Professor of Musicology Dr. Alexander Fisher edited a new edition of the Baroque composer Gregor Aichinger’s Lacrumae Divae Virginis et Joannis in Christum a cruce depositum (Tears of the Blessed Virgin and John at the Deposition of Christ from the Cross). A cycle of eight motets published in 1604, the composition takes the form of a series of sung dialogues between Mary and John the Evangelist at the foot of the Cross for five or six voices. It is especially noteworthy for its relationship to an exquisite bronze sculptural group depicting Mary, John, and Mary Magdalene at the foot of the Cross, erected around the same time in the church where Aichinger worked as organist, the basilica of Saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsburg, Germany. Music and art thus combined in a multisensory experience.
Assistant Professor of Musicology Dr. Claudio Vellutini published a new article, “Donizetti, Vienna, Cosmopolitanism,” in the Spring 2020 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. He also presented at the international anniversary conference dedicated to the Italian opera composer Saverio Mercadante, organized jointly by the Naples conservatory, the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Italian Cultural Institute in Vienna, and the municipality of Altamura, Mercadante’s birthplace.
Professor of Collaborative Piano Rena Sharon contributed a chapter entitled “Art Song Pedagogy and Performance Practice; Re-envisioning the Realm in the 21st Century” to The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing, Volume II: Education, edited by Helga R. Gudmundsdottir, Carol Beynon, Karen Ludke, Annabel J. Cohen and published this June. Prof. Sharon also delivered the lecture “Performative Co-creation: Chamber Music and Art Song as contributors to 21st century models of collaborative humanity” at CollabFest 2020: Conference for the International Keyboard Collaborative Arts Society in October 2020.
Professor of Music Theory Dr. John Roeder and Professor of Musicology Dr. Michael Tenzer together received a four-year, $232,000 SSHRC Insight Grant to study “Cycles in the World of Music.”
Dr. Roeder also published “Logic Programming Models of Music: A Semiotic Evaluation” in Perspectives of New Music and “Interactions of Folk Melody and Transformational (Dis)continuities in Chen Yi’s Ba Ban” in Music Theory Online. He presented “Comparative Musical Modernism: Jia Guoping’s Whispers of a Gentle Wind and Helmut Lachenmann’s Allegro Sostenuto” online at the Joint Meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, November 2020.
Assistant Professor of Viola Marina Thibeault received a UBC Hampton New Faculty Grant for her research project on amplifying the voices of women in music through performances, recordings, and pedagogy. The ultimate goal of the project is to “inspire the next generations to prioritize gender equity in their programming, teaching and while serving different organizations in the arts.”
Music theory Ph.D. student Grant Sawatzky presented his paper, “Generative Meter and Phrase-Rhythmic Multivalence in Three Slavic Folk Tunes,” at the same American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory conference in November.
