere to recover their faith and reconnect with loved ones after World War II, the composition uses the last five stanzas of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Day Is Done” (1844). It begins by urging sad and weary souls to turn to the words of “some humbler poet” rather than “the grand old masters and bards” and teaches that when we lend our own voices, however sad and weary, to the poet’s rhyme, “the night shall be filled with music” – a perfect message for a festival devoted to “present[ing] the trials, hopes and aspirations of those who have too long borne the yoke of oppression, made heavier by the silence of so many of us,” and for Margaret Bonds’ own life’s work of using her art to celebrate the dignity and inherent humanity of the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. “The Night Shall Be Filled with Music” was published on the 54th anniversary of Margaret Bonds’ transition.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper and Part-time Instructor of Music Christopher Washington traveled to North Carolina for the world premiere of Margaret Bonds’ musical Bitter Laurel (1968-1969). Working with the surviving libretti, lead sheets, and other musical scores, Cooper and Washington created a fully performable version of the two-hour work, which was left complete, but not concluded, at Bonds’ sudden death in 1972. There is poetry to this premiere having happened at Queens University. Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907) was an African American who eventually became an activist on behalf of formerly enslaved people and the best friend and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, First Lady of the United States. Keckley rose to that station from enslavement by the Burwell family, whose name was proudly emblazoned on the main administration building of Queens University until 2020. The University, which has since removed the Burwell name from its properties due to the family’s cruelty in enslaving Keckley and others, decided to honor Keckley using Bonds’ music, as a means of doing a belated right where so much wrong was done before. The musical was a great success, with an instant standing ovation at the end of Act II: mission accomplished.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Florence Price: Three Cotton Dances with Hildegard Publishing Company (Worcester, MA). The volume’s premise is a puzzle of sorts pertaining to Price’s life and work: though born and raised in Little Rock, AR, in the western end of the cotton-rich Arkansas Delta, she joined the Great Migration and moved from the agrarian south for good in 1928. Even though she flourished in her adopted home city of Chicago in the remaining 25 years of her life, she never stopped writing about the south, especially its lands and climes as these pertained to African American life. The three works presented here offer a cross-section of her musical reflections on cotton country that spans some 15 years and displays the richness and variety of her musical engagements with it.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez was invited to take part in the symposium “Desinvisibilization of women composers,” jointly organized by the French National Library and the University of Paris 8. The event, held in Paris on March 27 and 28, was dedicated to concrete actions aimed at increasing the visibility of women composers. Dr. Hourez presented a paper on the Boulanger sisters and how their unique relationship created a pathway for supporting the visibility of future generations of composers.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper’s work in exposing Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s lamentable forgery of a composition by Florence Price in their 2026 new year’s concert has been featured in articles published by The Guardian and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Tom Service’s article in The Guardian is available for free here, and Peter Dobrin’s paywall-protected piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer is available here. Those interested in seeing what it’s all about can read Cooper’s three blog posts that have been cited. The first of these, from February 1, is available here, with follow-up posts on March 15 available here and March 21 available here.

Violin and chemistry double major Seth Sagen ’26 was selected to perform violin with the Austin Symphony in their recent Masterworks concerts. He performed Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” a masterpiece of classical music which is also featured in the beginning of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He shared the stage with his teacher, Assistant Professor of Violin, Viola, and Chamber Music Jessica Mathaes, who is concertmaster of the Austin Symphony and performed the concertmaster solos in the piece.

Assistant Professor of Violin, Viola, and Chamber Music Jessica Mathaes performed a week-long residency in Jackson, WY public schools, working with high school orchestra students and presenting to elementary students. Mathaes is concertmaster of the Austin Symphony and a member of the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra, and was invited to Jackson this March to represent the festival as a violinist and educator. The Grand Teton Music Festival has been recognized by The New York Times as one of the top 10 music festivals in the United States.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published a de facto diptych of beauty and power from the pen of Margaret Bonds: a setting of the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” arranged for four-part mixed choir and piano, and another setting of that same spiritual, titled simply “Walk with Me,” scored for solo voice, solo cello, and piano. Both scores are published by Hildegard Publishing Company. The first work was written for seventh- and eighth grade voices and reflects Bonds’ interest in providing high-quality music for young musicians (none of that trashy John Williams stuff, or the sappy Disney fare!). The second was arranged from the “Lament” of Bonds’ series of musical snapshots of key moments in the freedom struggle – a movement that, according to Bonds’ written explanation, depicted the responses of the African American community and the world after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Montgomery, AL on September 15, 1963. The arrangement published here was composed for performance at the first anniversary of that tragedy – a musical commemoration of the event, and a way of inscribing the names of victims, Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise McNair (11), into public memory by means of music, the language that, for Bonds, said more than mere words ever could.

Assistant Professors of Music Julia Escobar (flute) and Jeanne Hourez (piano) performed and presented a recital in celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8 at the Oak Branch Concerts venue in Austin. The recital program exclusively featured historic women composers who are often underrepresented in classical music. This included several works from Dr. Escobar’s forthcoming publication that highlights trailblazing women composers.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of Florence B. Price’s significant but hitherto unknown “Spring Journey” (for women’s chorus, piano, and orchestra, or women’s chorus and piano) as part of the Craig Hella Johnson Signature Series of E.C. Schirmer Music (St. Louis). Written in Chicago in December 1935 and premiered by the South Side Women’s Chorus, Price’s music gives vivid – and wonderfully mischievous – voice to the longing for springtime joys that regularly attend Chicago winters (to say nothing of the winter drears and dreads of 2025–2026).

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published a chapter titled “Luminaries” in a new book titled Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn in Context, edited by Benedict Taylor and Thomas Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge UP). Taking as its starting point the extraordinary number of cultural and political luminaries who were drawn into the Mendelssohn siblings’ respective cultural ambits (figures including Goethe, Prussian kings Friedrich Wilhelm III and IV, Hegel, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, Chopin, Queen Victoria, authors Hans Christian Andersen and Achim von Arnim, mathematician Charles Babbage, painter Ingres, and dozens of others), the chapter traces the gendered dynamics of the two siblings’ circles and the gendered nature of their techniques for using their access to luminaries for promulgating their respective artistic and social agendas.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper and his work editing and publishing previously unknown compositions of Florence Price and Margaret Bonds were featured in an article by Kyle MacMillan on January 30. For readers of these Notables, it’s worth noting that the count of “72” of Cooper’s editions of Price’s music is actually an old figure; the current count is 158 by Price and 56 by Bonds, with another six by Price and eight by Bonds currently in the hopper. MacMillan’s article is available here.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Michael Martinez presented the lecture recital “Multiphonics: A Brief History and Pedagogical Breakdown” at the 2026 Big XII Trombone Conference in Lubbock, TX from January 16–18. The lecture portion discussed the phenomenon of simultaneously singing and playing trombone, its history, and daily practice with healthy mindsets; the recital portion utilized compositions by Abbie Conant and Mike Svoboda to support key points in musical contexts.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Artist in Residence Hai Zheng Olefsky has returned from a successful tour in Asia. In October 2025, she was invited to lead a cello master class for students at the China Conservatory in Beijing, sharing her expertise with some of the country’s most promising young musicians. She has also been teaching and mentoring the exceptional young cellists in the greater Austin area. Her students achieved remarkable accomplishments in statewide and regional music competitions. Two of her top cello students earned placements in the All-State Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras, including the prestigious first chair of the All-State Symphony Orchestra. In addition, six of her students won auditions in the 2025–2026 Texas All-Region Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras, securing both the first and second cello chairs of the All-Region Symphony Orchestra. These All-State and All-Region auditions are sponsored by the Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA), a leading organization promoting music education across Texas.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of the romantic piano waltz “Love’s Triumph” by Will H. Dixon (1879–1917) with Recital Publications. Dixon was one of the leading lights of the generation of African American creatives whose genius and resistance to the oppressive forces of anti-Black racism in the U.S. prepared the way for the Harlem Renaissance and Chicago Black Renaissance in the years after his death. A recording by Miami-Dade College Professor Wayne Bumpers of “Love’s Triumph,” commissioned by Cooper and Lawrence H. Levens of New York, can be found on YouTube here.

Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez was awarded the Programming Award by the International Alliance for Women in Music. This prize recognizes performers who have made deliberate, conscious efforts to achieve greater gender equity in their programming by including women/non-binary composers and/or performers.

Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde’s new work for alto saxophone, Hollow, received its premiere performance at the College Music Society’s National Annual Conference in Spokane, WA, on October 31. The work explores the wide range of the instrument, motivically employing large melodic intervals across that range.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was a mezzo-soprano soloist in Mozart’s beloved “Requiem KV 626,” presented by the Texas Bach Festival, under the direction of Dr. Barry Scott Williamson, on June 29 at First United Methodist Church in Georgetown. Ms. Altobello performed the iconic quartet “Recordare” alongside soprano Jenny Houghton, tenor Dr. Jeffrey Jones-Regona, and baritone Dr. Tim O’Brien. The entire work can be heard here.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez was invited to give masterclasses and perform recitals in Nevada and Utah during fall break. Dr. Hourez visited the University of Nevada – Las Vegas, Southern Utah University, and Snow College. Her recital program, dedicated to women composers, included pieces by Ania Vu, Mel Bonis, Marguerite Canal, Marie Jaell, and Agathe Backer-Grondahl.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the study score for composer Margaret Bonds’ setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Credo” with Hildegard Publishing Company. Cooper published the first edition of this work, which Du Bois’ widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, pronounced “a work of art that is eternal – that will live as long as people love each other and really believe in brotherhood,” back in 2020, and in that guise, Bonds’ “Credo” has been performed dozens of times on both sides of the Atlantic, earning a solid place in the modern concert repertoire. That score and the orchestral parts were available only on a rental basis, however. The present study score, available to libraries and individuals, as well as performing ensembles, will finally enable “Credo” to be studied, taught, and discussed as a worthy peer of iconic orchestral and orchestral/choral works by Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein, Mahler, and other canonical white Euro-American male composers.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Four Pieces for Piano Solo by Will H. Dixon with Recital Publications (Fayetteville, AR). Dubbed “the original dancing conductor” by James Weldon Johnson in his iconic memoir Black Manhattan, Dixon (1879-1917) was one of the leading musical lights of the generation of African Americans who lived and worked in Manhattan’s “Tenderloin District” in the generation leading to the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. Dixon, an actor, playwright, composer, pianist, and singer, was featured as a composer and performer on the great stages of Europe in the first decade of the dawning twentieth century. His music is a rich synthesis of African American vernacular musical traditions and Euro-American classical idioms. Most of his more than 100 surviving works remain unpublished. Dr. Cooper published these four from the privately curated Barnes/Dixon/Meyers Historical Harlem Papers, Archives, and Musical Manuscripts Collection. The volume contains two maxixes (Brazilian tangos) and two valses lentes (slow, romantic waltzes).

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Twelve Art Songs and Spirituals by Margaret Bonds, Florence B. Price, and Clarence Cameron White with Classical Vocal Reprints (Fayetteville, AR). The volume includes Cooper’s first four published editions of music by Clarence Cameron White, who before his posthumous erasure was considered the leading African American composer of classical music. The work also includes three never-before-published compositions by Florence B. Price (among these a moving setting of the first three stanzas of Robert Frost’s “A Prayer in Spring”) that Price wrote when she learned of the surrender of Nazi Germany, as well as five songs by Margaret Bonds that may all be considered revelatory, each in its own way. This volume brings the total number of Cooper’s first editions of music by Price to 152 and that of music by Bonds to 45.

This summer, Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Artist in Residence Hai Zheng Olefsky was invited to serve as a guest judge for the 2025 Colburn-Pledge Music Scholarship Competition, presented by Musical Bridges Around the World (MBAW). MBAW, a nonprofit dedicated to multicultural arts and social impact, works to celebrate shared humanity by making global arts accessible to all. The Colburn-Pledge Music Scholarship provides college tuition assistance to outstanding young string players who aspire to professional careers in classical music.

Assistant Professor of Violin Jessica Mathaes traveled to New Zealand, where she completed a three-month appointment as Associate Concertmaster of the Auckland Philharmonia. Selected through an international audition search process, Mathaes led the Auckland Philharmonia in many concerts during her tenure, playing alongside international colleagues, conductors, and soloists from throughout the world.

For the first time (and almost certainly also the last), Professor of Music Michael Cooper was quoted at some length in an article by Investor’s Business Daily. Titled “Florence Price Composed Lasting Beauty Amid Horrific Tragedy” and written by Paul Katzeff, the article is in the journal’s “Leaders and Success” column. Cooper’s remarks dealt partly with issues of Price’s biography but mostly with the agency of racist and sexist music publishers in ensuring that Price’s music would be largely forgotten in the decades following her death in 1953. The article can be read here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper has won the 2025 Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music for his book Margaret Bonds: The “Montgomery Variations” and Du Bois “Credo” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). This was the first book-length study of Margaret Bonds and her music (followed in Spring 2025 by Cooper’s biography of Margaret Bonds published with Oxford University Press). At just 164 pages, it’s a slight book, but not an insubstantial one. Adjudicators praised it for its “exceptional interdisciplinary analysis” and described it as “illuminating,” “monumental,” and “revolutionary.” More information about the honor can be found here and here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Six Songs on Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar by Florence B. Price with ClarNan Editions (Fayetteville, AR). Those who know Price’s other songs such as “Sympathy” or “Difference” know that Dunbar’s poetry, which the late Nikki Giovanni described as “peerless,” elicited particularly intense responses from Price’s musical imagination. But these six never-before-published songs shed new light on the beauties that emerged from the convergence of their creative spirits. Two of the songs are in the African American dialect, whose inherent poetry Dunbar famously celebrated, while four are in conventional English; collectively, they trace themes ranging from teem with wit, wisdom, and deeply human experience and emotion, in circumstances ranging from romantic love through despair, to end-of-life longing to be “called home” and rejoin long-departed friends and loved ones. This edition marks Cooper’s 149th publication of previously unknown music by Florence Price since September 2019.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of a floral meditation by Florence Price titled Coreopsis with ClarNan Editions (Fayetteville, AR). Price wrote the piece for two pianists at two keyboards, but alongside this, Cooper also included an arrangement for one keyboard and four hands, prepared by Po-Sim Head and Kowoon Lee. Those interested in hearing what the beautiful Coreopsis flower sounds like channeled through the musical imagination of Florence Price may hear this evocating gem here.

Professor Emeritus of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa has an article in the forthcoming issue of the International Suzuki Journal  (June 2025). “Origins of the Suzuki Violin School Repertoire” demonstrates that many of the pieces included in Shinichi Suzuki’s renowned sequence of violin instruction books were compiled from instruction books and string repertoire already in circulation in the early twentieth century, for which other musicians were responsible. The mostly German sources reflect Suzuki’s study as a young violin student in Berlin and were largely unacknowledged when the first published Suzuki Method  volumes appeared in the 1950s. By tracing the editorial paths of three particular compositions from Books 2 and 3, Tamagawa shows how the versions in Suzuki’s method are substantially altered from the original works, and in at least one case, misattributed.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 has been invited to be the mezzo-soprano soloist with the European American Musical Alliance (EAMA) in Paris, France for the month of July. Altobello will be one of four singers to workshop and perform international new works in collaboration with the EAMA’s composition program. Composition faculty Philip Lasser, Benjamin C.S. Boyle, and Abbie Betinis will lead the month-long intensive. More information is available here.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 has been invited to be the mezzo-soprano soloist in W.A. Mozart’s “Requiem” with the Texas Bach Festival, under the direction of Dr. Barry Williamson. The concert will be held on Sunday, June 29 at 3:00 p.m. at First United Methodist Church in Georgetown. More information is available here.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello’s voice student, mezzo-soprano Kaley Williams, has been doing wonderful things on the operatic stage in Central Texas. In the summer of 2024, Ms. Williams performed as a young artist with the Classical Music Institute Festival (CMI), partnered with the San Antonio Opera. The festival was led by Dr. Christopher Besch and featured selections from Spanish operas, canción líricas, and zarzuelas. In the fall of 2024, Ms. Williams performed in the ensemble with Georgetown Palace Theatre’s production of Sweeney Todd, directed by Kristen Rogers. In March 2025, Ms. Williams performed the roles of “Tara” and “Tattooed Man” in Tyler Mabry’s new opera Ray Bradbury with One Ounce Opera in Austin, directed by Matt Smith. This summer, Ms. Williams will perform in Gilbert & Sullivan Austin’s production H.M.S. Pinafore, directed by Carol Brown, and conducted by Dr. Jeffrey Jones-Ragona. Ms. Williams began her vocal studies with Professor Altobello in the fall of 2022.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello’s voice student Will Mallick ’24 has been taking the musical theatre stage by storm in Austin. In October 2024, Mallick performed “Will Hanks” in a professional workshop of Mr. Hanks, A New Musical, written by Lane Rockford Orsak, composed by Francis McGrath, and directed by Laura Galt. In December 2024, Mallick performed “Apprentice Scrooge” in A Christmas Carol  at ZACH Theatre, directed by Dave Steakley. In February and March 2025, Mallick understudied and performed the role of “Bob Gaudio” in Jersey Boys  at ZACH Theatre, directed by Cassie Abate. In March and April 2025, Mallick performed as an “ensemble member” in Company with Roustabout Presents, directed by Adam Roberts. Currently, Mallick is performing the lead role of “Pigeon” in ZACH’s children’s musical production Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, directed by Nat Miller. This summer, Mallick will perform the title role “Conrad Birdie” in Bye Bye Birdie  at TexArts, directed by Kimberly Schafer. Will Mallick began his vocal studies with Professor Altobello in the fall of 2020.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez has been nominated for the 2025 Texas Music Teachers Association Outstanding Collegiate Teaching Achievement Award. This prestigious honor recognizes exceptional achievement in collegiate-level instruction in music performance, composition, theory, history, or any combination of these disciplines. Dr. Hourez was elected to represent the Central Texas region and was nominated alongside six other distinguished faculty members from across the state. The results will be announced in early June.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed provided a pre-UIL clinic for five choirs at Copperas Cove High School. The all-day clinic involved over 15 pieces. A Sweepstakes Award-winning program, Copperas Cove High School has a professional staff of two full-time high school teachers and an accompanist.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello performed Dr. Chris Prosser’s 11-minute comedic operatic duet, titled “META Anthem,” at KMFA Radio’s Opera Austin Festival at the Draylen Mason Music Studio on November 16, 2024, in conjunction with LOLA (Local Opera Local Artists). The piece featured Altobello as mezzo soprano, baritone Brandon Morales, and pianist Brad Baker, and was directed by Rebecca Herman. A hilarious spoof on the ridiculousness of social media, the piece was written for Altobello and Dr. Tim O’Brien in the spring of 2023 and premiered at the Here Be Monsters Music Festival in Austin that summer.

Recent music graduate Makenna Palacio ’24, a student of Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Julia Taylor, has been accepted into the Houston Grand Opera (HGO) Young Artist Vocal Academy. All participants receive the opportunity to work on-site for a week of classes in character development, score preparation, diction, and movement, in addition to daily voice lessons and coachings with HGO music staff, including Director of Vocal Instruction Stephen King.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the mezzo-soprano section leader and vocalist for Congregation Beth Israel’s High Holy Day season in September and October 2024. Professor Altobello sang under the leadership of Cantor Sarah Avner, Conductor Dr. Jeffrey Jones-Ragona, and Collaborative Pianist Dr. Maimy Fong. This marks Professor Altobello’s ninth year singing High Holy Days with the synagogue, the oldest Jewish synagogue in Austin.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed performed as the piano accompanist for four choirs from East View High School for their UIL performance in March. She performed on a total of eight pieces ranging from the 16th century to the modern period, including one with an East View clarinetist. The contest was held at Georgetown High School with three judges from across the state of Texas. This two-day event involved over 30 choirs from Region 26.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Margaret Bonds  as a part of the Composers Across Cultures series by Oxford University Press (New York). It is the first book-length biography of the composer, pianist, and activist who (as many readers of these Notables know distressingly well) is Cooper’s primary musical heartthrob of late. The book draws on an unprecedented mass of archival materials, offers insights into previously neglected (but important) facets of Bonds’ career, points out and corrects a number of longstanding and widely repeated fictions, and includes as its final chapter a 100-page survey of Bonds’ more than 400 compositions, categorized by genre. It’s also Cooper’s third book completed in as many years (although its origins date back to the mid-1980s). Readers of this notice may rest assured that Cooper will now take a break from writing books (though his series of editions of previously unpublished works by Bonds and her friend and mentor Florence Price will continue…). Those interested in this book about one of the most extraordinary musicians and musical activists of the twentieth century may read snippets (or more) at OUP’s website here and through their favorite booksellers.

Assistant Professor of Music Ruben Balboa was named a national finalist for The American Prize in Orchestral Conducting, college/university orchestra division. The American Prize National Nonprofit Competitions in the Performing Arts are the nation’s most comprehensive series of contests in the performing arts. The American Prize is unique in scope and structure, designed to recognize and reward the best performing artists, directors, ensembles and composers in the United States at professional, college/university, community, and high school levels, based on submitted recordings. The full announcement can be viewed here.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed was the visiting clinician for the Round Rock High School Choirs in February. She conducted, accompanied on piano, and gave instruction for foreign language diction, historical style, and vocal pedagogy, as well as provided several interpretative ideas for three choirs. She also gave conducting and UIL preparation coaching to their director. The choirs did well at the UIL contest, receiving at least one Sweepstakes Award for their performance and sight-reading abilities.

