Graduate Student News

Lee Bidgood is currently living, playing and researching in Prague, Czech Republic. The project's working title is "Performing Americanness, Locating Identity: An Ethnography of Bluegrass Music in the Czech Republic," though both Lee and the project remain flexible. For updates and media, see his blog (blidgood.wordpress.com).  Lee is excited about an upcoming UK minitour with Czech band Roll's Boys, the summer festival season in Europe, and getting back to Cville to teach music theory this July.

In June 2007, Sarah Culpeper presented her work on Joan Baez at FTM 9, the biannual Feminist Theory and Music Conference in Montreal, Canada. Next month, she will be in Iowa City, Iowa, presenting her work on Liz Phair at the annual meeting of IASPM-US (International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US Chapter).

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, who was among 60 women across the country to receive an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship that funded her final year of graduate work, will finish with a Ph.D. this May.  During 2007 she presented her work as an opening plenary panelist at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) international conference in Mexico City, as well as presenting at the Feminist Theory and Music conference in Montreal, Quebec, and the IASPM United States conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Lindau will present her work on Sonic Youth at the April 2008 conference of the International Association for the Society of Popular Music - U.S.

Loren Ludwig is currently living in London, where he holds a one-year Mellon Fellowship to conduct archival research for his dissertation on the social history of the viola da gamba consort. The viola da gamba, or 'viol' consort was an ensemble of string instruments popular among amateur musicians of seventeenth-century England, including King James I and his son, later King Charles I, both of whom played viol consort music. Based in part on his research in English archives, Loren presented a paper on the viol consort and Elizabethan melancholy in November at the 2007 American Musicological Society conference in Quebec City, Quebec. He will return to Charlottesville in the fall to complete his dissertation.

Kevin Parks has released a CD of improvised duos with Joe Foster entitled Ipsi Sibi Somnia Fingunt (reviewed in the March issue of the Wire and elsewhere, available from Erstwhile Records Distribution).  As a member of the all UVa improvisation line up Pinko Communoids (Wendy Hsu, music dept., Carey Sargent, Sociology), Kevin also released Pinko Communiods Vol. I. The Pinkos also completed a tour of Taiwan (Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung). Kevin went on to play a series of shows in Seoul, with Joe Foster, Bonnie Jones, Choi Joonyong, Ryu Hankil and others and has given numerous concerts in Charlottesville and Richmond.

Expressive Machines Musical Instruments, founded by Troy Rogers, Scott Barton, and Steven Kemper gave a lecture/performance of their robotic instrument PAM (Poly-tangent Automatic multi-Monochord) at The Bridge in Charlottesville. The Daily Progress wrote a feature story about this event that was picked up by the AP wire. EMMI will be presenting PAM at the Danville Science Center in April.

Nick Rubin received a National Communication Association Student Travel Scholarship in February 2008. This award came in conjunction with his presentation "'Impacting Radio Now': College Radio in the Pitchfork Moment," which he delivered at the Exploring New Media Worlds conference at Texas A&M University. In late April, Nick will join a robust UVA Music Department contingent at the ISPM-US conference in Iowa City, where he will present "'Your Better Alternative': College Radio Communities and the Popular Music Industry."

Composer Peter Traub's lastest piece, 'ItSpace', was recently featured on NPR's 'Day to Day'. 'ItSpace' is an online work that creates a network of sounding objects and pieces within the social networking site MySpace. The sounds in 'ItSpace' come from around the composer's house with pieces made from recordings of vases, wine glasses, pillows, a shower head, and creaky recliner. Visitors are invited to create their own contributions to the ItSpace Network.

Jonathan Zorn’s works for electronic sound and voice, as well as his collaborative project with conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith were released on Ubuweb, an online repository for Sound Art and Sound Poetry. The recordings can be found at http://www.ubu.com/sound/zorn.html. Examples of Jonathan’s graphic scores will be included in the upcoming book Notations 21 by Theresa Sauer, which is to be released in April by Mark Batty Publisher.