Letter from the Chair

Katharine Maus
Photo by Sophie Maus

Dear Friends,

Like most departments at the University, some of Music’s course offerings are hardy perennials—history, theory, composition, and ensemble courses offered year in and year out to majors, nonmajors, and graduate students. Other courses are offered only once or twice, often in a faculty member’s research area. Behind the sameness of their titles from year to year, “standard” courses are, of course, often anything but routine: in recent memory, for instance, composition faculty have successfully used new technology to teach significantly larger classes than they were previously able to manage, course content in the music theory sequence has been innovatively revised, and the curriculum for “Twentieth Century Music,” a requirement for the major, has altered dramatically depending upon who is teaching it. Yet in a newsletter, it seems more proper to note those courses that are actually new! Classes on Wagner’s Ring Cycle, on Asian-American Music, on Improvisation, on Film Music, on Approaches to Auditory Culture, and on Spectralism enriched the curriculum this spring. Some of these courses were offered by our regular faculty and grad students, and some by visitors. Since composer Matthew Burtner was on leave with Semester at Sea, we invited composer Yiorgios Vassilandonikis from Berkeley to teach here this spring. With choral conductor Michael Slon also on leave, Dirk Johnson, visiting from the Cincinnati Conservatory, led University Singers and the Chamber Singers.

Every year, the Department hosts a large number of special events, masterclasses, and visiting speakers. These events stimulate intellectual and artistic cross-fertilization, especially valuable in a relatively small department like ours. They also constitute a valuable service to the community: most are free and the others are very inexpensive, and they often draw considerable audiences. Many of these special events require outside funding, because the Music Department has only very limited money of its own for such projects. This spring, in a time of financial retrenchment, we have been especially grateful for the outside funding that made our initiatives possible.

In January, with help from the Arts Council, we welcomed the eight-member Relache Ensemble, specializing in the performance of contemporary music. Working closely with our graduate student composers, Relache rehearsed and presented a concert of new music which stretched the limits of instrumentation to create surprising and exciting combinations of sounds. In February, with help from the College of Arts and Sciences, the Arts and Sciences Council, and the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, and in conjunction with the scholarly journal Opera Quarterly, we hosted an interdisciplinary symposium exploring the theme of austerity in opera, a form usually associated with spectacle and excess. The symposium attracted scholars from Chicago, Brown, Columbia, Yale, Stony Brook, Tufts, Berkeley, and the University College Cork (in Ireland); our own Bonnie Gordon, Heather Wiebe, and Richard Will also participated on the program and helped coordinate the event. In March, as one of the events of our “Year in Jazz,” renowned jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer Terence Blanchard spent a three-day residency working closely with students and finally presenting a concert with them. The Music Department used a grant from the Provost’s Arts Enhancement fund to support the Blanchard residency. You can read more about this residency elsewhere in the newsletter, in an essay contributed by a student who participated in it. Later in March, also using Arts Enhancement funds, we hosted the first ever Virginia World Music Festival, coordinated by our Performance Director, ethnomusicologist Joel Rubin. The Festival featured seven ensembles playing a wide variety of music: African Music and Dance and Klezmer Ensembles from UVA; Middle Eastern, Nordic Folk, and Appalachian Ensembles from the College of William and Mary; and two Javanese gamelan ensembles, one from the University of Richmond and the other from the Charlottesville community. The festival also included a round-table symposium on the topic of world music in the academy.

While I am on the topic of outside funding, I should also acknowledge Hunter Smith’s extremely generous $10.7 million gift to build a Band Rehearsal Hall on the new Arts Quad, close to the art and drama buildings and convenient to the Culbreth Parking Garage. The Hall will allow the Marching Band to practice indoors for the first time, as well as to store uniforms and instruments on site (we have been paying a local laundry a pretty penny to store uniforms in the off season). The Band Rehearsal Hall will provide space not only for the Marching Band but for related groups, such as Wind Ensemble and Basketball Band. If the University raises sufficient funds, the Hall will be enlarged to include studio and practice space for several other Music Department ensembles and for private lessons, relieving some of the pressure on our beloved but overscheduled and unsoundproofed Old Cabell Hall. We expect to break ground for the Band Rehearsal this coming fall, with a projected completion date in spring 2011.

The Department has suffered some losses this spring. In January, long-time voice teacher Edmund Najera died after a long illness. At the end of this semester Nancy Garlick is retiring: she has long served as principal clarinetist of the Charlottesville and University Symphony Orchestra and as the department’s clarinet instructor. Voice teacher Amanda Balestrieri and administrative assistant Granville Mullings are departing for Colorado and New York City, respectively. We will miss all these wonderful colleagues in the coming year.

Best wishes,


Katharine Eisaman Maus
Interim Chair