In honor of the 2025 International Women’s Day, Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez organized a charity concert in Austin. The program consisted of music written exclusively by women, and Dr. Hourez invited Assistant Professor of Music Ruben Balboa to perform with her. The concert was dedicated to Dress for Success Austin, with all proceeds donated to the organization, which supports women’s independence and professional success.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez presented a lecture-recital, titled “Marguerite Canal & her three Esquisses Méditerranéennes for piano: An exploration of Impressionist colors and timbres,” at the Symposium on Timbre and Colour in French Music at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in the United Kingdom in February.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Margaret Bonds’ choral love song “Supplication” with E.C. Schirmer (St. Louis). Written for SATB chorus and piano, the work proceeds from the usual sense of the term “supplication” (an earnest request or entreaty, especially one made deferentially to a person in a position of power or authority – OED Online), but challenges its connotation of hierarchy (here, gender hierarchy): the men’s and women’s voices address each other with mutual/reciprocal deference: “Once more I offer you my adoration, I offer you my love. Once more I beg of you, heed my supplication… I want to love again, and learn to smile. I want to live again the life you made worthwhile… This is my tender supplication, this is my plea.”

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Margaret Bonds’ choral gem “Rainbow Gold” with E. C. Schirmer (St. Louis). Scored for mixed chorus and piano, “Rainbow Gold” was part of what Bonds called “a certain line” of compositions that she was “anxious to promote” after she became the only woman of color in classical music in the white- and male-dominated American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers in 1955, because the compositions advanced the cause of Black music and gave voice to the Black experience. She took it on a dangerous tour of thirteen Southern states as the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was gaining steam toward passage. In a letter to her family, she linked it to the end of segregation, tying the growing spirit of hope born of that Act’s progress to audiences’ enthusiasm for the piece and its populist message hailing the rewards that – so Bonds believed – would come to those who devoted themselves to doing good for others: “There’s a folly in believin’ / You can’t take it with you when / All these riches you’re achievin’ / No one else could use again, / It’s the pay you’ve been receivin’ / While you did good deeds for men – / Rainbow Gold.” Rainbow Gold posthumously premiered using a pre-publication print of Cooper’s edition by the Capitol Hill Chorale (Washington, D.C.) in 2022. Those interested in being moved to earn their own Rainbow Gold can hear that performance here.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Sarah Oliver published “The Biopsychosocial Approach: A New Path Toward Healing Physical Pain in Musicians” with Sage Journals. It will appear in the spring issue of the American String Teacher journal.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Margaret Bonds’ “Note on Commercial Theater” as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series  with Hildegard Publishing Company. The song is Margaret Bonds’ final art song based on a text of her longtime friend and collaborator Langston Hughes, an art song in the style of blues, and about the blues – and it is a searing critique of cultural appropriation: “You’ve taken my blues and gone – You sing ’em on Broadway and you sing ’em in Hollywood Bowl, and you mixed ’em up with symphonies, and you fixed ’em so they don’t sound like me … But someday somebody’ll stand up and talk about me, and write about me – Black and beautiful – and sing about me, and put on plays about me! I reckon it’ll be me myself! Yes, it’ll be me.” (To hear Hughes’ own reading of it with jazz accompaniment, click here.) Bonds wrote her in 1960-61 and at that time, Hughes’ assistant George Bass described it as “another message from the gods to man via MARGARET BONDS,” and a pre-publication version of Cooper’s edition (2019) was used for a videorecording released by the Antwerp-based team Songs of Comfort in 2021 (that powerful recording can be seen here) – but the song has until now remained in manuscript. This edition marks its first publication.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper and Part-Time Instructor of Music Christopher Washington published the world-premiere edition of Two Songs for Peggy Lee  by Margaret Bonds with ClarNan Editions. Cooper accessed the original autographs in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and prepared the volume as a whole, while Washington composed the piano part for “Don’t Speak,” which survives in lead sheet only (vocal line with chord changes, but no written-out accompaniment). The two songs represent Bonds’ well-known ability to synthesize classical and non-classical styles and offer a glimpse into the workings of Bonds’ genius as it had come to exist by 1968. “Don’t Speak” is a love song of great tenderness and eros-tinged intimacy, while the other song, “Bunker Hill,” is a hard-hitting critique of the human costs of urban renewal and gentrification, named for the storied Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles, whose poor and underserved community of immigrants and minorities was heartlessly displaced in 1958 so that the area could be redeveloped with high-rise, high-rent, and predominantly white-owned facilities.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez has been elected to the College Music Society South Central Chapter Board as the Advisory Board Member for Performance. In this role, Dr. Hourez hopes to build stronger connections between institutions in the South Central region. She aims to encourage more performance opportunities for students and faculty from colleges in the region, as well as to develop exchanges with surrounding communities. She also seeks to promote collaboration between different musical fields.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has been teaching and coaching top young talents in the greater Austin area. Three of her students won cello auditions in the 2024–2025 Texas All-State Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras, including the first cello chair of the Philharmonic Orchestra, sponsored by the Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA). Two of her cello students from St. Stephen’s School won cello auditions for the Texas Private School Music Educator Association (TPSMEA) 2024–2025 All-State Orchestra.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published “Three Early Songs” by Margaret Bonds with Hildegard Publishing Company (Worcester, MA). The volume is the first publication of three works written before Bonds moved to New York, where she would spend most of the rest of her career, in October 1939. The earliest of the three songs, “Sleep Song” (text by Joyce Kilmer) was written when Bonds was just 14. The second, “The Sea Ghost” (text by Frank Dempster Sherman), written in 1931 or early 1932, is a parable of recognition of repressed traumatic memory; it is significant because it enhanced Bonds’ national recognition by winning the Rodman Wanamaker Competition in Musical Compsition for Composers of the Negro Race in 1932 (the prize of $250 is the equivalent of about $5,200 today). And the third song, “Sunset,” written ca. 1934-1938, is Bonds’ only known setting of the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar – a glistening meditation on the beauties of daylight passing into the beautiful darkness of night.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of “Joy,” written by Margaret Bonds on a text of Langston Hughes, with Hildegard Publishing Company (Worcester, MA). Written for four-part mixed chorus and piano, the composition has the greatest compositional longevity and variety of any of Bonds’ works, having first been composed in 1936 and then re-arranged by the composer at least seven times for various forces over the next twenty years. The reason for that recursive process is probably the lesson taught by Hughes’ parable-poem and Bonds’ music: that Joy/joy is not the exclusive domain of “upstanding” institutions such as churches and universities – Hughes wrote the poem just after he had abandoned his studies at Columbia University due to that institution’s deeply ingrained racism – but rather something that is equally often found in humble, ne’er-do-well quarters. That is an idea that both poet and composer lived by – and Margaret Bonds’ music gives exultant voice to its beauty. Those interested in hearing the music (which was released on Conspirare’s Grammy-nominated album “The House of Belonging” last year) can find it here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published Florence Price: Seventeen Art Songs and Spirituals  with ClarNan Editions (Fayetteville, AR). The volume includes 14 previously unpublished art songs and spirituals by Price, together with a variorum edition of an art song that evidently (judging from the number of times that she returned to it in the period 1937–1950) held special meaning for her, and the first edition of two previously published spirituals that, in this edition, document a performance tradition that dated to enslavement in Tennessee. At least one, and probably two, of the songs are Price’s most explicit musical commentary on her first marriage, and one of the spirituals published here for the first time is a heartbreakingly beautiful musical reflection occasioned by the death of Price’s mother. The art songs include texts by William Stanley Braithwaite, Maude Ludington Caine, Nora Connelly, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Claude McKay, and Elizabeth Whittier.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed served as a national choral judge for the American Prize in December. The American Prize is a national, nonprofit competition in the performing arts and is the nation’s most comprehensive series of contests in the classical arts. The American Prize is designed to evaluate, recognize and reward the best performers, ensembles, composers, directors, and administrators in the United States. The American Prize has attracted thousands of qualified contestants from all 50 states since its founding, has awarded nearly $150,000 in prizes in all categories since 2010, and is presented annually in many areas of the performing arts.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of Five Pieces for Piano Solo  by Florence B. Price with ClarNan Editions. The five works – A Thought for May, A Wee Bit of Erin, Broadway at Night, Dainty Feet, and Southern Sketches  – span the period 1929–1949 and collectively offer a cross-section of Florence Price’s stylistic diversity and a glimpse into the workings of one of the most prodigious musical imaginations of the early twentieth century.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of “Silver Urn” by Margaret Bonds – a miniature in miniature composed for flute or violin, and a veritably glistening synthesis of neoclassicism and African American stylistic elements. The edition was released by ClarNan Editions. Philological evidence suggests that this is the first classical composition Bonds wrote after moving from her native Chicago to New York in October 1939. Cooper’s working theory to explain the origins of the diminutive and undated piece is that Bonds, who had worked as a ballet accompanist in Chicago and would resume working as a ballet accompanist soon after moving to New York, wrote the charming work for use in a dance studio. That notion is neither provable nor disprovable, but that’s Cooper’s story and he’s sticking to it (for now).

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Sarah Oliver was featured with Dr. Holly Dalrymple and the Saengerrunde Damenchor on NPR radio. The story highlights the choir’s commitment to the preservation of German heritage and can be read here.

On December 7, Assistant Professor of Music Ruben Balboa had the honor of being the featured soloist with the Central Texas Medical Orchestra, performing Hoffmeister’s Viola Concerto  in collaboration with Austin Speech Labs. This special performance supported stroke survivors and their families, underscoring music’s role in supporting the community and meaningful initiatives.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed presented an interactive lecture to about 50 high school students on classical music. The presentation was part of the Waco Symphony Council’s outreach to high school students in the Central Texas area. Topics included: “Where do we find classical music in our lives?”, “How are our lives impacted by classical music?”, and “What makes classical music different from other genres?”

On July 7 at First United Methodist Church, Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the Mezzo-Soprano soloist with the Texas Bach Festival under the direction of Dr. Barry Williamson. Altobello performed Bach’s “Magnificat BWV 243” and Vivaldi’s “Gloria RV 589,” performing the solo “Domine Deus, Agnus Dei.”

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez presented a lecture titled “Implementing Music by Women Composers in the Undergraduate and Graduate Piano Curriculum” at the prestigious 2024 College Music Society National Conference in Washington, D.C. on November 8.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed gave the EOY financial report at the national conference of College Music Society in Washington, D.C. She included highlights on revenue and losses, and provided insights and direction to financial management of current assets. She is leading the task of updating and improving the Society’s current Financial Handbook. She also began a discussion on seeking grants and utilizing new sources of revenue to position the Society to meet its goals for the next decade. She has been the Treasurer since 2022, and was recently re-elected to a new 3-year term.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper’s forthcoming biography of Margaret Bonds (Oxford UP, March 2025) was previewed in an interview/article in the Hong Kong music journal Interlude. Those interested in learning about the book, the story of its becoming, and some of its special features can read the interview here. The article also includes some exceedingly tasty clips of Margaret Bonds’s music.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper presented the keynote lecture at the inaugural concert of the 2024 Corcoran Music Festival, hosted by George Washington University. The centerpiece of the concert was the previously unheard “Five Spiritual Songs in High and Low Keys” of Margaret Bonds, which Cooper published in August 2024 ([Ann Arbor]: Videmus).

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed has been re-elected to a three-year term as the National Treasurer for the College Music Society (CMS). She has been instrumental in creating best accounting practices for the organization. She also chaired the Oversight Committee for the External Consultant to look at the structure and processes for CMS. She also successfully encouraged the organization to apply for ERC funding, which earned CMS a significant governmental return of monies to be used for financial needs of the Society. Her new term will expire at the end of 2027.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed recently judged the All-State Region auditions at Stony Point High School. Senior music education student Emma Duncan ’25, recommended by Dr. Sneed, was also asked to serve as a judge for this competition. Hundreds of students sang to be selected for All-Region, and less than 100 will continue on to the next level of All-State auditions. Every year, more than 70,000 students audition for instrumental and vocal ensembles across the state, and fewer than 2,000 are chosen to perform in February at the state music educators conference.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Bonnie Sneed delivered the pre-concert lecture for the Waco Symphony Orchestra performance on October 3. She led concertgoers in a discussion about Mexican composer Arturo Márquez and American composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Jeanne Hourez released her third CD, dedicated to “Quartet of the End of Time” by Olivier Messiaen. The album was recorded under the Ladoga Records Label, with Hank Landrum, Zongheng Zhang, and Bobae Lee. It can be heard here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published “Two Moon Songs for Women’s Chorus and Piano” by Florence B. Price (Fayetteville, AR: ClarNan). The volume comprises two songs – “The Moon Bridge” by Mary Rolofson Gamble and “The New Moon” by Liza Lee Follett – that may be described as loving maternal musical reflections on the magic of moonlight in a young daughter’s imagination. Price published both works separately in 1930, “The New Moon” with a dedication to her friend Estella Bonds (mother of Margaret Bonds), but those editions are long out of print. Cooper’s edition hopes to help them find a new place in modern musical life.

Seth Sagen ’26 was recently awarded the Assistant Concertmaster position with the Central Texas Philharmonic, a professional orchestra in the Austin area. He is a violin major and student of Assistant Professor of Violin and Viola Jessica Mathaes. Seth won an audition in order to receive this highly competitive violin leadership spot with the orchestra.

Professor Emeritus of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa was invited to edit and expand the 2024-25 Prescribed Music List (PML) for solo pianists participating in the annual Texas State Solo and Ensemble Contest of the University Interscholastic League (UIL). Hundreds of high school pianists from across the state participate in this event, which culminates in a final audition before an expert adjudicator in Austin in late May of every year. They earn a rating and a possible designation of Outstanding Soloist. Tamagawa’s revisions, which are now in effect, substantially increased repertoire choices for participants, including for the first time many works by women composers and composers of color.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Artist in Residence Hai Zheng Olefsky is excited to share this season’s release of the Amazon documentary “The Story of Art in America,” where she is featured in season 3, episode 2. This episode highlights Georgetown artists, including painter and art instructor Carol Light, textile artist Gary Anderson, muralist and portrait artist Devon Clarkson, and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky. “The Story of Art in America,” an award-winning docuseries created by acclaimed film director Christelle Bois and produced by executive producer Pierre Gervois, explores the art scenes in various American cities and towns. The series features in-depth interviews with artists and art historians, highlighting the role of the arts in American society and its historical significance. The documentary is now available on Amazon Prime, offering a glimpse into Georgetown’s vibrant arts scene. Georgetown Arts and Culture Program Manager Amanda Still remarked, “It’s been an unforgettable experience to participate in this project… We are so proud of the members of our arts and culture community for the eloquent way they have demonstrated the impact of arts, culture, and history in Georgetown.” The episode can be viewed here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of Florence B. Price’s three-movement trio titled Moods for flute, clarinet, and piano. A number of fragmentary manuscripts for this important late work – a series of “moodscapes” that reflect the compositional and stylistic diversity Price had achieved by the mid-1940s – have long been known, but they did not permit reconstruction of the complete work. Cooper’s edition is based on two previously unknown autographs that were found in an apartment in Chicago and donated to the University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville, in 2023.

In July, Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Artist in Residence Hai Zheng Olefsky was invited to serve as a guest judge for the 2024 Colburn-Pledge Music Scholarship Competition by Musical Bridges Around the World (MBAW), a nonprofit organization dedicated to multicultural arts and social impact. MBAW’s mission is to celebrate our shared humanity by making global arts accessible to everyone. The Colburn-Pledge Music Scholarship offers college tuition assistance to young string players aspiring to careers in classical music.

Professor Emeritus of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa performed a recital on the TGIF Concert Series at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Fe, NM in June. His program was a reflection on the intertwined personal and musical relationships of Robert and Clara Schumann and their protégé and friend Johannes Brahms and included music of all three composers.

Assistant Professor of Violin Jessica Mathaes performed as a soloist with the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra in Jackson, WY this summer. She also led the orchestra as concertmaster. Named “one of 2024’s top US Classical Music Festivals” by BBC Music Magazine, the Grand Teton Music Festival is an eight-week concert series that draws from top orchestra musicians throughout the world, and is led by music director Sir Donald Runnicles.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper’s work in editing and publishing previously obscure music by Florence Price and Margaret Bonds was the subject of an interview article published in the August 2024 issue of American Music Teacher. The article can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Music Ruben Balboa had the distinct privilege of performing at the 2024 American Viola Society Festival and Primrose International Viola Competition in Los Angeles, CA, where he gave the world premiere of “Tejano Suite for Viola and Piano,” a piece he commissioned by Alex Molina Shawver. The suite is an exploration of both genre and identity, delving into the Tejano or Conjunto genre, which includes folk music developed in the Texas-Mexico border region over centuries of cultural conflict, fusion, and synthesis. Each movement of the suite incorporates characteristic rhythmic material from common conjunto dances, while the harmonic and formal idioms remain true to the composer’s unique style.

Assistant Professor of Music Ruben Balboa and colleagues Ames Asbell, Kathy Steely, Martha Carpetyan, and Tim Washecka, had the honor of presenting and performing together at the 2024 American Viola Society Festival and Primrose International Viola Competition in Los Angeles, CA. Their presentation, entitled “AVS Festival Ensemble Commissions Retrospective: Works by Bunch, Colberg, and Vanderveer,” featured a retrospective with brief, recorded interviews with each composer and a performance of their works.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave an invited presentation for the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library’s Summer Educator Institute, “It’s Tricky: American Music and Culture.” Titled “Teaching American Classical Music in Color: Stories, Journeys, and Portraits Old, New, and Yet to Come,” Cooper’s presentation was about the ethical and moral imperative of challenging both the perception of a Black/White color line in classical music and the de facto creation of said color line via endless reiterations of canonical compositions by mostly-long-dead-canonical composers, most of whom are European and/or male, and about ways in which today’s educators can liberate themselves from the fetters of canonical domination.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first edition of the complete four-movement version Florence B. Price’s valedictory opus, Dances in the Canebrakes, for Piano Solo, with ClarNan Editions (Fayetteville, AR). Price actually began work on the music that would become this suite in early 1929, and returned to the idea repeatedly over the next twenty-four years. Finally, in what was to be the last year of her life, she was ready to publish it and made preparations to do so – but died before the edition could come out (it was copyrighted five months to the day after her death and published shortly thereafter). That edition soon went out of print, however, and consequently the Dances in the Canebrakeshave been known mostly in the orchestral arrangement prepared by Price’s colleague William Grant Sill. Cooper’s edition makes her music newly available as she conceived it, also including an appendix that provides the original version of final movement (this titled Chicken Feathersinstead of Silk Hat and Walking Cane). Interested folk can hear three of the suite’s movements in the landmark recording on pianist Althea Waites’s 1987/1993 album Black Diamonds here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper contributed an invited guest post to the Women’s Song Forum blog. Titled “Florence Price, Motherhood, and Loss,” the post draws on archival research and textual and musical analysis to explore the relationship between “Brown Arms (To Mother),” which Price composed (on her own poem) at the twentieth anniversary of her mother’s unimaginably painful decision to sever all ties to Price and renounce her race, spending the rest of her life passing as white, and “To My Little Son” (poem by Julia Johnson Davis), which she composed at the thirtieth anniversary of the death of her son Tommy, who died of malaria two days before his sixth birthday. Cooper discovered the manuscript for “Brown Arms (To Mother)” several years ago and released its first published edition this past January. Interested folk can read this post here.

Part-time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello’s voice student Will Mallick ’24 has been cast in leading roles with theater companies around the Georgetown and greater Austin area this year. At the Palace Theatre, Mallick performed the title role “Daniel” in Once on this Island, the title role “Chad” in Disaster, supporting roles “Lord Savage” and “Spider” in Jekyll and Hyde, and supporting role “Kodaly” in She Loves Me. He will soon perform the title role of “Jimmy Ray” in Bright Star. Mallick performed “Kenickie” in Greasewith Summer Stock Austin, and is soon to perform the title role “Emmett” in Legally Blondeat Zilker Hillside Theater. Please congratulate Will Mallick on his incredible success these past twelve months! Altobello has been Mallick’s voice teacher for four years.

The cello studio of Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Artist in Residence Hai Zheng Olefsky participated in a masterclass led by guest artist Joshua Gindele on March 21 at the Caldwell-Carvey Foyer. Professor Gindele, a cello professor at the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding member of the prestigious Miro Quartet, conducted the session and provided valuable insights to the performers. During the masterclass, Anna Martens ’24, the first cellist of the SU Orchestra, performed a cello solo piece by Bach and the first movement of the Elgar Concerto, accompanied by Part-Time Instructor of Music David Utterback. Additionally, the Sarofim Piano Trio, a student trio coached by Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa, also performed a rendition of Shostakovich’s Trio Op. No. 2 in E minor at the event.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper presented a keynote lecture titled “The Cost of Being Fanny Mendelssohn” at each of two concerts offered as part of a Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel festival given by the Capitol Hill Chorale in Washington, D.C., under the direction of Frederick Binkholder of Georgetown University.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper led a virtual seminar on the subject of the politics of the CREDO of W.E.B. Du Bois and Margaret Bonds with the combined choirs of the University of California, Berkeley. Attended by about eighty singers and several community members, the seminar was offered in preparation for the choirs’ upcoming performance of the Bonds/Du Bois CREDO.

Assistant Professor of Music Ruben Balboa served as a jury member for the 2024 Primrose International Viola Competition. As one of the most renowned string instrument competitions in the world, the Primrose International Viola Competition features the world’s best and most promising young violists.

Lerchen Zhong, a sophomore at Westwood High School in Austin and a piano student of Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa since 2019, has been awarded one of fifteen Texas Young Masters arts awards for 2024-2025. Texas Young Masters is a joint program of the Texas Cultural Trust and the Texas Commission on the Arts that focuses on talented young artists in grades 8-11. Recipients, selected through competitive application and audition, receive the title of Young Master and are awarded renewable grants of $5,000 per year for further study in their chosen arts disciplines. In addition to his piano studies, Lerchen was selected as Assistant Concertmaster of the Texas All-State Symphony, the top All-State orchestra, in February.

