RESEARCH & CREATIVE ACTIVITIES

A wellspring of wisdom from Black women leaders in higher education for the next generation.

FINALIST FOR THE MIDWEST BOOK AWARDS!

Practical and candid, this book offers actionable steps to help Black women leaders create meaningful success. The reflections and recommendations of the contributors forge a critical and transformative analysis of race, gender, and higher education leadership. With insights from humanities, social sciences, art, and STEM, this essential resource helps to redefine the academy to meet the challenges of the future. Dear Department Chair is comprised of personal letters from prominent Black women department chairs, deans, vice provosts, and university presidents, addressed to current and future Black women academic professionals, and offers a rich source of peer mentorship and professional development. These letters emerged from Chair at the Table, a research collective and peer-mentoring network of current and former Black women department chairs at colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada. The collective's works, including this volume, serve as tools for faculty interested in administration, current chairs seeking mentorship, and upper-level administrators working to diversify their ranks.

Siv B. Lie (ethnomusicology) won the 2022 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe for her book "Django Generations: Hearing Ethnorace, Citizenship, and Jazz Manouche in France" (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Fernando Rios (ethnomusicology) presented his paper “Escuchen Nuestras Voces (Hear Our Voices): Salvadoran Refugee Songs and the Challenge of Using ‘The Music of the People’ in Social Justice Movements” at the 2022 Annual National Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in New Orleans in November 2022, where he also served as chair and organizer of a panel titled “Transnational Solidarity in Latinx and Latin American Social Justice Movements in the US.”

Andrea Brown (conducting and ensembles) was a 2022 recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Jessica Grimmer (musicology) received the Best Paper award for her presentation of “Community-Centered Sustainability: A Case Study of the Music Encoding Initiative” at the Music Encoding Conference in May 2022. Co-authored with UMD iSchool assistant professor Katrina Fenlon, the paper is a part of the ongoing Sustaining Digital Community Collections project, which has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Jason Max Ferdinand's book Teaching With Heart is the first book to directly help us address the societal issues in our choral rehearsals. Not attempting to separate the music from social issues, this new tool in the classroom uses musical examples to address uncomfortable topics and hopefully 'open minds and hearts.' Built to ask singers to read, watch, listen and then to respond and discuss, this resource has been developed with the help of nine outstanding contributors and ten composers and arrangers. I strongly urge you to take a look at this new resource for your classroom.

—Jo-Michael Scheibe, D.M.A.
Professor, Department of Choral and Sacred Music
Conductor, University of Southern California Thornton Chamber Singers

Teaching With Heart is a timely and relevant resource that offers a well-crafted, research-based approach to choral music education. Students will learn how diverse choral repertoire can be used as a tool to not only advance musicianship, but also as an access point for critical thinking and the enhancement of social emotional learning skills.

—Rollo A. Dilworth, D.Mus.
Vice Dean and Professor of Choral Music Education
Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts, Temple University

Through valuable repertoire suggestions, listening examples, video interviews, quotes, and teaching activities, this resource provides designed lessons helping students apply, synthesize, evaluate, and comprehend music from an artistic perspective and, more importantly, a human perspective.

—Brandon Boyd, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor Choral Conducting, Choral Music Education
University of Missouri

'How would you suggest a Caucasian teacher talk about social justice issues with students of color?' a student from Georgia Southern University asked via ZOOM. Dr. Ferdinand responded by quoting from Teaching With Heart, specifically sharing inspiration from the module titled 'Justice, or Just Us?' Powerful conversation ensued and our future educators were immediately on fire to get ahold of these teaching tools! We are so grateful for Dr. Ferdinand's generous leadership and his extremely well-timed Choral Conductor's Compendium to help guide us through current times and into the future.

—Shannon Jeffreys, D.M.A.
Director of Choral Activities
Georgia Southern University

Composer Mark Edwards Wilson and Ravello Records present Time Variations, a stirring journey through the dimensions of musical style. Wilson blends soprano vocals with piano and electroacoustic synthesizers, flute with electronic tape, and experiments with the stylistic boundaries of solo violin and chamber ensembles in works inspired by poetry, Greek mythology, and various musical expressions throughout time. By fusing the idioms of early music with contemporary compositional concepts, Wilson has created a modulating and continuously transforming stylistic synthesis that awaits listeners.

In this article, Haggh-Huglo argues that documents recording foundations of saints' offices permit a more accurate dating of late medieval liturgical manuscripts than paleography. Haggh-Huglo discusses several liturgical books from Cambrai that were misdated with paleography. A problem is that scribes used scripts based on earlier models.

The second volume of Thomas DeLio's collected essays, Analytical Studies About Music, has been published by The Edwin Mellen Press. As with the first volume, this second collection consists of reprints of his essays from the past 40 years initially published in major theory journals in the United States and Europe.

This article explores how music professionals promote interdiscursive oppositions between musical aurality and musical literacy to unsettle the terms of their racialization. For many French Manouches (a subgroup of Romanies/“Gypsies”), music is a source of pride, profit, and public recognition. Manouche musicians often valorize their own sensorially centered pedagogical approaches in distinction to music literacy as espoused by French schools and conservatories. In doing so, they link notions of expressivity, naturalness, and ethical behavior to their Manouche identity in contrast to White French society. They construct parallel contrasts between Black and White musicalities in the jazz world to convey their value as racialized musicians, pointing to transnational formations of race and White supremacy. Because French color-blind policy constrains speech about race and racism, advocacy for an aurally centered approach to music pedagogy becomes a way for speakers to denounce the discrimination Manouches face as racialized subjects. For these musicians, self-exoticization is a multifaceted tactic to develop a market niche, to prove themselves as good neoliberal subjects, and to disrupt the racial logics that render such alterity both an asset and a burden. Their discourse remains powerful even if, in practice, some make use of the very music-theoretical frameworks they critique.