Associate Professor of Musicology Dr. Claudio Vellutini published the book Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian States after Napoleon for Oxford University Press (April 2025). Entangled Histories discusses the role of opera in the patterns of cultural exchange across the Austrian Empire in the decades following the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
Dr. Mark Anderson, Julius Röntgen: Piano Music 6
Associate Professor and Chair of the UBC Keyboard Division, Mark Anderson has released a new recording, Julius Röntgen: Piano Music 6, with three new scores. Piano Music 6 is part of Anderson’s ongoing Röntgen Research, Record & Publish Project with Nimbus Music Publishing and Nimbus Records. The album highlights three works that reveal a unique and powerful voice in Röntgen’s music, edited by Anderson, and spanning from Röntgen’s earliest published piece at age nine to his later compositions. These include a previously unpublished Toccata and Sonata in C Minor (1877), and the brilliant Passacaglia and Fugue (1911) for solo piano. Piano Music 6 was released April 4, 2025 and is available for purchase at ArkivMusic .
Acting Director and Associate Professor of Musicology Dr. Hedy Law published “Mourning for the Death of a Political System: Cantonese Opera and Cantopop in 香 • 夭 Requiem HK (2017).” In East Asian Voices of Resistance Against Racism in Music, edited by Maiko Kawabata and Ken Ueno, 138–149. Cambridge: Ethics Press, 2025.
Dr. Law also presented many lectures, some of which are listed below. For a full list of Dr. Law’s research activities visit her profile page.
- “Sounding Taishanese in Vancouver: Chinese Immigrants’ Worlds, Belonging, and Muk’yu Ge (Wooden-Fish Song) in Alice Ping Yee Ho’s Chamber Opera, Chinatown (2022),” Society for American Music Annual Conference, Tacoma, WA, March 21, 2025. [Presenter; Peer-reviewed; International]
- Session “Power and Resistance: Musical Historiographies of China and Tibet,” the Annual Conference of the American Musicological Society, Chicago, November 15, 2024. [Chair; Peer-reviewed; International]
- Symposium, “Sounding a Center Away from the Coast: Global Music History Study Group Lightning Talks,” at the Global Music History Study Group session, the Annual Conference of the American Musicological Society, Chicago, November 14, 2024. [Co-chair; Peer-reviewed; International]
- “Sounding Numbers in Cantonese: Numbers Songs, Tone Language, and Trans-local Resonance.” The Second Asian Sound Cultures Project Conference. Hybrid conference organized by The University of Sheffield, September 17, 2024. [Presenter; Peer-reviewed; International]
- “On the Translatability of the Cantonese Rhyme: Sounds and Sense in Bell Yung’s 2010 Translation of Tang Disheng’s Cantonese Opera Script for The Flower Princess (1957).” Conference: Translating the Field: Music, Power, and Praxis, Sept 6–7, 2024; Butler School of Music of the University of Texas at Austin. [Presenter; Peer-reviewed; International]
Professor of Composition and Director of the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, Dr. T. Patrick Carrabré was the keynote speaker at the Acadia School of Music Concert & Lecture Series “Teachings of the Water Festival” in March 2025. Dr. Carrabré’s choral piece, Snewíyalh tl’a Staḵw (Teachings of Water) was performed by the Acadia University Singers.
Below: Snewíyalh tl’a Staḵw performed by Elektra Choir.
Snewíyalh tl’a Staḵw is a collaboration with Indigenous knowledge-keepers, cultural leaders, and artists was a musical exploration of Indigenous water teachings—what water teaches about relationships to the land, each other, and to ourselves. In many of these communities, women are the water protectors.
Cover art from Earth, Wind & Fire album designed by Nagaoka Shusei
Dr. Nathan Hesselink, Professor of Ethnomusicology published “Space Fantasy: Nagaoka Shusei’s Contributions to Afrofuturist Visual Culture” in The Journal of American Culture in November 2024. In February 2025, Dr. Hesselink gave a lecture examining Shusei’s contributions to Afrofuturist visual culture, primarily through the lens of his album cover work with the African American super group Earth, Wind & Fire. This lecture accompanied Hesselink’s curated record cover exhibit hosted at the UBC Asian Centre Library.
Hesselink’s book Finding the Beat: Entrainment, Rhythmic Play, and Social Meaning in Rock Music (New York: Bloomsbury Academic) was released in paperback, originally published in 2024.
As part of a SSHRC-funded project “Modeling Polyrhythmic Experience,” Assistant Professor of Music Theory Dr. Ève Poudrier and her collaborators Daniel Shanahan (Northwestern University), Craig S. Sapp (CCARH/Stanford University), Bryan J. Bell (University of British Columbia), and Jason Y. H. Lee (McGill University), have recently published a series of articles featured in Auditory Perception & Cognition and the Journal of New Music Research in January 2025. The research focuses on the influence of rhythmic complexity and dissonance on listeners’ perceived emotion in notated European and North-American music of the early twentieth century. Music data and visualization tools are available as part of the open-source online platform.
Assistant Professor of Music Theory
Dr. Anabel Maler published the first monograph-length analytical study of sign language music, Seeing Voices for Oxford University Press in December 2024. Seeing Voices centers the musical experience and knowledge of Deaf persons, bringing the long and rich history of sign language music to the attention of music scholars and lovers, and challenges the notion that music is transmitted from the hearing to the Deaf. Dr. Maler demonstrates that sign language music shows us that the fundamental elements of music such as vocal technique, entrainment, pulse, rhythm, meter, melody, meaning, and form can thrive in visual and tactile forms of music-making.
Professor of Musicology, Dr. Alex Fisher published “Confraternities, Congregations and Aural Culture in Counter-Reformation Germany” in the book Listening to Confraternities: Spaces for Performance, Patronage and Urban Musical Experience in October 2024. Dr. Fisher also presented “Resonances of War and Peace in the Age of Schütz.” at the Symposium on Music and War, Mt. Allison University, Sackville, NB on October, 26 2024.
Two UBC School of Music scholars have contributed entries to the 24-chapter Oxford Handbook of Music in China and the Chinese Diaspora, edited by Yu Hui and Jonathan Stock (New York: Oxford, 2023). Professor EmeritusDr. Alan Thrasher contributed one chapter entitled “Traditional Instruments and Heterophonic Practice”, in which he explored the differing musical textures of four regional Chinese traditions. Kar Lun Alan Lau (BMus’03, MD’23) contributed the chapter “Kunqu from Analytical Perspectives”, in which one basic melodic structure from Kunqu classical opera is examined from interdisciplinary approaches.