The violin studio of Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Mathaes performed in a masterclass by guest artist Sandy Yamamoto on Saturday, February 24, at Caldwell-Carvey Foyer. Professor Yamamoto is a violin professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a founding member of the renowned Miro quartet. Mathaes’ students performed violin solo works in front of a live audience, with a real-time critique by the guest artist. The Sarofim String Quartet (a student quartet coached by Mathaes) concluded the masterclass with a Beethoven Op. 18 No. 4 performance.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Mathaes was selected to lead the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra as concertmaster this summer. Hailed as “one of the top 10 classical music festivals in the US” (Financial Times), the Grand Teton Music Festival takes place in Jackson, Wyoming. In its 63rd season, the festival is eight weeks long and is a destination for top orchestral players from world-renowned orchestras. Mathaes will lead the orchestra in July, with Sir Donald Runnicles conducting.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music and Concertmaster of the Austin Symphony Jessica Mathaes’ student Seth Sagen ’26, a violin performance major, performed in the violin section of the Austin Symphony on their Masterworks concerts February 9-10 at the Long Center.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper wrote the program note for the first performance of Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. The performance is another milestone in the ongoing Florence Price movement, as a major orchestra that, even just ten years ago, had never even considered performing any of her music finally elected to recognize her significance by granting her a place in its repertoire.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published two new volumes of previously unknown compositions by Florence Price: Seven Songs on Texts of African American Poets and 12 Pieces for Piano Solo (both Fayetteville, AK: ClarNan Editions) and released these in tandem with sixteen videos performed and produced by African American artists; four of these videos were produced with assistance from Southwestern. The volume of songs was released in both the original settings for medium voice and a separate edition for high voice (because we all want to keep the sopranos happy). Totaling about 54 minutes worth of music, the 19 pieces in these volumes reveal the breadth and richness of Price’s musical imagination and span her active composing career from 1929 to the early 1950s. Those interested in hearing the Seven Songs on Texts of African American Poets can check out this YouTube playlist, and those interested in hearing the 12 Pieces for Piano Solo can check out this YouTube playlist. Listeners should, however, be forewarned that after listening to either or both of these playlists, they might experience what one listener dubbed #ThePriceEffect: a highly emotional state that mingles joy at this music’s entry into public life with a wide range of other emotions triggered by the music itself and sorrow that such genius that the political economy of the music industry and higher education allowed these works to remain unknown for decades – depriving audiences, teachers, and (most of all) students of their beauties.

In August of this year, Part-time Assistant Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the featured guest Resident Artist alongside Grammy-nominated pianist Austin Haller at the iconic Spiritual Retreat Center, Holden Village, located in the remote North Cascade Mountains of Washington State. Altobello and Haller led daily musical workshops, choral programs, and performed a contemporary-classical concert for voice and piano titled “Hope and Healing.” Holden Village offers visitors a unique opportunity to step into the wilderness to form and renew their relationship with God, the earth, and each other. Over the course of more than 60 years, Holden Village has been transformed from a copper mining town to a vibrant place of education, programming, and worship where everyone is welcome and embraced. For more information, visit www.holdenvillage.org.

Part-time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has continued coaching the top high school cellists in Austin. Her cello students have won the first stand cello chairs for Texas Region 26-All Region High School Symphony Orchestra this school year, and her students also won the cello audition for All-State Orchestra sponsored by TMEA (Texas Music Educator Association) and All-State Orchestra sponsored by TPSMEA (Texas Private School Music Educator Association).

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Mathaes presented a violin masterclass at Baylor University on Nov 27.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first monograph on Margaret Bonds and her music. Titled “Margaret Bonds: The Montgomery Variations and Du Bois Credo,” the book was published by Cambridge University Press as part of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks series. It was born during the tumultuous year 2020 and draws on dozens of previously unpublished archival documents and takes a deeply interdisciplinary dive into the complex and powerful cultural, intellectual, political, social, and musical cross-currents that produced these twin summits of Margaret Bonds’s career-long quest to put her talent and her art into the service of the quest for racial justice and global equality. It is available here.

Part-time Assistant Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello was a featured guest soloist at New Music On the Bayou’s International Summer Music Festival located in Monroe and Ruston, Louisiana, in June of this year. Altobello performed “Evocations” by Steven Landis alongside soprano Claire Vangelisti. “Evocations” was composed in 2021 for soprano and mezzo-soprano and is entirely acapella (unaccompanied). The work is comprised of a set of nine site-specific nocturnes in mobile form. Each song explores aspects of the night: astronomy, astrology, mythology, and some of the associations humanity makes with the night (fear of the unknown, death, and sex). The work integrates the use of space and lighting (moonlight, fire, starlight) to further enhance the atmosphere. Altobello premiered the piece “Everything is Tiny,” composed by Astrid Hubbard Flynn alongside Benjamin Cold (alto saxophone), Justin Kujawski (bass), and Diana Thacher (piano). The title is a quote from Tomoe-san Katagiri, a Japanese Zen elder living in Minneapolis. The work is about giving time and space to everything and having nothing to prove. New Music On the Bayou’s International Summer Music Festival allows composers and performers from around the world to intersect during an intense multi-day, multi-city, multi-venue series of rehearsals, presentations, and concerts to enliven the region with new ideas about music and to inspire composers with the unique landscapes and cultural offerings scattered among the cities of Monroe and Ruston, Louisiana. Learn more here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was interviewed by the Hong Kong-based online magazine Interlude about his forthcoming Cambridge University Press book on Margaret Bonds’s “Montgomery Variations” and “Credo” (https://tinyurl.com/y3drvdkb) and his ongoing projects concerning Bonds and Florence Price in general. The book is due out this month. Those who missed their extra hour of sleep this past weekend can quickly recapture it by reading the interview here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was interviewed by the Hong Kong-based online magazine Interlude about his forthcoming Cambridge University Press book on Margaret Bonds’s “Montgomery Variations” and “Credo” (https://tinyurl.com/y3drvdkb) and his ongoing projects concerning Bonds and Florence Price in general. The book is due out this month. Those who missed their extra hour of sleep this past weekend can quickly recapture it by reading the interview here: https://tinyurl.com/3w7dtb73.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave the keynote address “Margaret Bonds: A Life in Music” and two pre-concert lectures at the first-ever three-day Margaret Bonds symposium on November 3-5. Hosted by Queens University (Charlotte, North Carolina), the symposium included a salon recital of Bonds’s art songs, popular songs, and spirituals and a choral concert that included Bonds’s choral lullaby “Sleep Song” and a performance of her magisterial setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconic civil-rights manifesto “Credo” (both works recently edited and published by Cooper as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series of Hildegard Publishing Company).

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa performed as harpsichord soloist on October 23 with Jessica Mathaes, Austin Symphony Orchestra concertmaster and Adjunct Instructor of Music at SU, and Rachel Lopez, ASO flutist, in J.S. Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto with the Austin Youth Orchestra. The “Bachtoberfest” concert was part of the Youth Orchestra’s 30th anniversary season.

Will Mallick ’24 performed the lead role of Daniel in “Once On This Island” by Lynn Arenas and Stephen Flaherty at The Georgetown Palace Theatre on May 19-June 18 in Georgetown, TX. Mallick performed the role of Kienickie in “Grease” by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey at Summer Stock Austin July 28-August 7 in Austin, TX. Cayden Couchman ’23 performed in the ensemble of “Matilda” by Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin with Zilker Theatre Productions on July 7-August 12 in Austin, TX. Couchman and Mallick are currently performing in Jekyll & Hyde at The Georgetown Palace Theatre in Georgetown, TX. Couchman performs the title role of Jekyll and Mallick plays Lord Savage and Spider. The show runs October 6-November 5th. For more information:georgetownpalace.com

Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury were invited to perform at the Just Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 7th-9th. A social justice and human rights festival, the Just Festival is part of Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival whose events aim to challenge perceptions, celebrate differences, and encourage dialogue on the key issues of our time. The duo was also invited to perform at the Hispanic Heritage Festival at Palm Beach Atlantic University on October 14th. The program for the concerts in Scotland featured works on environmental themes written for the duo by composers Matthew Dunne, Jason Hoogerhyde, Diego Luzuriaga, Eduardo Martin, Julio Cesar Oliva, and Diego Vega, while the concert for the HHF was comprised of works based upon Spanish texts.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the second, enlarged edition of his Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. The first edition of this book (2013) was the most diverse and inclusive single-volume study of music of the long nineteenth century (ca. 1780-ca. 1914) to date. But the 600+ entries of the new edition double down on the challenge of dismantling the widespread and historically false portrayal of Romantic music as an imaginary museum of works by dead White folk, most of them German, French, or Italian, and most of those male. It includes more women, more Black musicians and other musicians of color, and more musicians from Central and South America as well as Central and Eastern Europe than any other single-volume study of Romantic music. It features entries on topics such as anti-Semitism, sexism and misogyny, and racism that were pervasive and defining to the worlds of musical Romanticism but are rarely addressed in general studies of that subject, as well as (another first) dedicated entries on spirituals and ragtime and genre-determinative topics such as the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, Reconstruction, the National Peace Jubilee, the World Peace Jubilee, and the Second Great Awakening. The result is an expansive, inclusive, diverse, and more richly textured portrayal of “Romantic music” than is elsewhere available. A bonus is that a dozen or so of the book’s entries were written by SU alumna Megan Marie McCarty’10.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Julia Taylor and Part-Time Instructor of Music David Utterback were invited to perform a recital for the South Texas Chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing Fall Conference. The program included works by William Grant Still, H.T. Burleigh, Amy Beach, Dominick Argento, Reynaldo Hahn, and Rachmaninoff.

Part-time Assistant Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 performed the world premiere of Chris Prosser’s hilarious piece spoofing Facebook entitled “Meta Anthem” (an eleven-minute duet for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and piano) at Tetractys New Music’s sold out event HERE BE MONSTERS! on Saturday May 27th at The Butterfly Bar in Austin, TX. The event featured five hours of new music on two stages, was sponsored by KMFA Classical 89.5, and featured outstanding local artists such as The Kraken Quartet, Convergence, Invoke, and Graham Reynolds. You can watch the live performance of “Meta Anthem” here.

Three works by Margaret Bonds, discovered and edited by Professor of Music Michael Cooper, were featured on the new album “Reflections in Time” by trailblazing pianist Althea Waites. Waites – who will perform at Southwestern at 7:30 p.m. on February 24, 2024, as part of the Sarofim Music Series – made history with her first album, “Black Diamonds,” in 1993 by presenting the first commercially released album devoted exclusively to piano music by African American composers (a proposition that had previously been considered not commercially viable) – including the world-premiere recordings of Margaret Bonds’s “Troubled Water” and Florence Price’s Piano Sonata. This latest album includes the second recording of Bonds’s sensual “Tangamerican” and the world-premiere recordings of her evocative “Flamenco” and masterpiece sui generis, Fugal Dance. Cooper published the first and third of these pieces in 2021, and his edition of the “Flamenco” is to appear in 2024. He also wrote the liner notes for these works.

Part-time Assistant Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello’s voice student, Abigail Bensman ’25 was cast as Brenda in the National Broadway Tour of the hit musical “Hairspray”! After five grueling days of callbacks in New York City, Bensman was offered a year-long contract touring the United States and living her dream performing musical theatre. Altobello has been Bensman’s voice teacher for three years and has witnessed her incredible growth, talent, and work ethic. For more information: www.hairspraytour.com.

Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde’s student Brayden Carr ’23 was an invited participant to the Valencia International Performing Arts Festival, Valencia, Spain, this summer. While there, they participated in composition masterclasses and received a performance of their commissioned work for the Mivos String Quartet. Carr was the winner of an international call for scores from the Rock Mountain Chamber Choir. The choir’s performance of Carr’s work, The Elysian Fields, may be heard here.

A nonfiction book titled Funky Fungi: 30 Activities for Exploring Molds, Mushrooms, Lichens, and More was co-authored by Adjunct Professor of Music Education Alisha Gabriel. In March, the book won the 2023 AAAS/Subaru Book Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the hands-on category, and Gabriel spoke about the book at the AAAS Conference in Washington, DC.

A choral composition by Margaret Bonds, “Joy,” discovered and edited by Professor of Music Michael Cooper, was included on GRAMMY-winning choral ensemble Conspirare’s new album, “House of Belonging,” along with Cooper’s program note for the piece. Based on a parable-poem written by Langston Hughes after he had abandoned the racism and stifling conformism of Columbia University for a job as a “saloon messman” aboard a decommissioned freighter (where he discovered that his rough, ne’er-do-well shipmates where “the finest gentlemen [he] ever met”), the work teaches that joy is not the province of the exalted halls of universities and churches, but rather something that can be found in the humblest of human quarters and need only be embraced wherever we find it. Margaret Bonds’s musical interpretation is, aptly enough, suffused with joy as well as genius in its brief 2’14”. Those who wish to hear it can stream it on YouTube here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper discovered an art song by Margaret Bonds that was given its world premiere by acclaimed soprano Nicole Cabell and pianist Lara Downes at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago on 22 August. The song “Sunset” is Bonds’s only known setting of the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and reflects the ideals of the mid-twentieth-century Black renaissance in its portrayal of daylight passing into the beauties of the night. Bonds’s music emphatically celebrates the rich splendors of night’s Blackness by vividly portraying twinkling stars and using exceptionally evocative harmonies during the portion of the song devoted to darkness. Cooper discovered this song quite by accident during his archival research: the manuscript for the first half of the song is in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, while that for the second half is in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Cooper’s edition is being published as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series of Hildegard Publishing Company (proofs are already awaiting his review as soon as he returns from his next appointment with his ophthalmologist).

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa performed two solo recitals in July, one for the Central Presbyterian Church Noonday Concerts series in Austin and the second on the Sunday Concert Series presented by the city of Lakeway.

Assistant Professor of Applied Music Ruben Balboa’s research has been published by The Journal of the American Viola Society and is a featured article. The title of the publication is The Loeffler-Verlaine Connection.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Sarah Oliver presented “Less Pain, More Gain: Looking Beyond Technique for Longevity” at American String Teachers Association’s 2023 Summit and the Greater Austin Suzuki Institute.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper’s edited arrangement for piano solo of Margaret Bonds’s “Especially Do I Believe in the Negro Race” is featured on pianist Lara Downes’s new album “Love at Last,” which debuted at No. 1 in Billboard’s Traditional Classical Albums category and has held that position for two weeks (so far). In its original guise for soprano with piano or orchestra, the work is No. 2 of Bonds’ setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconic civil-rights manifesto, CREDO. Cooper’s edition of this arrangement will be published later this summer as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series of Hildegard Publishing Company. Those interested in hearing Lara Downes’s exceedingly beautiful interpretation can find it on all major streaming platforms or on YouTube here.

Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury were invited to perform at the College Music Society Southwest Regional Conference in March and as featured guest artists at Rollins College in April. The programs for these concerts featured works on environmental themes written for the duo by composers Susan Cohn Lackman, Daniel Crozier, Matthew Dunne, Jason Hoogerhyde, Diego Luzuriaga, Eduardo Martin, Julio Cesar Oliva, and Diego Vega.

Georgetown will be featured in the upcoming Amazon Prime docuseries “The Story of Art in America.” The show, created by award-winning director Christelle Bois, showcases the art scene of different cities and counties through interviews with well-known artists and historians. The docuseries aims to explore the significance of the arts in American society. Concert Cellist and Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Hai Zheng-Olefsky was selected to be featured as one of the four artists. The filming took place on April 16th, and the episode is expected to premiere on Amazon Prime Video in early 2024.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper traveled backward nearly twenty-three years, to late May in the year 2000, when he went poking around in the Conservatorio di musica “Giuseppe Verdi” in Milan, Italy, looking for significant music manuscripts pertaining to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At that time, Cooper found a fascinating and beautiful manuscript that transmitted an arrangement by Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909) of Mendelssohn’s Albumblatt (Album leaf) op. 117, originally written for piano solo, for bassoon with piano. Cooper edited it immediately upon return to these shores and even arranged for several performances (at the Juilliard School in 2002, the University of North Texas in 2003, and Southwestern University in 2007) – but he never committed it to print. Having returned to our own day, Cooper finally realized, some twenty-three years later, that this arrangement warranted publication. Martucci’s arrangement of Mendelssohn’s Albumblatt is now available through the Recital Publications imprint of Classical Vocal Reprints (Fayetteville, AR). Those interested in hearing the work can do so here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the entry on Florence B. Price in MGG Online (Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart Online), the leading German-language encyclopedia of music. The entry marks Price’s first appearance in German music-lexicography and will give German speakers easier access to reliable information about this extraordinary composer’s life, works, and significance than has been the case until now.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a virtual lecture on the deliciously finite and focused subject of “The Piano Music of Florence Price” for California State University, Northridge. Florence Price’s complete oeuvre comprises more than 456 works, but a paltry 217 of those were written for piano solos. The presentation classified this body of works into major style periods in the fashion that scholars have long since done for virtually every canonical composer as well as many Kleinmeister whose utter insignificance is undisputed even by their advocates; it is the first attempt to come to terms with Price’s extraordinary creative imagination in this fashion. Best of all, the presentation included clips of recently unearthed Price compositions in performances by Lara Downes, Samantha Ege, Elizabeth G. Hill, Phoenix Park-Kim, and Althea Waites; and viewers who were not lost in Instagram or simply snoozing were rewarded with a video of the world premiere of Price’s final composition for piano solo, the still-unpublished Waltz Charming, discovered and edited by Cooper and recorded especially for this presentation by Prof. Kevin Wayne Bumpers.

Several student members of the Texas Alpha chapter of the Alpha Chi Honor Society attended the Alpha Chi National Convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they presented research and creative works from several fields. Arden Neff ’25 presented a research poster titled “Using Linear Programming to Optimize Grape Harvest Timing and Yield” based on research supervised by Professor of Computer Science Dr. Barbara Anthony. Chelsey Southwell ’24 Samuel Dawson ’23 gave a presentation titled “Gold(I) Catalyzed Synthesis of Isoquinolines” based on research supervised by Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Mike Gesinski. Finally, Anna Wicker ’24 gave a piano performance of “Souvenir de Porto Rico” by L.M. Gottschalk, which she selected with the guidance of Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa. Additionally, it was announced that Marcelo Salazar-Barragan ’23 was awarded a $3,000 H. Y. Benedict Fellowship. Alpha Chi is a national honor society open to students of all academic disciplines and was founded at Southwestern University in 1922. Only the top 10% of juniors and seniors are invited to join, and our chapter currently consists of 55 student members.

Austin-based choral ensemble Conspirare and conductor Craig Hella Johnson, GRAMMY-Award winners both, gave posthumous premiere(s) of a composition by Margaret Bonds discovered and edited by Professor of Music Michael Cooper in a pair of performances on March 31 and April 1. A setting of Langston Hughes’s parable-poem Joy (1922), the composition was evidently one of Bonds’ favorite works: she returned to it in no fewer than six different arrangements, all performed to acclaim, over the period 1936-66 – more than any other work. It has remained unpublished, but Cooper’s edition will be published as part of Hildegard Publishing Company’s Margaret Bonds Signature Series later this year.

Professor of English Michael Saenger presented a paper entitled “’Oh, I smell false Latin!’: Multiple Languages in Love’s Labours Lost” at the Multilingualism in Translation Conference, Université Paris Nanterre, March 31, 2023. Saenger also served on the Advisory Board of the conference.

Pre-college and Southwestern students of Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa distinguished themselves in March. Eighth-grader Richard Wang won the first prize in the Steinway Piano Gallery Concerto Competition, Division II (Grades 6-8), and Lerchen Zhong, a ninth grader at Westwood HS, won both the first prize in the Senior Piano division and overall Grand Prize at the Asian American Community Partnership Music Competition. (Assistant Professor of Music Hai Zheng is the Artistic Director of the latter event.) Finally, SU piano student and Music major Anna Wicker ’24 performed at the Alpha Chi national convention in Albuquerque, NM.

Professor Emerita Lois Ferrari, Associate Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities Holly Dalrymple, and Instructor of Applied Music Chaz Nailor collaborated with Austin-based soprano Natalie Joy Howard, the Southwestern University Chorale, and the Austin Civic Orchestra to give the Texas premiere of a work recovered, edited, and published by Professor of Music Michael Cooper: the choral/orchestral version of Margaret Bonds’s setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconic Civil Rights Credo. Given on February 25, the performance was many students’ first time singing with an orchestra – and the opportunity to lift their voices in song to proclaim Du Bois’s magisterial text with Margaret Bonds’s music was, in the words of one student, “a life-altering experience.” Those interested in hearing or re-hearing the performance can find it here. The Chorale will perform the Credo again, now in its original version with piano accompaniment, with Professor of Music Bruce Cain (baritone), Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Julia Taylor (soprano), and Part-Time Instructor of Music Bruce Cain (piano) in another concert at 7:30 p.m. in the Alma Thomas Theater on April 15.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the entry on composer Margaret Bonds for MGG-Online (Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart – Online), the leading German-language encyclopedia of music. It is this African American composer’s first-ever appearance in German musical lexicography and her first in German-language musicology generally. Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in German interest in Bonds and her work in Germany. This article will grant German speakers easier and more authoritative access to reliable information concerning Bonds and her music. Cooper’s entry is available here.

Part-time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has been teaching and coaching top young talents in the greater Austin area. Three of her students won Cello Audition in the 2022–2023 Texas All-State Symphony, Philharmonic, and Sinfonietta Orchestras, sponsored by the Texas Music Educators Association; and two of her students from St. Stephen’s School won cello auditions for the Texas Private School Music Educator Association (TPSMEA) 2022–2023 All-State Orchestra.

