Letter from the Chair

Bruce Holsinger is Professor of English and Music and Chair of the McIntire Department of Music

Greetings from Old Cabell Hall and the Central Grounds of the University of Virginia.  It’s a great pleasure to introduce this new semiannual newsletter, which will provide an opportunity for alumni, faculty, students, and other friends of the McIntire Department of Music to connect and reconnect with the wider musical community we’ve all helped to create.  For over a century and a half, the department has dedicated itself to fostering music as an integral part of the liberal arts experience at the University.  With a popular undergraduate major, two thriving Ph.D. programs, and a diverse calendar of performances and events, the department is at an exciting moment in its history, and we hope you’ll enjoy this snapshot of the state of music at Uva.

Among this issue’s features are two concerning current and former graduate students.  Last year the University of Virginia awarded the first Ph.D. in Music ever received in the Commonwealth to Mary Simonson, whose graduate training in the department’s Critical and Comparative Studies program helped prepare her for the position she holds during the current school year in the musicology department at UCLA.  Another tribute to the growing success of our doctoral programs comes in the amount of attention received by our Composition and Computer Technology students, three of whom feature here for their work on musical robotics.  Other stories we’re featuring in this inaugural issue include the University Singers’ 50th Anniversary Gala, a major book award presented to one of our academic faculty members, the Music Library’s digitalization project on early American musical imprints, and the Charlottesville and University Symphony Orchestra’s Arts Strings project. 

In each issue we will also be highlighting a Featured Alum, one of our former majors whose story seems particularly compelling and worth sharing.  This semester we’re featuring Ann Marie Calhoun, whose nationally televised appearance with the Foo Fighters at the Grammy Awards this past February brought many accolades her way.  We’d love to hear future suggestions for this feature from our readers, and we encourage all of our alumni (whether former majors or participants in departmental ensembles in years past) to let us know where you are and what you’re doing so we can share this information in subsequent issues.  To contribute to our alumni page, please send your news to .

Here at Thomas Jefferson’s University, the musically inclined are often wont to quote Mr. Jefferson’s most familiar words on the subject, which occur in a letter to his close friend, Nathaniel Burwell, written on March 4, 1818.  Here, in a discussion of the virtues of female domestic education, Jefferson hails music as the most fulfilling of the domestic arts, surpassing dancing, drawing, and certainly the reading of novels.  (“A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed.  When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading.”)  Music, by contrast, provides “delightful recreation for the hours of respite from the cares of the day,” Jefferson avows, and “lasts us through life”—a sentiment with which we can likely all agree. 

Less often cited, however, are the two sentences that precede Jefferson’s famous aphorism on musical enjoyment: “Music is invaluable where a person has an ear. Where they have not, it should not be attempted.” 

Ouch!  We’re not that picky these days, and in fact many of our majors come to us with little or no formal musical training.  While we do our best to give our students “an ear” by means of a variety of courses in musicanship, music theory, and performance, our faculty encourage students to study, understand, and practice music as part of their broader undergraduate experience rather than as a narrowly professionalizing course of study.  At the same time, many of our majors are high-caliber performers who go on to graduate work at some of the nation’s great conservatories and schools of music.  This level of musical professionalism is due in no small part to the dedication of our performance faculty, top-flight musicians who, when they’re not instructing our students, coaching our ensembles, and performing on our stages, can be found playing with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the National Symphony, touring with Bruce Hornsby and writing for the Dave Matthews Band, and appearing in music festivals from Tanglewood to Banff to Aspen. 

With best wishes for a happy and productive spring and summer,

Bruce Holsinger