Inversion Ensemble presents the world premiere of “Extinction,” a choral setting by Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis of Kim Stafford’s poem “An Extinction” for its Planet Home concert, with a soundscape by Seylon Stills. Attend the performances on Saturday, February 25, 2023, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, February 26, 2023, at 3 p.m. The Rosette 3908 Avenue B Ste 116, Austin, TX 78751. Tickets are available here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was interviewed on the podcast “Her Music Academia,” founded by Lydia Bangura, a music theory Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan who is interested in “the intersection of performance and analysis, and the performance of Black feminism in American classical music.” The episode’s conversation retraces the long and winding trail of Cooper’s work on Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. The episode “get[s] into the weeds” (as Bangura puts it) about the powers, good and bad, wielded by music publishing houses, talks about Price and Bonds, and features a powerful reading by Dr. Candace Kerr Johnson (UC Berkeley) of a speech (discovered by Cooper) in which Margaret Bonds talks about her African American ancestral heritage, her experiences with racism at Northwestern University as well as Bonds’s recently discovered “Tangamerican,” which Cooper discovered in 2018 and published in 2021. The episode is on all major podcasting platforms and via Bangura’s anchor site.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first-ever edition of Margaret Bonds’ “Sleep Song” (text by Joyce Kilmer), written ninety-one years ago this year, as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series with Hildegard Publishing Co. Scored for women’s chorus and piano, it is a lullaby, likening the silver moon, watching lovingly over the sleeping earth with cloak and shoon, to the speaker as she watches her “little maid” drift off to sleep: “Your life, your love, your dreams are mine to keep / So sleep, so sleep.” Margaret Bonds gives musical voice to that protective parental devotion with delicacy, tenderness, and warmth. A plus is that this choral score was copied by Bonds’ friend and collaborator Florence B. Price – a circumstance that makes this the closest thing the modern world has to a compositional collaboration between the two great composers.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the world-premiere edition of Margaret Bonds’ setting of the iconic spiritual “We Shall Overcome” (for soprano solo, SATB chorus, bongo, and tambourine) as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series of Hildegard Publishing Co. (Worcester, Mass.). Running to a remarkable 130 measures, the setting employs a wide array of musical styles, making it the most original setting of a ubiquitous social-justice hymn ever written. It was commissioned by legendary soprano Leontyne Price, a close friend and collaborator of Bonds, in September 1969 but has had to wait nearly 54 years for publication. Now, though, it has overcome the silence forcibly imposed on it by a musical world determined to silence the voice of resistance tendered by this African American woman composer who was doubly damned by her race and her sex.

In June of this year, Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury made video recordings of works written for them. They are releasing them as the editing process is completed. The next video in this series, Luz, is the fourth song from the cycle Sobre La Naturaleza by Diego Luzuriaga. The composer, originating from Ecuador, has a special affinity for writing music derived from traditional sources and connects deeply with themes from the natural world. The video can be viewed here.

Several compositions by Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis are enjoying their premieres. “Oure Light in Oure Night” (2020) for voices and nature soundtrack gets its in-person premiere in Seattle on December 1 and 7, 2022, by the University of Washington combined choirs and in San Francisco on December 9 by the San Francisco State University choir. Portia Hansen and David Utterback recently premiered “Ma’iingan” for flute and piano at Southwestern. On January 21, Inversion Da Capo premieres “Julian’s Hazelnut” for treble choir and clarinet, using the original pronunciation of Julian of Norwich’s Middle English text. See more information here.

Professor Emeritus of Music Lois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra in a performance of Prokofiev’s Peter and Wolf, narrated by Peter Bay, the Austin Symphony Orchestra conductor. Ferrari and Bay collaborated in the Austin Symphony Orchestra’s Pajama Party concert on November 12. Both orchestra and audience arrived in their pajamas and settled in for a unique take on the bedtime story.

• In June of this year, Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury made video recordings of works written for them. They are releasing them as the editing process is completed. The next video in this series, Atmósfera, is the first song from the cycle Sobre La Naturaleza by Diego Luzuriaga. The composer, originating from Ecuador, has a special affinity for writing music derived from traditional sources and connects deeply with themes from the natural world. The video can be viewed here.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has been invited to be an adjudicator for a strings-cello audition for All-State Orchestra by TMEA (Texas Music Educator Association) on Saturday, November 12, 2022. She has continued coaching the Austin area’s top high school cellists. Two of her cello students have auditioned and won the first cello chairs for both Texas Region 26 and Region 32-All Region High School Orchestra this school year.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the mezzo-soprano soloist in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “All Night Vigil” with the Texas Bach Festival, under the direction of Dr. Barry Williamson on June 23 and 26 in Georgetown and Austin. The work consists of 15 movements with a capella chorus and soloists, sung in Church Slavonic/Russian. The “All Night Vigil” is one of Rachmaninoff’s finest compositions, considered “the greatest musical achievement of the Russian Orthodox Church.” Watch the performance here. 

In June of this year, Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury made videorecordings of works written for them and are releasing them as the editing process is completed.The next video in this series is a song from the River of Words Song Cycle entitled Mariquita,featuring music by Diego Vega, and text by Yutzel Garcia.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a presentation at the 25th anniversary conference of the African American Art Song Alliance at the University of California, Irvine. Titled “A Ghost No More: On a Prize-Winning Song by Margaret Bonds No Longer Lost,” Cooper’s talk centered on Bonds’s setting of Frank Dempster Sherman’s poem “A Sea Ghost,” which she composed at the age of eighteen and for which she won a prestigious prize of $250 (about $5,400 in 2022 dollars) in the national Wanamaker Competition in 1932. The song has frequently been described as lost, but Cooper discovered it in the course of his archival research. By examining it and the political campaign song “We’re All for Hoover Today” (written when Bonds was fifteen), putting those two into a focused chronology with the flowering of mature song that emerged in mid-1932, and examining the previously unknown correspondence of the composer, Cooper shed light on the nature and potency of the otherwise unseen but powerfully felt encounter that enabled Bonds to grow by a decade or more as a composer in a matter of mere months. For those who are wondering, it is totally and truthfully coincidental that Cooper, who has an aversion to cheesy promotional stunts, gave a talk about ghosts and phantom voices two weeks before Halloween.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper wrote the program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first-ever performance of the two violin concertos of Florence B. Price (1887–1953). In Prince’s life, most White stages banned Black audience members, White orchestras had no Black performers, White orchestras rarely performed classical music by Black composers, and standing Black orchestras that could handle difficult concertos, Florence Price had to know that the chances of these two powerful compositions (1931 and 1951) being performed were virtually nil – and yet she wrote them. Now, though, 67 years after their composer’s death, they have finally been performed by one of the world’s greatest orchestras. Cooper’s program notes supplement their abstruse analytical comments on Price’s violin concertos with reflections on Price’s complex and deft negotiations of White and Black performance spaces and music in these two compositions.

Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury released a video recording of “Juntos Frente al Mar,” the third and last song from the cycle  De Amor y Desventura  by Julio César Oliva. The video is available on YouTube .

Associate Professors of Music David Asbury and Bruce Cain performed their program titled “Canciones por la Vida” as part of the guest artist series at Kalamazoo College on September 29. This program contains many songs commissioned by the duo in the last 11 years, primarily on environmental themes.

Associate Professors of Music David Asbury and Bruce Cain have released the second in their series of video recordings made in the summer of 2022. The recording is the second movement of the song cycle  De Amor y Desventura  written for the duo in 2017 by Julio César Oliva and is titled “Un Grito de Dolor.” The video is available on YouTube .

Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury made video recordings of works by Federico Garcia Lorca, Jason Hoogerhyde, Diego Luzuriaga, Eduardo Martin, Julio César Oliva, and Diego Vega. The first of these recordings is titled “Encuentro” and is the first movement of a song cycle entitled  De Amor y Desventura  by Julio César Oliva. The video is available on YouTube .

Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury were invited to perform at the Cheboygan Opera House in Cheboygan, Michigan, at the Heart of the Turtle Gathering in Mackinaw City, Michigan, and as part of the guest artist series at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Charlevoix, Michigan, in May 2022. The programs for these concerts featured works on environmental themes written for the duo by composers Matthew Dunne, Jason Hoogerhyde, Diego Luzuriaga, Eduardo Martin, Julio César Oliva, and Diego Vega.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis and Shana Norton, otherwise known as the flute and harp duo Chaski, will present “Most Importantly,” a recital of music that explores the things that really matter, with soprano Maureen Broy Papovich and pianist Jeanne Dayton Sasaki. The recital’s centerpiece is the premiere of the song cycle “Most Importantly, Loves” (2021) by Inglis. The performance will be October 2 at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper wrote the program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s upcoming performance of both violin concertos by Florence B. Price, scheduled to take place November 6–9 with soloist Randall Goosby under the baton of Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Price wrote both concertos in an age where most white halls barred Black audience members, most white stages banned Black performers, and no white orchestras included any Black players; she had to know there was virtually no chance of the concertos being performed with orchestra during her lifetime. And indeed they were not: the Second Concerto, written just 13 months before her death, was premiered with piano three years after her passing, performed one more time, and then forgotten, and there is no evidence that the First Concerto was ever performed. Both works were lost until their manuscripts were found in an abandoned house south of Chicago in 2009. They were first performed in 2018 and are now in the repertoire of one of the world’s greatest orchestras.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was the first guest speaker in the 2022 University of Arizona Choral Studies Distinguished Speakers Series. Titled “The Africans, Who Are a Part of My Ancestry, Say …’: Voices of Heritage in the ‘Credo’ and Spirituals of Margaret Bonds,” Cooper’s video lecture includes a significant amount of newly discovered archival evidence as well as readings by Candace Kerr Johnson (University of California, Berkeley) and performances by Grammy-winning chorus Conspirare and acclaimed soprano Karen Slack accompanied by Michelle Cann. A previously unknown exchange of letters between Bonds, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Sam Fox Music Publishing provides unusually direct smoking-gun evidence of the music-publishing industry using its economic leverage to ensure that Bonds’s musical affirmation of Black folk and the Black ancestral heritage would be silenced.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published three new editions of music by Margaret Bonds as part of Hildegard Publishing Company’s Margaret Bonds Signature Series: the Afro-modernist “African Dance” for soprano, baritone, and piano (text by Langston Hughes); “Especially Do I Believe in the Negro Race” for soprano, chorus, and piano (the second movement of Bonds’s setting of the W. E. B. Du Bois prose poem “Credo”); and, most significantly, The Montgomery Variations, a 23-minute orchestral work that offers a series of snapshots of the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott to the 16th-Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, followed by a radiant “benediction” in which, according to Bonds, “a benign God, father and mother to all people, pours forth His love on His children—the good and the bad alike.” Released on a rental basis in 2020, the variations have been recorded by the Minnesota Orchestra and were featured at this summer’s Brevard Music Center Summer Festival in North Carolina. This study score is a full scholarly edition that will make the works available to individuals and libraries as well as performing groups.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a virtual lecture titled “‘So Sind Wird Nun Botschafter’: Der Gemeingut Mendelssohns und Wagners als Repräsentanten Deutscher Kultur in England” (“‘So Now We Are Ambassadors’: The Common Ground between Mendelssohn and Wagner as Representatives of German Culture to England”) for a conference titled Mendelssohn und Wagner: Zwei Leitfiguren der Leipziger Musikgeschichte (Mendelssohn and Wagner: Two Leading Figures of Leipzig’s Musical History) hosted by the University of Leipzig. Cooper was one of only two U.S. scholars in the program. His paper showed that although Mendelssohn and Wagner are commonly understood as absolute antipodes in 19th century music, they followed parallel strategies in a shared mission of musical diplomacy for expanding and enriching the musical life of England via recent and historical contributions of German composers. 

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis participated in “I Belong to You,” a multimedia experience presented by Inversion Ensemble and featuring the world premiere of “Motherland/I Belong to You,” an oratorio blending poetry, comic book illustration, and choral music, on June 25. The autobiographical libretto by critically acclaimed comic book author Greg Pak (The Incredible Hulk, Star Wars) explores the history, culture, and natural wonders of Texas from the perspective of a native Texan during the various stages of his life. The musical adaptation of Pak’s text by Inversion’s three founding members—Inglis, Robbie LaBanca, and Trevor F. Shaw—was sung by Inversion’s flagship choral ensemble and accompanied by guest artists Invoke (string quartet) and Ethan Shaw (steel guitarist). “Motherland/I Belong to You” will also be published as an original comic book by Pak, commissioned by Inversion, with illustrations by renowned artists Ann Smith, Dustinn Craig, Ethan Young, Sean Chen, and Shing Yin Khor. A recording of the performance may be purchased via the Inversion website. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a virtual presentation titled “Freedom, Justice, and Jazz: An American Odyssey” for the New Horizons International Music Association. The presentation began with a cursory review of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and proposed that the creative urges that resulted in the musical revolutions of jazz were able to achieve extraordinary prominence not only as an art form, but also as a sonorous expression of the forces that underlay and are embodied in the fifth level (self-actualization) of Maslow’s hierarchy. Using guided questions and assigned listening, the presentation applied this thesis to Langston Hughes’s iconic poem “The Weary Blues” (both in its original 1925 literary guise and in his own televised reading with a jazz ensemble in 1958), the televised performance of Max Roach’s and Abbey Lincoln’s “Triptych” from the Freedom Now Suite, and Bob Kaufman’s poem “Walking Parker Home.” The presentation was adapted from a class assignment in Cooper’s fall 2021 course, Music and Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to #BlackLivesMatter. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper taught a class and delivered a public preconcert lecture at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory on the occasion of a performance of the Margaret Bonds/Du Bois Credo by the conservatory’s combined choirs (150 voices) and orchestra in the world-renowned Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Titled “FLEX: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Margaret Bonds and Her Credo,” the class and lecture adduced unpublished correspondence between Bonds and Shirley Graham Du Bois to illustrate how the political economy of classical music and music publishing works to erase, tacitly but potently, the presence of women, Black folk, and their art in musical life and narratives of music’s history. 

Part-time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky was invited to give a live music performance and talk as the guest speaker at the May 19 installment of the Full Circle: Speaker Series for Creatives in Georgetown, Texas. She was also interviewed for a feature article in Georgetown View magazine. 

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s composition “El Mar” (2020) for mixed chorus and piano will enjoy its live premiere performance by the San Francisco State University Chamber Singers on May 6. The piece expresses the angst and tragedy in Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni’s “Frente al Mar.”

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari led the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) in the fourth concert of its “Reunited” season on April 2. The performance was the 8th Texas Rising Stars concert and featured the three winners of the University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music String Concerto Competition as soloists. The program included music by Tchaikovsky, Chausson, and Brahms, along with a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem. Ferrari is currently in her 20th consecutive season with the ACO.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was guest musicologist for a two-day Florence Price Festival at Bowling Green State University. In addition to meeting with musicology and other music students, Cooper delivered two lectures as part of his visit: “Hear Her Voice: On Knowing Florence Price, Pianist, Today” and “’With Love, Devotion to the Negro Race and Humanity …’: Margaret Bonds and the Social Work of The Montgomery Variations.” Both talks were updated versions of lectures previously given virtually, now incorporating new information and issues raised by archival sources. In addition to aspiring to keep his audiences only minimally vegetative through 45 minutes’ worth of musicological droning, Cooper strove above all in these two talks (which were addressed to audiences comprised primarily of younger individuals beginning careers that may enable them to make the world a better place) to convey a sense of the courage and hope that motivated both Price and Bonds in their work as they challenged an unjust system and used art not as entertainment, but as an agent of social change.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper  gave a presentation titled “The Prophecies Fulfilled: Margaret Bonds and the Sacred Social Work of The Montgomery Variations and the Du Bois Credo ” at Georgetown University. The presentation explored how Margaret Bonds’s work in celebrating Black vernacular music in genres traditionally reserved for Euro-American classical repertoires was a 20th-century enactment of ideas first proposed in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Frederick Douglass, James Monroe Trotter, Frédéric Louis Ritter, Antonin Dvořák, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The presentation was followed the next day by a preconcert lecture (also at Georgetown University) for the first performance since 1973 of the orchestral version of the Bonds/Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s orchestral magnum opus, The Montgomery Variations (both recently discovered and published by Cooper), along with excerpts from her recently published cantata Simon Bore the Cross. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was interviewed on historian Pamela Toler’s blog, “History in the Margins,” about his work in excavating and bringing back into public life the music of Florence B. Price and Margaret Bonds, including his motives, hopes, and trepidations. As is customary on the blog, Cooper asked a question of Toler after answering her questions to him. Read the complete interview. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper helped organize the world premiere of Florence B. Price’s choral/orchestral work “Song of Hope” (1930) at Ithaca College and participated in a pre-concert panel discussion on the piece and its significance. Learn more about the event and the work on the Ithaca College website.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper delivered a virtual guest lecture for the John Bird lecture series at Cardiff University (Wales). Titled “‘… and God and Everything Noble’: Margaret Bonds and the Montgomery Variations,” the lecture was an updated version of a lecture given for the University of Iowa in December 2021.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave the keynote lecture (virtually) for the two-day Florence Price Celebration jointly hosted by the University of the Incarnate Word and Texas Lutheran University. Titled “Hear Her Voice: On the Challenges of ‘Rediscovering’ Florence B. Price,” Cooper’s talk included recordings of two of his recently published editions of previously unknown music by Price. It also included a recording of the posthumous premiere of another song that remains unpublished, “Brown Arms (To Mother),” an otherwise utterly unknown composition that contemplates what must have been one of the most painful episodes in Price’s entire life: her mixed-race mother’s abandonment of her entire Arkansas family (including Price) to live a life passing as white in Indianapolis—forever. 

Part-time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has been teaching and coaching young talents in the greater Austin area. Two of her students won the final round of auditions as the first cellist and eighth cellist in the 2021–2022 All-State Symphony Orchestra (highest-level orchestra) sponsored by the Texas Music Educator Association, and three of her students from St. Stephen’s School won their auditions for the Texas Private School Music Educator Association (TPSMEA) 2021–2022 All-State Orchestra. 

Under the direction of founding artistic director Craig Hella Johnson and with the assistance of renowned pianist Anton Nel, six-time Grammy-winning chorus Conspirare will perform a concert on February 15 featuring pieces from Margaret Bonds that Professor of Music Michael Cooper has unearthed, edited, and published. The program was designed in consultation with Cooper and consists entirely of compositions he edited. The finale will be Bonds’s inspiring and magisterial setting of the W. E. B. Du Bois’s prose poem “Credo”—a musical social-justice manifesto the likes of which the world had never seen before and has never seen since. For more information, visit the Conspirare website.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published two short choruses by Margaret Bonds with Hildegard Publishing Company. Titled “No Man Has Seen His Face” and “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” the two works were written in the spring of 1968 and exemplify Bonds’s commitment to providing high-quality music for both amateur and professional choruses.

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa was the piano soloist in a December 2 performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Op. 80, by the Westwood High School Symphony Orchestra and Choir, conducted by Joshua Thompson. The orchestra’s past honors include being selected as an Honor Orchestra by the Texas Music Educators Association and being invited to perform at the national Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinic. Last month, 12 of the group’s string players were selected for the Texas All-State Orchestra. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper wrote the program note for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Digital Stage performance of Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, airing December 8–15. Composed in 1938–1939, the work marks the beginning of a new period in Price’s creative life. She was obviously aware of its originality, trying for several years after its premiere to secure a second performance. Despite her previous successful track record as symphonist, these efforts were in vain, and her correspondence makes the reason plain: “To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins.” The Philadelphia rendition marks this important composition’s first complete performance by a top five U.S. orchestra. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper consulted with the Boston-based Convergence Ensemble on a program titled “American Voice in Poetry in Song II,” writing the program note and offering a short virtual lecture for a virtual concert that aired on December 4. The program included works by John Wesley Work III on poems by Maria Howard Weeden and Myrtle Vorst Sheppard, works by Florence Price and Margaret Bonds on poems by Langston Hughes, and a selection of spirituals.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a virtual lecture for the Musicology, Music Theory, and Ethnomusicology Colloquium of the University of Iowa titled “‘With Love, Devotion to the Negro Race and Humanity …’: Margaret Bonds and the Social Work of The Montgomery Variations.” The Montgomery Variations, a 23-minute set of programmatic variations on the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” for large orchestra, is a work that Cooper discovered during archival research in 2018, edited that same year, and published with Hildegard Publishing Company in 2020. In October 2021, it was recorded by the award-winning Minnesota Orchestra. Margaret Bonds’s lifelong work as an advocate for racial justice and gender justice is well known, and Cooper’s paper situates The Montgomery Variationsin the context of the composer’s increasingly ambitious projects that she mounted in the service of those goals, portraying it as a series of snapshots of major events of the civil rights movement, including the Montgomery bus boycott (1955), the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing (1963), and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has been teaching and coaching Austin-area young talents. Her students have won auditions as the first cellist for both middle school and high school all-region orchestras in 2021. It was announced this week that two of her students won cello auditions for the 2022 All-State Symphony Orchestra (highest-level orchestra) sponsored by the Texas Music Educator Association. She is also the cello teacher for a top high school cellist, Yochen Zhong, who recently won second place for cello (age group D) in the 2021 King’s Peak International Music Competition.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave an invited lecture for the Juilliard School titled “‘And I must go farther …’: Margaret Bonds and the Credo of W.E.B. Du Bois.” The paper was a thoroughly overhauled version of a talk that Cooper gave earlier this year for the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the University of California, Irvine, now revised to foreground documents that reveal Bonds’s thinking about her inheritance from her family—especially her mother—and her responsibility to her heritage as an African American, an artist, and a woman.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper completed the first installment of his work as a member of the Leadership Council of the three-part festival titled “The Souls of Black Folk: Rediscovering Black Classical Music,” a historic event offered in Washington, D.C., by the PostClassical Ensemble. In addition to designing most of the program, which included three posthumous premieres of music by Margaret Bonds and Florence Price and performances of other important marginalized works by Black classical composers, Cooper helped select the performers, wrote a characteristically windy, obtuse, and vaguely sanctimonious program note, gave an on-air live interview with host David Rabin on WPFW-FM, and participated in an after-concert roundtable moderated by Jenn White, permanent host of the national 1A radio program. 

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari led the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) in the second concert of its “Reunited” season on October 30. The costumed orchestra presented a Halloween-themed program titled “ACO Spooktacular!” and featured music by Moussorgsky, Berlioz, Holst, Grieg, and John Williams.

On November 1 at St. Martin’s Lutheran Church in Austin, part-time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the mezzo-soprano soloist in J.S. Bach’s Cantata BWV 79 alongside soprano Jenny Ohrstrom, bass-baritone Gil Zilkha, oboist Rebecca Fairweather-Haskins, cellist Matthew Arbruster, organist Austin Haller, and the St. Martin’s Lutheran Church choir (conducted by Tim O’Brien). 

Part-time Assistant Professor of Applied Music and Opera Julia Taylor will be the soprano soloist in performances of Handel’s Messiah with the Austin Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Austin on December 7 at Riverbend Centre and December 11 at St. Matthew’s Episopal Church.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper has been chosen as a recipient of the Dena Epstein Award for Archival and Library Research in American Music from the Music Library Association. The award will go toward supporting Cooper’s archival research for the first book-length biography of composer Margaret Bonds.

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa performed on November 7 with Suzanne Jacobson and Cory Blais, concertmaster and principal cellist, respectively, of the Temple Symphony Orchestra, as part of the symphony’s 2021–2022 season. The fall performances feature members of the orchestra and guests in chamber music concerts, with full orchestra performances set to resume in the spring. The program included trios by Mozart, Beethoven, and award-winning contemporary composer Jennifer Higdon.

Michael Martinez  ’15 recently earned his doctorate in trombone performance from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester and was awarded the principal trombone position at the Arizona Philharmonic Orchestra.

Music alumnus Jason Schayot ’97 has been nominated for the Recording Academy and Grammy Museum’s 2022 Music Educator Award.

Two songs from part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s recently commissioned song cycle “Most Importantly, Loves” were premiered October 16–17 by soprano Maureen Broy Papovich and pianist Joseph Choi during Inversion Ensemble’s Through the Prismconcert. The Concordia Singers performed the live in-person premiere of her piece “La Ciudad Sumergida” on October 24 at the Concordia University Texas Chapel. Chaski will perform her pieces “Newt” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider” on November 21 at 2 p.m. at the Georgetown Public Library.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper is serving as musicological consultant for season two of the ONEcomposer initiative, focusing on Margaret Bonds (with cameos from Florence Price). The official launch features a series of scholarly commentary videos by Cooper, together with stunning performances of works by Bonds and Price given by award-winning soprano Karen Slack and pianist Michelle Cann, as well as bass-baritone Justin Hopkins and pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers. Cooper’s recently published and soon-to-be-published editions of these works by Bonds and Price are the source of most of the performances. Cooper’s narcolepsy-inducing commentaries can be viewed along with those beautiful performances at the ONEcomposer website.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari led the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) in its first live concert since February 2020 on September 26, 2021. The ACO presented its program, titled “Come for the Music, Stay for the Flowers,” in a performance at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. The concert featured the different, separate sections of the orchestra and included the music of Piazzolla, Newbold, Vivaldi, Balmages, Reich, R. Strauss, and Di Lorenzo.

Professor of Music Michael Cooperwrote the program note for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s performance of Florence B. Price’s Symphony No. 4 in D minor, to be released on the orchestra’s Digital Stage on October 13. The symphony was composed in 1945 but only recently discovered and published; it represents a substantially different approach to the genre of the symphony compared to Price’s previous symphonies and tenders perhaps her most overt musical commentary on the war. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper  made his first (and probably last) foray into phrenological musicology, or perhaps musicological phrenology, with a virtual guest lecture for the University of North Carolina at Greensboro music program. Titled “Disorderly Inspiration: Hector Berlioz’s Idée Fixe, the Clash of Tradition and Modernity, and the Episode in the Life of an Artist,” the lecture showed how Berlioz, who studied medicine before his descent into music, appropriated the technique of using a specific musical theme to represent an extramusical fixation or monomania from the pseudoscientific phrenological research of F. J. Gall and J. G. Spuzheim, specifically the first two volumes of their Anatomie et Physiologie Système Nerveux en Général, et du Cerveau en Particulier.  Of this pseudopsychiatry was born great art: Berlioz used Gall’s and Spurzheim’s concept to invent the technique of the (musical) idée fixe in his Symphonie Fantastique  and other works, a technique that became foundational to later Romantic music. 

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari  conducted and presided over the Austin Civic Orchestra’s (ACO’s) three-part summer concert series, the final installment of its The Beat Goes On  virtual season. These concert programs were designed to provide the orchestra’s musicians with a safe environment in which to rehearse and perform during the current pandemic. ACO members were assigned to small chamber groups or chose to form their own groups, all with social distancing and aerosol management at the forefront of consideration. The members rehearsed for four to five weeks and then recorded their performances as virtual compilations or in person at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. The streamed events drew large appreciative virtual audiences on both the ACO Facebook page and YouTube channel. Ferrari and the ACO plan to return to the live stage for their 2021–2022 season, titled Reunited .

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music and flute instructor Adrienne Inglis’s composition “Santo” for treble chorus and folk percussion from her Latin American folk mass “Misa Trinitaria” was featured in Chorus Austin’s Southwest Voices: She Sings concert on April 24, 2021 (the recording is streaming until May 8, 2021). The world premiere of a commission by Inglis, “Shelter in Place” with poetry by Kim Stafford and a nature soundtrack, will be featured during the Lewis & Clark College Choirs spring concert on April 28, 2021. The Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College of the City University of New York will present Inglis’s “How Dare You” for mixed chorus, flute, and nature soundtrack with text by Greta Thunberg as part of its concert on May 13, 2021;  Inglis will perform with the QC Vocal Ensemble during the livestreamed event.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper participated in a virtual panel discussion titled “The Mastery of Florence Price.” Hosted by the Heritage Signature Chorale (Washington, DC) founder and director Stanley Thurston, the panel also featured pianist Karen Walwyn (Howard University), who made the world-premiere recording of Price’s First Piano Concerto  in 2011 and is known as a foremost interpreter of Price’s music.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper presented a virtual lecture for the Royal Irish Academy of Music (Dublin) titled “Black Feminism, Margaret Bonds, and the Credo of W. E. B. Du Bois.” The lecture included the first performances (via Zoom) since 1972 of three excerpts from the “Credo,” featuring Washington National Opera Cafritz fellow soprano Katerina Burton and the Grand Chorus of Georgetown University, conducted by Frederick Binkholder. Cooper published the piano/vocal and orchestral/choral versions of the “Credo” with Hildegard Publishing Company in 2020. Music-loving readers of this notable can hear Burton’s stunning rendition of “Especially Do I Believe in the Negro Race” (No. 2 of the “Credo”) here and the opening and closing choruses here.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari  appeared as a special guest on KMFA’s Classical Austin  show, an hour-long broadcast which aired on March 7 and March 10, 2021. Hosted by Dianne Donovan, the show “takes you behind the curtain of greater Austin’s dynamic classical music stage [and features] in-depth interviews with conductors, composers, choreographers, instrumentalists, and more.” The interview is archived on KMFA’s website.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper , whose regular blog Journeys  has almost 600 “regular, unique readers,” contributed a guest post to the blog of the Women’s Song Forum titled “Kindred Spirits: Margaret Bonds and Edna St. Vincent Millay (Part I).” The post is available here . Cooper argues that despite the color line that separated them in their lives and contemporary and posthumous receptions, Millay and Bonds were kindred spirits—and that their staunchly feminist affinities manifested themselves in these songs, which Cooper recently published. The post includes world-premiere recordings of two of Bonds’s Millay settings.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper  published the preantepenultimate and antepenultimate editions in his series of 64 world-premiere source-critical editions of music by Florence B. Price with G. Schirmer (New York). The first edition, submitted with deliberate irony during Snowcalypse 2021, is a brilliant lyrical waltz for piano solo titled “Waltz of the Spring Maid” (because when better than during housebound Snowcalypse …?). The second, a major contribution by any measure, is Price’s only known song cycle—a set of four songs all taken from Langston Hughes’s iconic collection of poems that articulated the vision of the Harlem Renaissance, The Weary Blues . Price chose four poems centered on the subject of dreams in the sense of longings, desires, and aspirations. The four songs have been known individually before, but Cooper’s research into the manuscripts reveals their identity as a cycle; characteristically for cycles, the cycle as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. (Another “notable”:  Cooper has never written the word preantepenultimate  in a Notable before.)

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari  conducted and presided over the Austin Civic Orchestra’s (ACO’s) third and fourth virtual concerts of their The Beat Goes On!  season on December 12, 2020, and February 13, 2021. These concert programs were designed to provide the orchestra’s musicians with a safe environment in which to rehearse and perform during the current pandemic. ACO members were assigned to small chamber groups or chose to form their own groups, all with social distancing and aerosol management at the forefront of consideration. The members rehearsed for four to five weeks and then recorded their performances as virtual compilations or in person at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. The streamed events drew large appreciative virtual audiences on both the ACO Facebook page and YouTube channel . Ferrari and the ACO plan to present the next virtual concert on April 17, 2021.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper  published the premiere edition of Florence B. Price’s Six Pieces for Piano Solo  (1947) with G. Schirmer/Associated Music Publishers (New York), his 59th world-premiere edition of Price’s music since September 2019. This edition was  particularly challenging because the autograph is notated in pencil and severely water damaged, resembling some of the papers found at the bottom of the stacks on Cooper’s home-office desk, some of which may well date from the Carter administration. Price’s music, though, is deliciously spontaneous and veritably glistens with the wit, charm, and inventiveness for which she is rightly celebrated.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s mixed chorus version of her composition “La Ciudad Sumergida” was performed by C4 and Inversion Ensembles February 4, 2021, under the direction of Perry Townsend. The nature soundtrack combines with an excerpt of the poem “Río de La Plata en lluvia” (1938) by Alfonsina Storni. The “Where Water Meets Sky” live-streamed concert may be viewed here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper  published the world-premiere edition of Margaret Bonds’s Six Songs on Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay  as the inaugural issue of Hildegard Publishing Company’s Margaret Bonds Signature Series . Bonds, who stands as the only African-American woman ever to have had an entire day dedicated to her in a major U.S. metropolis (legendary Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley declared January 31, 1967, as that city’s official Margaret Bonds Day), was one of the 20th century’s most outspoken social-justice activists in the world of classical music. The series is currently slated to present world-premiere editions of 37 works by Bonds over the next two years; all works have been discovered and edited by Cooper over the last two years. The last two of these six songs were premiered by former SU voice instructor Dana Zenobi at Butler University in November 2018.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis received an American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Plus Award for concert performances in 2020. In addition, her composition “La Ciudad Sumergida” premiered on November 2, 2020, performed by the commissioning choir, Ramona M. Wis and the North Central College Women’s Chorale of Naperville, Illinois. Under the direction of Adrienne Pedrotti Bingamon, Inversion Da Capo recorded “La Ciudad Sumergida” for a December 19, 2020, release on Inversion’s YouTube channel.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis virtually rehearsed two of her recent compositions, “La ciudad sumergida” (The Submerged City; 2020) and  “Oure Light in Oure Night” (2020), which were both composed for remote online choir performance, with North Central College’s Concert Choir and Women’s Chorale. Commissioned by Ramona M. Wis and the North Central College Women’s Chorale of Naperville–Illinois, “La ciudad sumergida” for four-part treble chorus with nature soundtrack captures the mood of a river, a city, the cloudy sky, and the poet’s own profound melancholy. The text is an excerpt of “Río de La Plata en lluvia” (1938) by Alfonsina Storni. The sound of rain creates the ambiance of a misty day on the river and the sensation of cathartic crying from great sadness and pain. The city’s reflection on the river’s surface gives the illusion that the city is submerged in the water, and the reflection of the clouds hovering low over Río de La Plata looks like gray heliotrope flowers. The apocalyptic images of a submerged city and of tears overflowing from the chalice-sky eerily foreshadow rising sea levels due to anthropogenic global warming.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first-ever edition of what is arguably the most important of many collaborations between Florence B. Price and Langston Hughes: “Monologue for the Working Class” (New York: G. Schirmer). Hughes wrote this poem in October 1941 or earlier to boost the morale of the “poor and unemployed” in the face of the apathy of the rich in Depression-era America, and in that guise, the poem inspired Price to write an extraordinary song, which was recently given its world premiere (in Cooper’s edition) in a music video produced by the Antwerp-based #SongsofComfort team, featuring bass-baritone Justin Hopkins and pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the U.S.’s entry into World War II in December 1941, Hughes recast the poem as a morale booster in wartime, replacing the words “show ’em what the working class can do” with “show ’em what free men can really do” and making other similar changes. Hughes never published the “working-class” version of his poem, and Price never published her setting thereof—but now both are out. Because the full story is much richer than space permitted in the Schirmer edition, Cooper also blogged about it here to help brave and sleep-deprived readers learn more about the poem and music while also nodding off for a good night’s rest. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a virtual masterclass for the University of Memphis titled “Paying the Price: Race and Gender, Imperatives and Opportunities for the Great White Spaces of Classical Music in the Year 2020.” The presentation integrated Cooper’s work in reviving the previously unheard music of Florence B. Price into larger issues of antiracist and inclusive pedagogies in the “last water fountain” of Western classical music, as developed in his current course on Freedom, Movement, and Migration in Music.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’ 99 was the mezzo-soprano soloist in Howard Goodall’s Eternal Light: A Requiem  on November 1, 2020, at St. Martin’s Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas. Featured musicians included Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Jameson James  (tenor), Jeffery Jones-Ragona (tenor), Maimy Fong (piano), Elaine Martin Barber (Austin Symphony Orchestra’s principal harpist), as well as Grammy-winning musicians Austin Haller (organ), Shari Wilson (soprano), and John Proft (baritone). Tim O’Brien conducted. The service was prerecorded and is available on YouTube.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a virtual lecture titled “The Music of Florence B. Price” for the Music for Life  series of the New Horizons Band’s Toronto chapter. Although the title of the talk was as bland as old corrugated cardboard, the presentation itself focused on the issues and opportunities that Cooper’s ongoing series of editions of Price’s music pose for the current Price renaissance in a musical world hungry for new and socially relevant ideas and sounds in the world of music history. 

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari conducted and presided over the Austin Civic Orchestra’s (ACO’s) second virtual concert on October 24. This concert program was designed to provide the orchestra’s musicians with a safe environment in which to rehearse and perform during the current pandemic. ACO members were assigned to small chamber groups or chose to form their own groups, all with social distancing and aerosol management at the forefront of consideration. The members rehearsed for four weeks and then recorded their performances at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. The streamed event drew a large appreciative virtual audience on both the ACO Facebook page and YouTube channel. Ferrari and the ACO plan to continue this practice through the spring semester.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published a source-critical edition of Florence B. Price’s previously unpublished and delightfully prankish “Scherzo” for piano solo (1928) with G. Schirmer/AMP (New York). This is the 56th edition of music by Price that Cooper has published with Schirmer in the last 52 weeks. In keeping with the prankish character of the “Scherzo,” Cooper prepared this walkthrough (“The Bee Gees Meet Florence Price”) of last year’s Price editions. A circumstantially unlikely but musically gratifying celebration of these works is finally seeing the light of day, nearly 70 years after Price’s death.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first-ever editions of two major compositions by Margaret Bonds (1913–1972), the only female African-American composer to have a day specifically devoted to her in a major U.S. metropolis (Mayor Richard J. Daley officially proclaimed January 31 Margaret Bonds Day in Chicago in 1968). The two works are the “Montgomery Variations” for large orchestra and the “Credo” for soprano and baritone soloists with chorus and orchestra. The “Montgomery Variations,” a set of seven programmatic variations on the spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” is a series of musical snapshots of the civil-rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, from the Montgomery Bus Boycotts through the aftermath of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. The “Credo” is a 23-minute cantata whose text is the iconic civil-rights prose poem “Credo” (1904, rev. 1920–1921) of W. E. B. Du Bois. Both works are musical masterpieces and are frequently mentioned, but they have remained unpublished and therefore unperformed. Cooper’s editions, based on archival sources, are published by Hildegard Publishing Company in association with Theodore Presser Co.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the guest mezzo-soprano in Congregation Beth Israel’s virtual High Holy Day services, September 18–28. Altobello was honored to make music alongside conductor Jeffrey Jones-Ragona, collaborative pianist Maimy Fong, and Cantorial Soloist Sarah Beth Avner. 

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari  conducted and presided over the Austin Civic Orchestra’s (ACO’s) first virtual concert on September 26. This concert program was designed to provide the orchestra’s musicians with a safe environment in which to rehearse and perform during the current pandemic. ACO members were assigned to small chamber groups or chose to form their own groups, all with social distancing and aerosol management at the forefront of consideration. The members rehearsed for four weeks and then recorded their performances at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin. The streamed event drew a large appreciative virtual audience on both the ACO Facebook page and YouTube channel. Ferrari and the ACO plan to continue this practice through the spring semester.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper hosted a virtual session titled “New Understandings” at the Southwest Chapter meeting of the American Musicological Society on September 26. The session featured papers on the symphonies of Julie Giroux, Florence B. Price, and William Grant Still.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the world-premiere edition of Florence B. Price’s concert waltz for piano “Rowing” with G. Schirmer/Associated Music Publishers (New York). This is Cooper’s 56th world-premiere edition of music by Price published by Schirmer in the last 12 months. Cooper’s mercilessly stultifying forewords to those 56 editions guarantee sleep-deprived readers a combined minimum of 448 hours of blissful slumber, and Price’s music offers radiant genius on every page. What’s not to love about it all?

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa’s transcription for trombone of the Viola Concerto in G Major  by the Baroque composer George Philipp Telemann has been accepted for publication by Cimarron Music Press, a leading publisher of music for wind and brass instruments. Telemann’s work is a staple of the viola repertory, and this version will expand the available performance literature for advanced student brass players. In reworking the solo part for a very different type of instrument, Tamagawa collaborated with low brass performers and pedagogues Eileen Meyer, former SU faculty; Steven Wolfinbarger, Western Michigan University (WMU), and WMU student Adam Collela.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper  has been named to the leadership team of a four-day festival of Black classical music to be jointly sponsored by Howard University and the award-winning PostClassical Ensemble. Taking place in Washington, DC, in November 2021 and devoted to the “rediscovery and renewal of Black concert traditions,” the festival is part of the PostClassical Ensemble’s American Roots  series and will include concerts, discussions, film screenings, and other events. It will also yield a world-premiere album (in Oldspeak: CD) of three pieces by Florence B. Price and William Dawson on the Naxos label.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s composition “Newt” enjoys its world première YouTube performance, with Southwestern Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Gilliam-Valls on double bass, on August 21, 2020. C4 will also present the first public performance of Inglis’s compositional setting of text by Julian of Norwich, “Oure Light in Oure Night,” for voices with a nature soundtrack of nighttime Hill Country birds and insects on its the remote livestream, titled Night/Light,on August 27, 2020. Inversion Ensemble will present “El Mar,” Inglis’s setting of poetry by Alfonsina Storni for mixed chorus and piano, as part of its Aether: Waterconcert on August 29, 2020. In July, Inversion Ensemble presented all 38 seconds of her composition “Heels,” with soprano Adrienne Pedrotti Bingamon, as part of its Quarantunes project.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 performed a live and sold-out solo vocal concert for the Austin Artists Project and Austin Chamber Ensemble’s Lawn Concert Series on June 6. The concert, which was televised and broadcast on August 8, included American musical theatre and cabaret songs from the early 1930s to the present.  

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper has collaborated with an international team to produce a series of music videos titled Songs of Comfort (#SongsofComfort). The series will feature world-premiere recordings of Cooper’s editions of 10 songs and five piano works by Florence B. Price and Margaret Bonds. The videos are being created by U.S. bass-baritone Justin Hopkins, South African–born pianist Jeanne-Minette Cilliers, and multifaceted U.S. tenor Andrew Richards (here serving as videographer and producer). The first video in the series, Price’s setting of the iconic feminist poem “The Heart of a Woman” by Georgia Douglas Johnson, is available on YouTube here. Cooper and Cilliers blogged about the venture here.

Cargill Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper collaborated with pianist Lara Downes to produce a crowdsourced recitation of the Civil Rights “Credo” of W. E. B. Du Bois for the podcast We Need Gentle Truths for Now, hosted by Alexandra Juhasz. Seven SU faculty and staff (Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis, Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde, Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa, Professor of Music Lois Ferrari, Sarofim School of Fine Arts Coordinator Olivia Wise, Assistant Dean for Student Multicultural Affairs Terri Johnson, and Associate Professor of Communication Studies Valerie Renegar), three current students (Alexis Lemus ’22, Grace Sexton ’22, and Shelby Avants ’21), and six alumnae (Erin McHugh ’09, Isabel Tweraser ’19, Julia Fowler ’15, Katiebeth Brandt ’19, Kinley Johnson ’17, and Sara Watson ’13) participated in the recitation, along with 25 other participants Black and white, ages 5 to 81, from the Americas and Europe, representing four native languages. The podcast is available here. The recitation is also available as a YouTube video titled “Testimony: A #BlackLivesMatter Manifesto after the Credo of W.E.B. Du Bois,” here.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Music and Professor of Music Michael Cooper  published 12 world-premiere source-critical editions of music by Florence B. Price (1887–1953) with G. Schirmer/AMP, the single largest publisher of sheet music worldwide. Price is currently experiencing the most widespread sustained revival of public and scholarly interest since the mid-20th century’s revival of interest in the music of Gustav Mahler. Cooper’s editions—all accompanied by his usual soporific forewords—include works for piano solo and voice with piano. The works for voice with piano are Two Traditional Negro Spirituals  (“I Am Bound for the Kingdom” and “I’m Workin’ on My Buildin’”) as they were sung to Price by the granddaughter of a former slave as she heard them from her grandmother. The works for piano solo include the following: Barcarolle ,  Child Asleep , Etude in C , His Dream , On a Summer’s Eve , Scenes in Tin Can Alley , Song without Words in A Major , Ten Negro Spirituals for the Piano , Three Miniature Portraits of Uncle Ned , and Thumbnail Sketches of a Day in the Life of a Washerwoman .

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 is a 2020 Project Live Notes grant recipient and was honored to perform a virtual solo vocal concert on July 16. Project Live Notes (PLN) is a nonprofit musical organization meant to reach individuals in dire situations. PLN provides musical gifts to people who are alone; in a hospital, nursing home, or hospice care; or dealing with other extenuating circumstances, such as fragile mental, emotional, or physical health.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper  published a chapter titled “‘Inner Necessity’: Fabulation, Frame, and Musical Memory in Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang ” in Rethinking Mendelssohn  (ed. Benedict Taylor; Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 60–90). The chapter complements Cooper’s recently published source-critical edition of the Lobgesang , proposing that the composition is not a thinly veiled knock-off of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony , as is generally argued, but rather an audacious experiment in the construction of a frame narrative in choral–orchestral music. Cooper’s prose is admittedly stultifying, but the diagrams and music examples in this chapter are enough to impress music dweebs on an intergalactic scale.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper  published twelve source-critical world-premiere editions of compositions by Florence B. Price (1887–1953), the first African-American woman to have her music performed by a major U.S. orchestra and the subject of the most powerful and sustained musical revival since the mid-20th-century rediscovery of Gustav Mahler. The works are the song “Don’t You Tell Me No,” which Price composed for use on the so-called Stroll in Chicago’s Black Belt in the 1930s; the spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” arranged for solo piano; the three-movement programmatic suites Snapshots  and Village Scenes  and the five-movement Preludes  for solo piano; and “Impromptu No. 1,” “Song without Words in G Major,” “Tarantella,” “To a Brown Leaf,” “To a Certain Pair of Newlyweds,” “Until We Meet,” and “Waltzing on a Sunbeam.” All were published by G. Schirmer/AMP (New York), the largest publisher of sheet music globally.

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa ’s review of the audio recording Gabriel Dupont: The Complete Piano Music  by pianist Bo Ties (MSR Classics) was published in the College Music Symposium  (vol. 60, no. 1; online edition May 1, 2020), the official journal of the College Music Society.

Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde  has published a review of pianist Matthew Odell’s recording Connections: The Music of Olivier Messiaen and his Students  (Albany Records, 2019) in the scholarly journal and affiliated digital resource repository College Music Symposium  (spring 2020, vol. 60, no. 1).

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper published five source-critical world-premiere editions of compositions by Florence B. Price (1887–1953), the first African-American woman to have her music performed by a major U.S. orchestra and the subject of the most powerful and sustained musical revival since the mid-20th century’s rediscovery of Gustav Mahler. Published by G. Schirmer / AMP (New York), the largest publisher of sheet music globally, the works are “Some o’ These Days,” “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho,” “Placid Lake,” “Fantasie Nègre No. 2,” and “Whim Wham.” “Fantasie Nègre No. 2” and “Some o’ These Days” are featured tracks on acclaimed pianist Lara Downes’s genre-fluid new album, Some of These Days. Both may be heard on one of Cooper’s Price playlists on Spotify here.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first fully source-critical editions of the full score and piano–vocal score Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s symphony-cantata Lobgesang(Song of Praise) with Bärenreiter-Verlag. Widely hailed after its 1840 premiere as the beginning of a “completely new art-form” and performed at least 26 times in the seven years between its completion and Mendelssohn’s death, the Lobgesangwas later derided by critics such as Wagner for supposedly being unbecomingly indebted to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Cooper’s edition, in addition to drawing on previously never-before-cited correspondence and review and drawing on sources from six archives and libraries in four countries, shows that the work is not a unilinear sequence of movements, as the Ninthis, but rather an audacious experiment in musical time and narrativity, specifically in its transferal of the idea of the “frame story” (after the model of the Decameronor A Thousand and One Nights) into musical form. Cooper began work on this pair of editions (spanning 295 pages and 103 pages, respectively) in 2015 but seems to have survived. 

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper  published six new source-critical editions of compositions by Florence B. Price with G. Schirmer, the single largest publisher of sheet music globally: “First Romance,” “In Sentimental Mood,” “Three Roses,” “Your Hands in Mine,” “Fantasy No. 2 for Violin and Piano,” and “Valsette Mignon.” The first four of these editions were released simultaneously by acclaimed pianist Lara Downes on her new EP From the Heart  and are available on one of Cooper’s Price playlists on Spotify here . The editions are nos. 19–24 in Cooper’s currently contracted set of 64 Price editions to be released in the near future. 

Part-Time Professor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s composition “Fireflies” will enjoy its world-première performance by Inversion Ensemble and Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Matt Teodori at 7:00 p.m. on February 29, 2020, , at the Concordia University Chapel and at 3:00 p.m. on March 1, 2020, at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. Commissioned by Inversion Ensemble, “Fireflies” (2019) for mixed chorus, piano, and percussion evokes the vivid imagery of Margaret Noodin’s bilingual poem “Fireflies,” from her 2015 book Weweni: Poems in Anishinaabemowin and English.Honoring the composer’s Ojibwe ancestors, the piece sets the poem’s English text, including the Anishinaabemowin word for fireflies (Waawaatesiwag). Moments of musical and whispered aleatory capture visions of fireflies on a summer night. Colorful augmented sixth chords and lush harmonies kindle visions of love and nature amid the dreamy mixolydian modality and lilting ¾ time.

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa  participated as an invited performer in two events at the recent Texas Music Educators Association’s (TMEA’s) convention in San Antonio. On Wednesday, February 12 and Thursday, February 13, he performed Ravel’s Tzigane  with former Texas All-State Orchestra member and current Eastman School of Music student Grace Song as part of It Starts with Music , a video and performance event commemorating TMEA’s centennial. On Friday, February 14, he accompanied internationally acclaimed mezzo-soprano and Texas Tech graduate Susan Graham at the session “A Conversation with Susan Graham” and during her appearance at the Past Presidents’ dinner.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari recently conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra in a performance of Mahler’s 4th Symphony. The concert was presented in the Alma Thomas Theater on February 8, 2020. Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the guest soloist. A preconcert talk was given by SU alumni Walter P. (Gus) Sterneman III ’07.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper published seven world-première editions of works by Florence B. Price with G. Schirmer (New York): “Remembrance,” “Sketches in Sepia,” “Clouds,” “Meditation,” “Summer Moon,” “On a Quiet Lake,” and “Down a Southern Lane.” The editions are nos. 12–18 in Cooper’s series of 67 editions of Price’s music to be published with Schirmer, and their recordings are part of a series of 17 world-première recordings of Price’s music to be released by pianist Lara Downes in the spring of 2020, all timed to coincide with the publication of Cooper’s editions. Inquisitive and courageous souls will find abridged versions of the editions’ impossibly tedious forewords at Schirmer’s homepage for Price’s piano works here; those interested in hearing Price’s lyrical and deeply original music may access Downes’s recordings for free through Spotify, YouTube, or Naxos Music Library in the SU Libraries’ collection of databases, courtesy of Naxos America (Cooper’s Price–Downes playlist on Spotify is here). 

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper  published two editions of previously unpublished works by Florence B. Price (1887–1953) with G. Schirmer (New York). “Night” (1945) is scored for women’s chorus with piano and was given its posthumous premiere by Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Beth Everett  and the SU Chorale in November 2018. This work is based on a poem by Bessie Mayle (1898–1959) that was first published in The Crisis  in 1930; the poem celebrates the beauty and resilience of the blackness of the nighttime sky as a metaphor for the beauty and resilience of Black experience. The second edition, Fantasie Nègre No. 4 , is a milestone in the ongoing Florence Price renaissance. Its release was timed to coincide with acclaimed pianist Lara Downes’s world-première recording of the work (available on Spotify here ). The editions are nos. 10 and 11 in Cooper’s series of 67 editions of Price’s music to be published with Schirmer, and the recording is the first in a series of 17 world-première recordings of Price’s music to be released by Downes in the spring of 2020, all timed to coincide with the release of Cooper’s editions. For more information on this project, see here .

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari  conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra in a December performance of Vivaldi’s Winter from The Four Seasons , featuring Austin Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Jessica Mathaes. Also on the program was Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite  and other holiday favorites.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper published five editions of previously unpublished works by Florence B. Price (1887–1953) with G. Schirmer (New York): “Memory Mist” for piano solo; “Andante con Espressione” for violin and piano; “Judgement Day,” (based on a text by Langston Hughes) for voice and piano; and “I’m Troubled in My Mind” and “Peter, Go Ring dem Bells,” both traditional spirituals for voice and piano. Cooper’s edition of “Memory Mist” was featured by acclaimed pianist Lara Downes as the opening track of her March 2019 Holes in the Sky, an album comprising music exclusively of, by, and for women. The publications are nos. 5–9 in Cooper’s series of 64 editions of hitherto-unpublished works by Price with Schirmer.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari  began her 18th consecutive appointment as music director of the Austin Civic Orchestra with two concerts this past semester: Cosmos , featuring music from the science-fiction and fantasy genres, and New York, New York , a musical tribute to the Big Apple. For the latter, composer Anthony Iannaccone was on hand to present a preconcert talk regarding his piece Waiting for Sunrise on the Sound , and previous Pearl Amster winner Ben Laude flew in from New York City to perform Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody  for piano. The orchestra also performed the music of Bernstein and Rodgers, plus a suite of music from The Godfather  by Rota.

Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde’ s composition Revolve/Retract  was performed four times by Line upon Line Percussion, with choreography by the Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company, November 14–16, at the Ground Floor Theatre, in Austin, TX.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave two presentations on Florence Price in Boston. The first, titled “Nevertheless, She Persisted: The Homecoming of Florence B. Price,” given on November 1, 2019, was a full lecture–recital given at the New England Conservatory of Music, Price’s alma mater, and featured posthumous premieres of five of Price’s compositions for solo piano, performed by acclaimed pianist Lara Downes. The second, titled “Florence Price and the Poetics of African-American Musical Identity,” was a paper given at the national meeting of the American Musicological Society on November 2, 2019, in a session titled “Negotiating Class and Ethnicity in the United States, 1920–1950.” Both presentations centered on Cooper’s excavation and research of more than 300 unpublished compositions by a composer who is currently experiencing the most powerful sustained musical renaissance since the mid-20th century’s rediscovery of Gustav Mahler.

Selections from Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde ’s Don Juan Project  were performed at the Butler University School of Music, in Indianapolis, IN, on November 3.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the guest mezzo-soprano for High Holy services at Congregation Beth Israel in Austin, TX, under the direction of Dr. Jeffery Jones-Ragona and Dr. Maimy Fong.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the guest mezzo-soprano for High Holy services at Congregation Beth Israel in Austin, TX under the direction of Dr. Jeffery Jones-Ragona and Dr. Maimy Fong. 

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper  published three source-critical editions of music by Florence Price with G. Schirmer, Inc./AMP, the single largest publisher of classical sheet music globally. The editions are Price’s setting of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s poem “The Heart of a Woman,” the Fantasie No. 1 in G Minor  for violin and piano, and the Cotton Dance  for piano solo. These editions are nos. 2–4 in Cooper’s series of 64 editions of previously unpublished music by Price with Schirmer. 

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa’s book Echoes from the East: The Javanese Gamelan and Its Influence on the Music of Claude Debussy will be released in December 2019 by Lexington Books. In it, he recounts Debussy’s 1889 encounter with the gamelan, the traditional musical ensemble of what is now Indonesia, at the Paris Exposition Universelle and traces its echoes through his entire compositional career. The book adds a commentary on the modern-day issue of cultural appropriation and a survey of Debussy’s contemporaries and successors who have also attempted to merge the sounds of the gamelan with their own distinctive musical styles.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper published the world-premiere edition of Florence B. Price’s String Quartet No. 2in A Minor (1935) with G. Schirmer/Music Sales Classical. The firm acquired the exclusive worldwide rights to Price’s complete catalog in 2018. This edition is the first in a series of 64 source-critical editions of Price’s previously unpublished compositions to be released in Cooper’s editions over the next two years. Readers may preview the score, complete with impossibly turgid foreword, here. 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Beth Everett recently presented a lecture titled “We Belong Together: Choral and Operatic Styles in Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle” at the first TEXOMA Regional Conference of the National Opera Association, held at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. In addition, Everett served on the conference planning committee.

Under the direction of Professor of Music Lois Ferrari,the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) has won second place for the nationally adjudicated American Prize in community orchestra performance of American music (Ernst Bacon Memorial Award). Ferrari and the ACO submitted a performance recording of a piece by local composer Dan Welcher, as well as the music of William Grant Still and Lee Actor. The ACO also garnered overall praise from the American Prize staff for the orchestra’s 2017–2018 season, titled Made in America, which featured music exclusively by American composers.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari was awarded second place for the 2019 nationally adjudicated American Prize in community orchestra conducting. Ferrari’s work with the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) was also honored in the community orchestra performance category, with the ACO winning third place.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis ’s composition Wren , for mixed chorus and flute, will enjoy its world premiere performance by Inversion Ensemble on September 28, 2019 at 7:00 p.m. at the Wesleyan at Estrella in Georgetown and September 29, 2019, at 3:00 p.m. at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas. Inversion Ensemble will also perform Wren  at its Sarofim Music Series concert on October 22, and the Southwestern University Chorale will perform it during their fall concert on November 2. Commissioned by Inversion Ensemble, Wren  sets Robert Macfarlane’s acrostic poem of the same name for mixed chorus and flute. With quick harmonic changes, syncopations, and melodic gestures, the composition captures a sense of the charming poem as well as the actual Eurasian wren ( Troglodytes troglodytes ) found year-round throughout the U.K. Macfarlane’s poem “Wren” comes from his 2017 illustrated poetry book, The Lost Words , which conjures pictures of the wild things and untamed spaces that get shortchanged in modern urban life.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music  Adrienne Inglis ’s composition  Metamorphosis,  for solo flute, solo harp, and string orchestra, will enjoy its world premiere performance by Chaski and the Balcones Community Orchestra on September 22, 2019, at 4:00 p.m. at the Lakeway Activity Center in Lakeway, TX. Commissioned by the Balcones Community Orchestra,  Metamorphosis  honors the life and work of pioneering entomologist, naturalist, and artist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717). Merian carefully documented in illustrated detail the life cycle of so many insects; accordingly,  Metamorphosis  musically follows a butterfly from egg and larva to pupa and adult.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s composition “The Song of the Harp Seal” will enjoy its world premiere performance by Inversion Ensemble Coda August 10–11, 2019, in Georgetown and Austin, TX. Composed especially for Inversion Ensemble Coda, “The Song of the Harp Seal” sets to music Gillean McDougall’s poem of the same title and was commissioned by the composer for this project. For treble chorus and harp, this work tells the story of a mother harp seal and her pup forced south of their usual arctic range by the climate crisis. The pup ingests plastic pollution which contributes to her death near the shores of the Isle of Skye. Scottish legend mixes with modern tragedy as mermaids beckon in Gaelic to the harp pup and summon the audience to remember the harp seal. Inversion Ensemble’s project “Aether: Earth—Conservation/Nature” features guest conductor Cina Crisara and Chaski harpist Shana Norton.

An excerpt of Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde ’s opera The Color of Dissonance  was included in the 10th edition of Nancy Rogers and Robert Ottman’s Music for Sight Singing  (Pearson, 2019).

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Hai Zheng Olefsky was invited to give a cello master class and perform a solo and chamber music in concert with violin virtuoso Elizabeth Pitcairn at Luzerne Chamber Music Festival’s Legacy Concert on July 21, 2019. Luzerne Music Center (LMC) aims to provide world-class music instruction for passionate young people in a summer-camp environment regardless of their financial circumstances. Musicians ages nine to 18 come from all over the world to train at LMC’s campus, which is located in the foothills of New York City’s Adirondack Park.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s composition “The Rage and Reconciliation of King Lear” will enjoy its world première performance by Inversion Ensemble June 1–2, 2019, in Austin, TX. Commissioned by Jonathan Riemer in memory of his father, Rev. Dr. Milton H. Riemer, the work for mixed chorus, bassoon, and piano weaves passages from Shakespeare’s King Lear with the signature phrases of Rev. Dr. Riemer. Rev. Dr. Riemer’s words bring insight and reflection to the poignant narrative of a parent–child relationship and mental illness. Inversion Ensemble’s project “Heroes/Monsters: Songs of Legends and Beasts” features bassoonist Nathan Koch and pianist Austin Haller.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s work “Innocent Blood” was nominated by the Austin Critics Table for Best Original Composition/Score for 2018–19. Her work was part of the Inversion Ensemble’s concert I, Too, Sing America: Songs of Our Shared History, which was also nominated for Best Concert/Opera Performance.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) on May 18, 2019, in its annual Paint to Music Spring Concert, which features artwork created by Austin ISD students in response to hearing and studying an iconic piece of classical music. This year’s selection was Pictures at an Exhibitionby Modest Moussorgsky (orchestrated by Maurice Ravel). Also featured on the program was “Festive Overture” by Dmitri Shostakovich, the “Sleeping Beauty Waltz” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (conducted by Gus Sterneman ’06), and the “Concerto for Horn and Orchestra in B-Flat Major, Op. 91” by Reinhold Glière (performed by ACO member Chris Simpson).

Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde  has published a review of Prefab Sprout’s recording “I Trawl The Megahertz” in the College Music Symposium  (spring 2019, vol. 59, no.1).

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Voice Julia Taylor  performed the role of Mimi in the all-female production of Puccini’s La Boheme (La Femme Boheme)  with Local Opera Local Artists (LOLA) at the Women’s Music, Diversity, and Leadership Conference at San Diego State University.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and Concert Cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has been invited to be an adjudicator for strings and to give two cello master classes April 11–12 at the 2019 Independent Schools Association of the Southwest (ISAS) Arts Festival in Austin, TX. This Festival has grown to be the nation’s premiere annual regional arts festival among independent schools. The festival is a collaborative enterprise with more than 40 participating schools. For more than 50 years, the ISAS Fine Arts Festival has been a celebration of the visual and performing arts, bringing together thousands of students who will share their talents and be inspired for their futures.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a guest lecture titled “The Silence of Florence Price” at Trinity University on April 2. The talk featured recordings by award-winning pianists Lara Downes and Petronel Malan of five still-unpublished piano compositions by Florence Price (1887–1953). Cooper called for a more intersectional and sustained exploration of the composer’s life and works. Those interested may find the narcolepsy-inducing abstract here.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) on March 26, 2019, in its annual Texas Rising Stars (TRS) concert. The TRS performance is presented in collaboration with the Butler School of Music (BSOM) at the University of Texas at Austin and highlights winners of the BSOM string concerto competition. Also featured was the Amster String Quartet, an ensemble of high-school musicians nominated by their teachers and then auditioned by the ACO for the honor of being coached by a noted local music teacher (this year’s teacher was Dick Frazier at Anderson High School). Every year, a different ensemble is assembled and coached on a rotating basis (woodwind, brass, strings, percussion, etc.). The ACO was also honored to present the U.S. premiere of Roydon Tse’s Sinfonia Concertante, which won the ACO’s biannual composition contest.

Music Literature major Katiebeth Brandt ’19 prepared a critical edition and arranged for the posthumous premiere of Florence B. Price’s choral composition titled “Bluebell.” Based on a text by Mary Rolofson Gamble, the work was performed on March 3 at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Brandt prepared her edition under the supervision of  Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper. The autograph was obtained from the University of Arkansas Special Collections Library and has a professional recording and video made from the premiere. This piece was written by a woman, with a woman poet, edited by a woman, with a treble section of eight women voices, conducted by a woman with a woman accompanist.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s composition “Asleep in a Blanket Spun of Energy” enjoyed its world premiere performance by Inversion Ensemble on March 2 and 3, 2019, in Austin, TX. Honoring Inglis’s Ojibwe ancestors, the work for mixed chorus and Trevor Shaw’s electronic track evokes the vivid imagery of Margaret Noodin’s poem “We Are Returning Always.” The piece sets all of the English text and a few key words of the Anishinaabemowin text from the bilingual poem, which beautifully captures a glimpse into the natural and celestial wonders of the Ojibwe world. The music reflects a taste of the syncopated embellished singing, pentatonic melodies, and steady drumbeat characteristic of Ojibwe music. The electronic track provides both a compelling rhythmic foundation and fantastical sonic representations of the moon, nebulae, supernovae, the aurora borealis, and the forests of the Ojibwe lands.

Sphinx Organization Laureate Lara Downes gave the world premieres of two major compositions by Florence Price discovered and edited by Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooperin a major concert on Feb. 23. The concert, part of the Washington (DC) Performing Arts series, previewed Downes’s new project,  Holes in the Sky (Sony Masterworks, March 1). The album, a genre-fluid collaboration with Judy Collins, Rhiannon Giddens, and others, is devoted exclusively to music by women, performed exclusively by women. Along with other pieces, Downes performed Price’s “Fantasie Nègre no. 2,” long believed lost before Cooper recovered it, as well as her more compact “Sketches in Sepia” and “Memory Mist.” All three compositions typify Price’s creative synthesis of African-American stylistic traits with the genres and techniques of concert music.

A concert aria by Felix Mendelssohn, discovered by Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper,received its Puerto Rican premiere in performances by the International Chamber Orchestra of Puerto Rico with soprano Sara Garcia under the direction of Emilio Colón on February 8–10 in Mayagüez and San Juan. The 14-minute aria, “Infelice! / Ah, ritorna, età dell’ oro, MWV H 4” (1834), was long assumed to be a draft for a different piece written nine years later, but Cooper’s research into the manuscripts, text, and music revealed it to be an autonomous composition—resulting in the addition of a major “new” composition to the catalog of Mendelssohn’s works and the repertoire of nineteenth-century vocal music.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper uncovered and edited a composition by Florence B. Price titled “Memory Mist,” which was performed on Feb. 1 by Grammy-nominated pianist and Sphinx Organization Laureate Lara Downes as part of Detroit Public Radio’s celebration of the first day of African-American history month. The piece is part of Cooper’s large-scale project exploring the hundreds of unknown compositions by Price, who, despite her sex and race, was acclaimed as the mid-20th century’s leading African-American composer of concert music. The performance will be rebroadcast by Detroit Public Radio after Feb. 23 and will be one of the featured tracks on Downes’s new genre-fluid CD Holes in the Sky, devoted exclusively to music by women composers and performers (due for release on March 1).

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Beth Everett presented a session at the National Opera Association national conference titled “Female Conductors and Directors and Their Paths to Careers in Opera.” The conference took place on Jan. 3–5, 2019, in Salt Lake City, UT.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra on Dec. 2, 2018, in a concert titled Bohemian Rhapsodies. The concert featured guest violist Roger Myers and music by Czech composers Dvorak, Stamitz, Husa, and Smetana.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s composition “Innocent Blood” was part of the Inversion Ensemble’s “I, Too, Sing America” performance, which was just selected by The Austin Chronicle as one of  Robert Faires’s Top 10 Dance and Classical Joys of 2018. Faires  describes the performance as “a history lesson through choral music, speaking to struggles present and past (e.g., witch trials in Adrienne Inglis’s forceful “Innocent Blood”), with the choir’s united voices ever a symbol of e pluribus unum.”

Six music majors have prepared source-critical editions of unknown, unpublished, or little-known works by African American composer Florence B. Price (1887–1953) for the Music in the United States course offered by Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper. The editions were prepared from autographs held at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and include a scholarly preface, a source-critical score of the work, and a critical report. The students have gone through the entire process of preparing scholarly editions, including finding the sources, requesting reproductions and agreeing to the holding library’s terms, researching the poets and texts (where applicable), inputting the music using professional music-editing software, and assembling the final product. They hold the copyright on their editions. The students, works, and work-statuses are

• Emily Barham ’20, Fantasy in Purple (new edition; text by Langston Hughes)
• Katie Beth Brandt ’19, Bluebell (premiere edition; text by Mary Rolofson Gamble; recorded by the University of Texas at San Antonio choir and set for posthumous premiere in spring 2019)
• Myles Kellerman ’20, Monologue for the Working Class (premiere edition; text by Langston Hughes)
• Alex Slaid ’20, The Retort (new edition; text by Paul Dunbar)
• Tabitha Thiemens ’19, God Gives Me You (new edition; text by unidentified author)
• Ti Xin ’20, Presto (premiere edition; for piano solo)

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello was the guest mezzo-soprano soloist in Austin Chamber Ensemble’s production A Haunted Evening,featuring works by Brahms, Strauss, Verdi, Britten, Wildhorn, Schwartz, and Sondheim. Altobello performed alongside soprano June Julian, tenor Dr. Jeffrey Jones-Ragona, and pianists Dr. Stephen Burnaman and Martha Mortensen Ahern. Performances were on Oct. 19 at Huston–Tillotson University’s King Seabrook Chapel (celebrating their second season as an “all-Steinway” music school) and on Oct. 20 at the First Presbyterian Church in Austin. Performances included solos, duets, trios, and piano movements that fit the Halloween spirit.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper  uncovered, edited, and arranged for the posthumous premiere of two unpublished songs by African-American composer and civil-rights activist Margaret A. Bonds (1913–1972). The songs are based on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s (1892–1950) sonnets “What Lips My Lips Have Kissed” and “I Know My Mind and I Have Made My Choice.” Millay’s poems, considered among the finest sonnets of the 20th century, are important for their use of feminist themes, which Bonds in turn engages in the works’ musical style. The works received their modern premiere at a recital by former Southwestwestern Instructor of Music Dana Long Zenobi at Butler University, Nov. 6, 2018.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper discovered and edited an unpublished choral work by Florence B. Price (1887–1953) that will be performed by Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Beth Everett and the Southwestern University Chorale at their concert on Nov. 3, 2018. The composition, titled “Night,” is based on a poem first published in 1930 in the NAACP journal The Crisis by Harlem Renaissance author Bessie Mayle. Price, generally acclaimed as the doyenne of African-American concert music of the mid-20th century, set Mayle’s poem to music in 1945. After her setting was premiered in Chicago, the autograph was filed among Price’s other manuscripts. Cooper discovered it during his research in the summer of 2018.

Faculty members from the Department of Music were well represented at the annual meeting of the College Music Society, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Oct. 10 – 13.

• Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa presented his paper “Ragtime, Gamelan, and the Music of Claude Debussy: Exoticism vs. Cultural Appropriation.”
• Associate Professors of Music David Asbury and Bruce Cain performed three songs composed by Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde from the River of Words Project. The River of Wordsis a collection of songs the duo has commissioned from multiple composers, setting texts written by children on the topic of the environment.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari celebrated her 16th consecutive appointment as music director of the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) by opening the 2018–19 season on Oct. 6 with a concert titled Bella Italia! Guest trumpeter and Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Kyle Koronka joined the ACO in a concert that featured music by Italian composers Vivaldi, Puccini, Verdi, Rossini, and Respighi.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’ composition “Innocent Blood” will soon enjoy its world première performance by Inversion Ensemble. Mary Esty, the composer’s eighth-great-grandmother, was falsely accused of witchcraft and hanged September 22, 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts. Using poetry, court records, Mary’s petition from prison, and Puritan hymns, “Innocent Blood” tells her tragic story in this work for mezzo-soprano soloist, chorus, flute and bass flute, and organ. The performance will be hosted Oct. 6, 2018, at 7 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, and Oct. 7, 2018, at 3 p.m. at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello was the featured mezzo-soprano vocalist for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Congregation Beth Israel in Austin, Texas, led by Dr. Jeffrey Jones-Ragona of Saint Mary Cathedral and accompanied by Dr. Maimy Fong, an independent music director.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello was a featured mezzo-soprano soloist and ensemble member with the Texas Bach Festival under the direction of Barry Williamson and collaborative pianists Rick Rowley and Andrew Brownell. Featured works included J. S. Bach’s motets, “Jesu, Meine Freude” (BWV 227), “Singet dem Herrn ein Neues Lied” (BWV 225), Brahms’s “Liebeslieder Walzer, Op. 52,” and Vaughan Williams’s “Serenade to Music.”

Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde’s work “Ebullient Echoes” was chosen as part of the 52 Weeks of Flute Project, spearheaded by Chicago-based flutist Robin Meiksins. Meiksins prepared the composition in consultation with Hoogerhyde and presented it on the Project’s YouTube channel. The performance may be viewed here.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Alisha Gabriel is celebrating the release of two more nonfiction children’s books titled The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Triggers Reform and Escaping an Animal Attack, both published by The Child’s World.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’ composition “El sol” for SATB chorus, harp, and Venezuelan cuatro enjoyed its world première performance June 2, 2018, in Austin, Texas, with Inversion Ensemble and harpist Shana Norton. “El sol” (The Sun), sets Sonnet XXXIII by Luis Martín de la Plaza to a Venezuelan joropo for SATB chorus, harp, and cuatro. Luis Martín de la Plaza (1577–1625) grew up in the small southern Spanish town of Antequera. A gifted poet as well as a priest, he wrote this Petrarchan sonnet in classical style. The octave (the first eight lines) presents a violent thunderstorm with dark clouds that hide the sun, fierce winds that fight with the sea, waves that batter the rocky coastline, and hail that blankets the fields. The sestet (the final six lines) turns the narrative to the sun’s breaking through the clouds, calming the sea, hushing the wind and thunder, painting the clouds gold, and adorning the fields with fragrant flowers. One is left to wonder whose eyes are so beautiful as to make the sun’s dawn envy their colors. The sonnet’s rhythmic and vivid imagery lends itself to a Venezuelan joropo, a creole dance and musical style derived from Spanish, African, and indigenous sources. The SATB choral parts indulge in some cross rhythms and playful polyphony over a typical joropo rhythm on the harp and Venezuelan cuatro.

Music and Computer Science double-major Isabel Tweraser, class of 2019, has been awarded a $1,200 ACM-W scholarship to help her travel to Kyoto, Japan, to present her peer-reviewed conference paper “Querying Across Time to Interactively Evolve Animations” at the upcoming Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. The paper was co-authored with Lauren Gillespie, class of 2019, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum. ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, and ACM-W scholarships are specifically aimed at helping female students attend research conferences in hopes of encouraging them to pursue further research opportunities in the future.

Caleb Martin ’17, a Music Education major and former student of Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Anna Carney, has been accepted to the Buffet Crampon Summer Clarinet Academy in Jacksonville, Fla. This is an honor offered to only 20 clarinetists across North America. Caleb will have the opportunity to work closely with internationally acclaimed artist faculty, including Philippe Cuper, Pierre Génisson, Alides Rodriguez, Victoria Luperi, and Inn-Hyuck Cho. There will be a hands-on seminar on instrument maintenance and adjustment as well as several lectures given by the artist faculty. Caleb is currently teaching music in the Georgetown public schools and also serves as assistant principal clarinet in the Austin Civic Orchestra, conducted by Professor of Music Lois Ferrari.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari  conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) in their 5th concert of the season, Texas Rising Stars, in Bates Recital Hall at the University of Texas Butler School of Music on March 25, 2018. In addition to showcasing the winners of UT’s string concerto contest, the ACO also performed Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” ballet suite for 13 instruments and Pulitzer Prize winning composer Jennifer Higdon’s “Blue Cathedral.” This concert was performed as part of the larger 2017–2018 season theme, Made in America, for which Ferrari and the ACO are committed to performing music written by American composers.

Assistant Professor of Music Hai Zheng Olefskywill be honored by Austin Mayor Steve Adler and the Austin City Council with a special proclamation on Thursday, May 10, 2018 at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall for her contribution to the community as the Artistic Director for the Young Musicians Festival Competition at the Asian American Cultural Center for the past 18 years. She will also perform at the Austin City Council Chamber on that day. The performance will be aired live on ATXN.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 performed the mezzo-soprano solos of Mack Wilberg’s “Requiem” with St. Edward’s University Masterworks Singers and Orchestra, under the baton of Dr. Morris Stevens. This was the Texas premiere of the work, performed on March 4 and 8, 2018, at St. Edward’s University Ballroom and St. Theresa’s Catholic Church in Austin.

Music majors Melanie Lim, class of 2021, and Chloe Easterling, class of 2020, participated in the South Texas District Auditions of the National Association of Teachers of Singing. The students performed art songs and arias before a panel of judges and received written critiques. The event was held at The University of Mary Hardin Baylor in Belton, Texas on March 24. Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi served as an adjudicator and concluded her term as Secretary of the South Texas NATS chapter.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper channeled the percussionist skeleton in his academic closet to publish a review of The Cambridge Companion to Percussion (ed. Russell Hartenberger; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) in Performance Practice Review 22 (2017): 1-5.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi appeared as both a performer and a presenter at the second annual Music by Women Festival, held at Mississippi University for Women March 1–3.  Zenobi and University of Texas at Austin trombonist Megan Boutin performed “Love While You May,” a recently-composed song cycle for soprano and trombone by Southwestern alumna Ashley H. Kraft ’14. Zenobi also performed “Petite rêve,” a four-song cycle by Los Angeles based composer Genevieve Vincent.  She presented a lecture recital titled “À deux voix: Romantic Duets for Women’s Voices” along with former Southwestern faculty member Dr. Agnes Vojtko and pianist Dr. Michael Bunchman (University of Southern Mississippi). The lecture recital presented works by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Cécile Chaminade, and sister composers Maria Malibran and Pauline Viardot with the intent of situating this vocal literature more firmly within the canon.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’ composition “Cochineal” for SATB chorus and electronic dance track enjoyed its world première performance Feb. 10, 2018, with Inversion Ensemble. Inglis’ son, Walter Torres, a PhD oceanography student at Duke, created the electronic dance track. Inversion Ensemble performed “Cochineal” Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018, at Wesleyan at Estrella and Sunday, Feb. 25, 2018, at Westminster Presbyterian Church Fellowship Hall. “Cochineal” combines earthy and electronic sound to set to music the ancient Andean recipe for dyeing alpaca wool with cochineal, an insect full of carminic acid that feeds on prickly pear cactus. The recipe depicts the synthesis of insects, alpaca wool, minerals, water, fire, sun, time, and a couple of unusual ingredients to create colorful beauty. Using Andean harmonies and scales, the music captures the grandeur of the Andes mountains and the artisanal tradition of hand-crafting colorful yarn from local natural ingredients. The electronic track features compelling dance rhythms produced from original sound design and processing with software instruments Serum, Alchemy, Sylenth, and Massive among others. “Cochineal” is the first musical collaboration between Adrienne Inglis and Walter Torres.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi performed as the featured artist for LOLA (Local Opera Local Artists) Austin’s quarterly concert series on Feb. 15. Her program, “A Valentine to Female Composers,” introduced Austin-area music lovers to art songs by female composers, including Alma Mahler, Fanny Mendelssohn, Lori Laitman, Libby Larsen, and two sets of sister composers, Lili and Nadia Boulanger and Pauline Viardot and Maria Malibran.  She also performed a newly-composed song cycle by Canadian-born composer Genevieve Vincent, who is currently based in Los Angeles, Calif.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra’s 4th concert of the season, An American in Paris, which featured music written by Gershwin, Larsen, Barber, and Popper, on Feb. 3. Featured were local soloists Toby Blumenthal and Southwestern student Isabel Tweraser, class of 2019 and winner of the 2017 Southwestern Concerto Contest. This concert is a part of the larger ‛17–‛18 season theme, Made in America, for which Ferrari and the ACO are committed to performing music written by American composers.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the guest vocalist in Austin Chamber Ensemble’s “Berlin Bernstein Birthdays and More” featuring works by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and Claude Debussy. Altobello performed alongside pianists Marti Ahern and Stephen Burnaman. Performances were Jan. 26–27, inaugurating Huston-Tillotson University’s “all Steinway school.”

Part-time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Li Kuang recently attended the Big XII Trombone Conference held Jan. 12–14 at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX. The Big XII Trombone Conference is an annual trombone event that attracts professional trombone players, college trombone professors, trombone students and trombone enthusiasts across the country. Kuang served as a faculty member in this conference. He also presented a solo performance and adjudicated the final rounds of both the “Yamaha Tenor Trombone Solo Competition” and the “Big XII Bass Trombone Solo Competition.” The renowned bass trombonist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Mr. Charlie Vernon was also among the invited guest artists to this conference.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra’s 3rd concert of the season, Austin Home-Grown, which featured music written by local composers Donald Grantham and Dan Welcher on Dec. 10. Both composers were on hand to help rehearse and conduct their works So Long As Days Shall Be and Prairie Light. This concert is part of a larger season theme, Made in America, to which Ferrari and the ACO are committed to performing only music written by American composers throughout its 2017-18 season.

Isabel Tweraser , class of 2019, won the 2017 Southwestern Concerto contest. She will be perform “Hungarian Rhapsody” by David Popper with the Austin Civic Orchestra on Feb. 3, 2018.

Part-time Assistant Professor of Music Hai Zheng Olefsky was featured as a soloist with the Austin Youth Symphony Orchestra to perform ” Prayer” by Ernest Bloch at the Austin Youth Orchestra Winter Concert on Dec. 3.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi was competitively selected from the Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico region of the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) to perform on the 2017 Texoma Regional Conference Artist Series. Her lecture recital “Songs of the Boulanger Sisters: Stylistic Analysis Through a Gender Lens” presented historical context and stylistic analysis of art songs by sister composers Nadia and Lili Boulanger, with the intent of situating this literature more firmly within the canon of French melodie. Current Music Education major Tabitha Thiemens ’19 also attended the conference, which was held at Texas A&M University - Commerce, Nov. 9–11. Thiemens performed as part of the student auditions, which involved over 500 college students from the region.  She attended master classes, artist series performances, and a recital by nationally renowned soprano Elizabeth Baldwin.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi presented a lecture recital on the art songs of sister composers Nadia and Lili Boulanger at McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas. She performed along with pianist Jeanne Sasaki on Oct. 26.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari was invited to conduct a New York State School Music Association (NYSSMA) all-county concert in the Saratoga, NY, area. Ferrari rehearsed and conducted approximately 80 high school musicians over the course of three days, all culminating in a festival concert on Oct. 21.

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa was a featured artist and one of three guest presenters at the Oregon Music Teachers’ Association annual conference in Lincoln City, Ore, July 14–16, 2017. He presented two sessions, “Basics of Contrapuntal Playing on the Keyboard” and “Echoes from the East: Debussy and the Javanese Gamelan,” taught a master class on the keyboard music of J.S. Bach, and performed a solo recital of music by Bach, Debussy and Schumann.

Part-time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Li Kuang was invited to hold a four-day guest artist residency at both Yantai University’s College of Fine Arts and Jilin College of Fine Arts in China May 30–June 10, 2017. During the time of these residencies, Kuang taught masterclasses, gave private lessons, conducted clinics and presented solo recitals at both schools. In addition, Kuang was invited to teach a masterclass at Sichuan Conservatory of Music in Chengdu, China, on May 23. His residencies received great success and his trip to China helped create connections between Chinese music schools and Southwestern University. Kuang has already received several additional invitations from major conservatories for guest artist residencies and has set engagements with some of them for the summer of 2018.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper published a chapter titled “Faust’s Schubert: Schubert’s _Faust_” in Goethe’s “Faust” in Music: Music in Goethe’s “Faust,” ed. Lorraine Byrne Bodley (New York: Boydell, 2017). The first study to discuss the complete corpus of Schubert’s settings from Faust as a group in their dramatic and historical context, the chapter argues that Schubert, treating Part I of Goethe’s tragedy just four years after its publication in Vienna, was the first composer not only to appreciate the significance of Goethe’s recasting the traditional Faust narrative as a wager rather than a pact (and hence a venture in which humanity could outsmart or otherwise overcome the cosmic forces of Good and Evil that operate in the foreground of the drama), but also to understand that the true driving force of the drama is not Faust himself, but Gretchen. In so doing Schubert musically iterated “the woman question” that was gaining increasing prominence in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European cultural spheres, grappled astutely with a theme of Goethe’s drama even as much of the literary world was viewing it with incomprehension or outright hostility, and pioneered interpretive trends that have since assumed almost dogmatic status.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’ composition “Letters to Faith” made its world premiere June 3 at Austin’s new choral collective Inversion Ensemble. The eight-voice a cappella choral work sets to music two letters written by Inglis’ grandparents to their daughter, Faith Inglis, while she was a student at Pomona College. Faith’s parents wrote these letters to comfort and encourage her after a poor showing on an exam, but unwittingly revealed amusing and poignant family characteristics.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari performed (conducted) three concert programs with the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) over the past four months. The March 25 concert, “Texas Rising Stars,” featured concerto winners from the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas-Austin in addition to William Grant Still’s Afro-American Symphony. On May 13, the ACO hosted the Texas Guitar Quartet in a performance of Rodrigo’s Concierto Andaluz for Four Guitars. Also on the program was Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony. June 9–10 marked the 40th annual Zilker Park pops concerts. This year featured music by the Beatles and an eclectic array of music chosen by ACO audiences throughout the 2016–17 season.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the featured guest performer for Austin Bridal Magazine’s 30th Anniversary Gala on Apr. 13 in Austin, Texas.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari has been awarded second place for the 2016 American Prize Competition in orchestral conducting (community orchestra). The American Prize competitions are national awards adjudicated through submission of recorded performances. Ferrari submitted video recordings of her performances of Beethoven’s 2nd Symphony, the Shostakovich 5th Symphony, and the Marquez Danzon No. 2, all performed with the Austin Civic Orchestra.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi was invited to present a lecture titled “Practical Uses for Technology in the Solo Voice Studio” at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, Texas on Apr. 19.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 judged the Spring 2017 Choir Competition for The Texas Charter School Academic and Athletic League (TCSAAL). TCSAAL works to aid the individual growth of Texas’ charter school students through academic and athletic competition, promotion of teamwork and a healthy lifestyle, and the constant pursuit for academic excellence.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi represented Southwestern University as a judge at the South Texas Chapter of the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) auditions, held at Texas State University on Apr. 8. Zenobi was re-elected as an officer and will serve a second two-year term as Secretary of the South Texas NATS Chapter.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari performed (conducted) three concerts with the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) over the past six months. One on Oct. 29, another on Dec. 10, and the final on Feb. 4. The Feb. 4 concert, titled “Spotlight on Southwestern,” was presented in the Alma Thomas Theater and featured an all-Southwestern tribute. Professor of Music Kenny Sheppard lead the Southwestern Chorale in a collaborative performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, featuring Associate Professor of Music Bruce Cain and Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi as soloists. The ACO also performed Professor of Music Michael Cooper’s edition of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, and Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde’s composition, Lament. Also featured were nine Southwestern alumni, including Gus Sterneman ’06 who is the ACO’s assistant conductor.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis recently participated as a flutist, singer, and featured composer in the inaugural concert of Inversion Ensemble, a choral collaborative dedicated to the presentation of new choral works. The Feb. 25 concert in Austin included Inglis’ compositions “In Heaven and on Earth” for chorus, flute and clàrsach, and “On the Mystery of the Incarnation” for chorus and strings.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi traveled to Mississippi University for Women and presented a lecture recital, “Songs of the Boulanger Sisters,” at the inaugural Music by Women Festival, March 3–4. Dr. Chuck Dillard, area coordinator for collaborative piano at Portland State University, collaborated on the performance portion of the lecture recital.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 performs the role of “Fairy” in Verdi’s brilliant comedic opera Falstaff with the San Diego Opera, directed by Olivier Tambosi and conducted by Daniele Callegari.  Performances take place at the San Diego Civic Theatre February 18, 21, 24, and 26.  The San Diego Opera is ranked among the top 10 opera companies in the United States. For more information visit sdopera.org.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari is a finalist in the 2016 American Prize Competition in Community Orchestra Conducting. The American Prize competitions are national awards judged via submission of recorded video performances. Ferrari’s video entry was of the Shostakovich 5th Symphony and the Marquez Danzon No. 2, both with the Austin Civic Orchestra.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 performed in “Ladies Who Lunch” with the Austin Chamber Ensemble Jan. 13–14. This innovative program weaves the lives of three women: a seasoned socialite, a business woman, and a young bride. An attentive, meddling and haughty waiter also delivers candid commentary on the “Ladies Who Lunch.” The ladies and the waiter articulate everything about their lifestyles and personas through a wide range of musical repertoire including operatic arias, art songs, and musical theatre. While their individuality shines through, their lives become gradually intertwined into a cacophony of sound reflecting the frivolities of life, joy, hope, promise, disappointment, regrets, insanity, mortality, and ultimately, peace.

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa gave an invited presentation titled “The Javanese Gamelan and Its Influence on the Music of Debussy” at Pesta Indonesia, a multidisciplinary conference focusing on historical and cultural relationships between Indonesia and the West. The conference was held at the Institut Politécnico de Leiria (IPL), Leiria, Portugal, on Dec. 15, 2016.

Associate Dean of the Sarofim School of Fine Arts and Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa was awarded 3rd place in the 2016 American Prize Competition in Piano Performance (Lorin Hollander Award—Concerto). The American Prize competitions are national awards adjudicated through submission of recorded performances. Tamagawa’s  performance was of the Mozart Piano Concerto in C major, K. 503 with the Austin Symphony Orchestra, Peter Bay, conductor, recorded live in November 2014.

Part-Time Assistant Director of Music and Director of the Southwestern Jazz Band David Guidi was recently invited to serve as the conductor of the Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA) Region 32 Jazz Band. This ensemble comprises high school students who went through a competitive selection process culminating in a concert held at Glenn High School in Leander. The program included:

• Don’t Get Sassy by Thad Jones, arr. Mike Carubia
• Mambo Inn by Grace Sampson, George Woodlen, and Mario Bauza
• Big Heart Lament by David Guidi
• Hooked by David Guidi
• El Nino by Joey Calderazzo, arr. Vince Norman
• Moanin’ by Charles Mingus, arr. Sy Johnson

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi won an Honorable Mention for Exceptional Repertoire in the 2016 American Prize Competition. Zenobi’s entry included recordings of art songs by Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Alma Schindler Mahler, Pauline Viardot-Garcia, and Barbara Strozzi, performed with pianist Chuck Dillard and bassoonist Kristin Wolfe Jensen. It also included a recording of Love While You May, a song cycle by Ashley H. Kraft ’14 which premiered at Southwestern with trombonist and retired Southwestern faculty, Eileen Meyer-Russell.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair Michael Cooper discovered and edited an unpublished concert aria by Mendelssohn. The aria was performed on Nov. 26–27 in the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam by acclaimed soprano Lisa Larsson, accompanied by the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra conducted by Gordan Nikolic, who also serves as violin soloist.

Seven Southwestern faculty members were awarded a prestigious Sam Taylor Fellowship Grant. The 2016 recipients include:

• Professor of Physics Steven Alexander, “Creating a Wave-Powered Robot,” $1,200
• Associate Professor of Music David Asbury, “Research at the Library of Congress and the University of South Carolina Related to the Correspondence of Andrés Segovia and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco,” $1,100
• Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth, “Learning Arabic to Teach the Syrian Refugee Crisis: Inclusiveness and Diversity in the German Classroom,” $1,750
• Associate Professor of Art History Patrick Hajovsky, “Examining Excavated Aztec Sculptures and Offerings in the Templo Mayor Museum and Museo Nacional de Antropología,” $1,220
• Associate Professor of French Aaron Prevots, “Gestures Toward the Sacred: Guillevic, Vargaftig, Tellerman, Michel,” $1,500
• Associate Professor of Communication Studies Valerie Renegar, “Beyond the “Wicked Stepmother”: Representations of Stepmothers in Popular Culture,” $1,830
• Professor of Spanish Katy Ross, “Immigration in Spain: The Cultural Effects of Otherness,” $1,500

Part-Time Instructor of Music Alisha Gabriel has written a biography for children titled Silentó: Breakout Rapper, to be published by The Child’s World in the fall of 2017.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 performed the role of operatic “Scare-rrator” in the Halloween spectacular,”’Twas All Hallows Eve” on Oct. 29, 2016 at the Austin Independent School District’s Performing Arts Center in Austin. The hour-long Halloween concert featured 150 choristers, a 75-piece symphonic band, and 50 dancers from the Austin area.  Proceeds went to the Arts and Fitness Program for Young Children.

Professor of Music and Associate Dean for Fine Arts Kiyoshi Tamagawa had his article “Chopsticks, Golliwogs and Wigwams: The Need for Cultural Awareness in Piano Teaching Materials and Repertoire” accepted for publication in American Music Teacher, the journal of the Music Teachers National Association. The article explores how piano teaching materials that are still in use today can convey attitudes toward ethnic and cultural groups that do not reflect the progress being made in daily life.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was a guest soloist in Living Paper Song Project’s “I, Too: The Voices of Langston Hughes.” She performed alongside three-time Grammy award-winning baritone Donnie Ray Albert, soprano Anitra Coulter Blunt, baritone/artistic director Tim O’Brien, and pianist Chien-Lin Lu. The music was paired with original stories, poems, and insights by poet and Langston Hughes scholar Philip Bryant as well as recordings of Hughes reading his own poems. The entire performance took place against the backdrop of a projected visual program comprising Hughes’ original manuscripts, typescripts, and photographs, as well as the art of Harlem Renaissance artists Archibald Motley and Aaron Douglas.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari has just been selected as a semi-finalist in the community orchestra conducting division of The American Prize national competition.

Part-time instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was a guest vocalist for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services at Congregation Beth Israel in Austin, Texas.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi was named a national finalist for the 2016 American Prize Art Song Division (Professional Category). Southwestern alumna Kelsey Debner ’16 was selected as a national finalist for the 2016 American Prize Opera/Operetta Division (University Category).

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari celebrated her 15th consecutive appointment as Music Director of the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) by opening the orchestra’s 40th season with a concert of classics, “The Three Bs.” The ACO performed Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms at the AISD Performing Arts Center on Sept. 25th. Seven ACO members are either current SU students or SU alums, including the orchestra’s assistant conductor Gus Sterneman ’06.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis toured Texas and California with flute/harp duo Chaski for its “Oceans of Space” program in July. The concerts featured ocean-themed music and raised funds for ocean conservation. Chaski performed its own commission, Brandon Nelson’s “Manannán mac Lir” and Inglis’ “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” along with classical, Sephardic, Celtic, and Latin American folk music.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi was selected as a national semi-finalist in the 2016 American Prize competition (Art Song Division). Details can be found here.

Professor of Music Kenny Sheppard was awarded the Texas Choral Directors Association’s top honor at their July 2016 meeting attended by over 1,500 choral conductors. The Texas Choirmaster Award is “reserved for a TCDA member with clearly superior choral conducting and musicianship skill with many years of performance success.” 

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa has been selected as one of four national semi-finalists in the 2016 American Prize Lorin Hollander Piano Concerto contest. The American Prize is a national competition that gives awards in various performing categories based on recordings submitted by individuals or ensembles.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari hosted the 2016 SU Conductors’ Institute from Jun. 23 - 25. Associate clinician for the workshop was Peter Bay, Music Director of the Austin Symphony. Bay and Ferrari coached ten participating conductors, including recent alum Mattie Kotzur ’16, in Igor Stravinsky’s Octet and L’histoire du soldat. Performers included the following part-time faculty: Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis, Instructor of Applied Music Daniel Chrisman, Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Gilliam-Valls, and Assistant Professor of Applied Music Kyle Koronka. Sir David Whitwell gave a lecture on score memorization. The Institute concluded with a public concert presentation in which all ten participants conducted movements from these two chamber works.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper presented a paper titled “Felix Mendelssohn’s English Countenance as Reflected in London Publications of His Vocal Chamber Music to Ca. 1850” on July 9 at the symposium Germanic Enthusiasms, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: Conflict, Transfer and Assimilation in London’s Musical Life, c.1800–1850. The symposium was sponsored by the European Research Commission and hosted by King’s College, London.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Valls is organizing the 2nd annual Austin Bass Workshop at the Sarofim School of Fine Arts, June 27–30. Bassists from all over the country including New Mexico, New York, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas are converging on Southwestern for a four-day event of masterclasses, public concerts, technique classes and bass orchestra. All ages, all levels and all styles are participating in the music activities.

Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts and Professor of Music Michael Cooper conducted a workshop at the University of North Texas on the source-critical editing of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis toured five counties in rural Texas with flute/harp ensemble Chaski in May 2016. This tour was made possible by a rural outreach grant provided by the Texas Commission on the Arts. Chaski presented six performances of the program “Exploring the Folk Music of Latin America” to audiences in Lampasas, Eastland, Mills, Brown, and San Saba counties.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari led the Austin Civic Orchestra in a performance of Hector Belioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” on May 24 at the Austin ISD Performing Arts Center. The guest artist for the concert was saxophonist Harvey Pittel who performed the “Ibert Concertino.” This was the final formal program of the ACO’s eight-concert season, in which Dr. Ferrari is finishing her 14th consecutively-appointed season as Music Director.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper published two chapters (in German) in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Interpretationen seiner Werke, ed. Matthias Geuting (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2016). The first of these chapters is on Mendelssohn’s concert arias “Infelice! / Ah, ritorna, età dell’ oro (MWV H 4, 1834)” and “Infelice! / Ah, ritorna, bell’ età (MWV H 5, 1843).” The second is on Mendelssohn’s two settings for soloists, chorus, and orchestra of Goethe’s ballad “Die erste Walpurgisnacht (MWV D 3, 1830-43).”

Assistant Professor of Music Hai Zheng-Olefsky released her sixth CD on the Amatius Classics label titled Remembrance. Featured on the CD is Associate Dean and Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa. Zheng-Olefsky and Tamagawa celebrate their 20th season of performing together this year.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper presented a paper titled “Mendelssohn contra Mendelssohn: The Pre-1848 British Editions of Felix [and Fanny] Mendelssohn’s Songs, Duets, and Partsongs” at ML75.UNT, a symposium celebrating the 75th anniversary of the University of North Texas Music Library. Cooper’s paper begins with Felix Mendelssohn’s oft-discussed third private audience in 1842 with Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort Albert, and explores the proliferation of English translations and editions of his vocal chamber music in the 1840s. This exploration reveals the construction of a distinctively English Mendelssohnian song persona that was not only distinct from that in his native Germany, but also dominated—unwittingly, surprisingly, and perhaps tellingly—by the music of Felix’s sister, Fanny, rather than his own works.

Professor of Music Kenny Sheppard conducted a master class for the choirs at Texas A&M, Kingsville on February 22.

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa performed Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, at the Belmont University School of Music in Nashville on March 31. He performs Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 with the Temple Symphony Orchestra on April 30 and May 1.

Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde was a featured composer at the University of Southern Mississippi’s New Music Festival, in Hattiesburg, Miss., on April 8–9. His work, Hollow, for clarinet was performed.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper gave a public lecture titled “Urtext as Empowerment: From Notation to Edition to Performance” at Colorado State University (Ft. Collins) on April 4, 2016. Using autographs and printed editions of works by J. S. Bach and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the paper explores how manuscript notation is capable of conveying important interpretive nuances that are difficult to capture in printed editions. It also explores techniques editors can use to capture at least some of this interpretive nuance, and offers suggestions as to how performers can best choose and use printed editions of music in order to best understand what the composer wrote.

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis performed a world premiere performance of a work commissioned for Chaski. Brandon Nelson composed “Mannanán mac Lir” for flute and lever harp. Flutist Adrienne Inglis and harpist Shana Norton of Chaski performed the premiere March 3, 2016 in Austin, Texas. Chaski will include the piece in its Oceans of Space II tour this summer

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari conducted a performance entitled “On the 20th Century” with guest artist the Austin Civic Orchestra in the Alma Thomas Theater on February 6th. Featured on this concert were Sir David Whitwell, who conducted the world premiere of a piece he wrote especially for the ACO, and Anthony Lannaccone who commissioned Ferrari and the ACO to perform his composition, From Time to Time. The centerpiece for this concert was Igor Stravinsky’s groundbreaking and exciting Firebird Suite. 9 SU students or alums performed as members of the Orchestra, including Gus Sterneman ’06 who is the assistant conductor.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper published a source-critical edition of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s setting of Psalm 98 (MWV A 23) with Bärenreiter Verlag. Composed to inaugurate the politically important New Prussian Liturgy during Mendelssohn’s tenure as Director-General for Church and Sacred Music under King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the work was first published posthumously, and all editions up to this one have included a number of significant errors. Cooper’s edition corrects these errors and is the first to include an English translation provided by Mendelssohn’s preferred English translator of his works, William Bartholomew.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper had an article previously published in 19th-Century Music, the leading journal of musical scholarship concerning Romantic music, reprinted. Titled “‘Aber eben dieser Zweifel’: A new look at Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ symphony,” the article was reprinted in Benedict Taylor, ed., _Mendelssohn_ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016).

Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis performed a world premiere performance of a work commissioned for Chaski. Brandon Nelson composed “Mannanán mac Lir” for flute and lever harp. Flutist Adrienne Inglis and harpist Shana Norton of Chaski performed the premiere March 3, 2016 in Austin, Texas. Chaski will include the piece in its Oceans of Space II tour this summer.

Professor of Music Kenny Sheppard conducted a master class for the choirs at Texas A&M, Kingsville on February 22.

Professor of Music, Lois Ferrari, conducted a performance entitled “On the 20th Century” with guest artist the Austin Civic Orchestra in the Alma Thomas Theater on February 6th. Featured on this concert were Sir David Whitwell, who conducted the world premiere of a piece he wrote especially for the ACO, and Anthony Lannaccone who commissioned Ferrari and the ACO to perform his composition, From Time to Time. The centerpiece for this concert was Igor Stravinsky’s groundbreaking and exciting Firebird Suite. Nine SU students or alumni performed as members of the Orchestra, including Gus Sterneman ’06 who is the assistant conductor.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari conducted the WMEA All-State Band on February 11-14. The 150-member ensemble was comprised of premier Washington state high school music students. Dr. Ferrari rehearsed the group 7 hours each day and then presented a public concert at the conclusion of the bi-annual conference. This was Dr. Ferrari’s second invitation from WMEA in six years.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper presented a paper titled “Music and Cultural Transfer in the Fourierist Community of La Réunion, Texas (1855-58), with a Little-Known Songbook” at the national convention of the American Musicological Society in Louisville, Kentucky, on November 14.

A still-unpublished concert aria by Felix Mendelssohn discovered by Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper was performed on Oct. 30 by one of the world’s oldest professional orchestras, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, which celebrates its 250th birthday in 2015. The work featured renowned soprano soloist Lisa Larsson and was conducted by Jan Willem de Vriend.

Professor of Music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts Michael Cooper published an article titled “Escape to – and from – Utopia: Fourierist Philosophy and Musical Life in the Colony of La Réunion, Texas” in the Summer 2015 issue of American Music (pp. 141-75).

Lois Ferrari, Professor of Music and Music Director of the Austin Civic Orchestra, conducted a cross-genre concert entitled “Spaghetti Western” at the Long Center for the Performing Arts on Sunday, September 20th. Ferrari and the ACO presented a Classical-Latino program with Latin rock star Rick Del Castillo and his band, in addition to a 100 voice choir. The first half of the program was a live performance of the Castillo’s award-winning soundtrack for the independent film “Killing Snakes.” The second half was all ACO with the 85-member orchestra performing music from classic spaghetti western films in addition to the Marquez Danzon No. 2. Prior to this concert, Ferrari and Del Castillo made an appearance on KTBC TV’s Good Morning Austin morning program.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari was featured on Austin’s Fox 7’s Good Day program on Sept. 17. Watch the interview here.

Associate Professor of Music Jason Hoogerhyde received two performances of his vocal composition, Voy a Dormir, from the Chorus Austin Chamber Ensemble, on May 16-17.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari collaborated with soloists from the Butler School of Music at The University of Texas to present the 3rd annual Texas Rising Stars concert. As Music Director of the Austin Civic Orchestra, Ferrari and assistant conductor Gus Sterneman ’06 conducted concerti for the four talented soloists in addition to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture, and the rarely programmed, jazz-influenced Creation du Monde by Darius Milhaud. The concert took place on May 10.

Michael Cooper, professor of music and holder of the Margarett Root Brown Chair, presented a paper titled “Music and Cultural Transfer in the Fourierist Community of La Réunion, Texas (1855-58), with a Little-Known Songbook” at the Southwest Chapter meeting of the American Musicological Society on April 11, 2015. The paper is the first to connect the philosophical and musical ideas of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and his disciple Victor Considerant (1808-93) with the community of Belgian, French and Swiss immigrants established near the village of Dallas in 1855. It also discusses a previously unrecognized songbook held in the library of The University of Texas at Arlington as a thematizing of the issues that led to the community’s formation. 

Michael Cooper (Professor of Music and holder of the Margarett Root Brown Chair) presented a paper titled “Music and Cultural Transfer in the Fourierist Community of La Réunion, Texas (1855-58), with a Little-Known Songbook” at the Southwest Chapter meeting of the American Musicological Society on April 11, 2015. The paper is the first to connect the philosophical and musical ideas of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and his disciple Victor Considerant (1808-93) with the community of Belgian, French, and Swiss immigrants that was established near the village of Dallas in 1855. It also discussed a previously unrecognized songbook held in the library of the University of Texas at Arlington as a thematizing of the issues that led to the community’s formation. 

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari collaborated with Austin Symphony Orchestra Music Director Peter Bay on the Austin Civic Orchestra’s annual Pearl Amster Youth Concerto Festival concert on March 28. As ACO Music Director, Ferrari conducted two concerti with the winners of the 2015 concerto contest in addition to Wagner’s Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral. ACO Assistant Conductor Gus Sterneman ’06 led one of the concerti and performed Rossini’s Barber of Seville overture.

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari was interviewed by KMFA radio in regard to Women’s History Month. The classical music station’s focus was on Austin women musicians, and Ferrari spoke about her experiences as a female conductor in what is generally regarded as a “man’s profession.”

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari and the Austin Civic Orchestra performed a concert of Russian music in the Alma Thomas Theater on February 7. Featured were Assistant Professor of Music Hai Zheng on cello and ACO’s new assistant conductor Gus Sterneman ’06. Professors Emeriti Ellsworth Peterson and Bob Horick gave a pre-concert talk on the program’s main work, Symphony No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Assistant Professor of Music and Artist in Residence Hai Zheng-Olefsky has been invited to perform her 5th Asia concert tour. She will bring her long time pianist Kiyoshi Tamagawa, associate dean of the Sarofim School of Fine Arts and professor of music, to celebrate their 20th season performing together. They will give one master class and two concerts in Bangkok at Siam Ratchada Music School Auditorium on March 12, and at Hua Hin’s Hyatt Regency in Thailand on March 13; one master class and one concert at Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music at National University of Singapore on March 17 and 18. They will finish their concert tour with one master class and one recital at the China Conservatory in Beijing on March 19 and 20.

Michael Cooper, professor of music and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts, published a chapter titled “Music History as Sermon: Style, Form, and Narrative in Mendelssohn’s ‘Dürer’ Cantata (1828)” in the book “Mendelssohn, the Organ, and the Music of the Past: Constructing Historical Legacies”

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Jessica Gilliam-Valls was invited to perform at the 2015 International Society of Bassists Convention, at the University of Colorado at Ft. Collins, June 1-6. She will also be presenting at the Vivo el Bajo! South Texas Bass Symposium, Feburary 27-March 1, 2015.

Flute instructor Adrienne Inglis toured with Chaski to Hot Springs, Ark., November 20-23, to perform Latin American folk music as well as two of Inglis’ compositions. Chaski and the Hot Springs Music Festival Chorus, under the direction of Lynn Payette, presented the Arkansas premiere performances of Inglis’ “Misa trinitaria” and “In Heaven and on Earth” and received a standing ovation.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music Dana Zenobi presented a lecture titled “Funding Strategies for Performers” at the 2014 Texoma regional conference of the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Zenobi was one of nine artists selected from the Texas/Oklahoma/New Mexico region this year. 

Professor of Music Kiyoshi Tamagawa performed with the Austin Symphony Orchestra in two subscription concerts at the Long Center in Austin on Nov. 21 and 22. He played the Piano Concerto in C major, K. 503, by Mozart as part of “A Night with Mozart and Schubert,” and participated in pre-concert lectures on KMFA before each performance.

Southwestern Jazz Band Director David Guidi was recently selected to serve as the director for the TMEA Region 26 Honors Jazz Band. The ensemble made up of public school students selected through an intensive audition process, performed at East View High School in Georgetown on December 13.

The Austin Civic Orchestra and its Music Director, Lois Ferrari, both finished as finalists in the 2014 American Prize national competition. Both orchestra and conductor competed on a national scale in the civic orchestra division by submitting both video and audio recordings of recent performances. The ACO has within its ranks nine members with SU connections, either as alumni, current students or faculty.

Flutist and flute instructor Adrienne Inglis, with mezzo-soprano Shaunna Shandro and harpist Shana Norton, performed the American premiere of three works by British composer Rosemary Duxbury on May 4, 2014, in Austin, Texas: The Nightingale, Songs of the Mysterious, and The Dawn Princess. The world premiere of Inglis’ composition, In Heaven and on Earth for SATB chorus, flute, and lever harp, was presented September 28, 2014, by the Westminster Presbyterian Church Sanctuary Choir with director Rick Colvin, flutist Adrienne Inglis, and harpist Norton, in Austin, Texas.

The Austin Civic Orchestra premiered a new composition by Jason Hoogerhyde, associate professor of music, during an April 26 concert on The University of Texas campus. The piece is titled “A Quiet Constellation.” Lois Ferrari, professor of music, conducted the orchestra and students Mattie Kotzur and Michael Martinez performed with the orchestra on this program.