Department of Music

Biography

Dynamic and engaging, pianist Francesca Hurst delights audiences with a mix of classical and contemporary music. Listeners have described her playing as “moving and compelling” and “powerful yet sensitive”. Classically trained, she fell into the new music scene in 2013, when a last-minute gig with Great Noise Ensemble turned into a decade-long engagement as their pianist. At ease with a wide range of repertoire, she makes sense of the music regardless of style and period, is passionate about communicating with audiences, and has a special interest in performing music by women.

As a new music pianist, Francesca has appeared as a solo and collaborative guest artist at festivals like the Atlantic Music Festival, New Music Delaware, New Music Gathering, Charlotte New Music Festival, and the Bang on a Can Music Marathon. Equally versatile in the classical repertoire, she has played in such venues as the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, and internationally in Bulgaria, Italy, Portugal, and France. During the pandemic, she created the 100-day online video series Daily Dose of Piano, which featured music from the Baroque to today, including 14 premieres. She was recently named to the Performing Artist Touring Roster of the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and just recorded her debut album of women composers, which will be released in early 2024.

Francesca is on the piano faculty at the University of Virginia and The Catholic University of America, and maintains a thriving private piano studio in Northern Virginia. She also taught at Trinity Washington University for several years. She is an MTNA Nationally Certified Teacher of Music. She holds a DMA in Piano Performance and a BA in Italian.

Biography

Described by The Washington Post as looking and sounding “stunning,” soprano Bridgid Eversole has performed operatic roles, including “Birdie” in Blitzstein’s Regina; “Fiordiligi” in Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte; “Cleopatra” in Handel’s Giulio Cesare; "Nerone" in Monteverdi's L'Icoronazione di Poppea; and “Gilda” in Verdi’s Rigoletto. She created the roles of “Athena” in Simpson’s The Furies and “Emily” in Martin’s Life in Death.

Comfortable in the concert hall as well, Eversole has appeared as soloist in venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York, and Washington D.C.'s Constitution Hall and The Kennedy Center. She has been the featured soprano soloist for works, including Carissimi’s Jephte; Vivaldi’s Gloria; Fauré's Requiem; Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate, Requiem, and Vesperae Solennes de Confessore; Handel’s Messiah; and numerous Bach works. She premiered A Crown of Stars, composed by Andrew Simpson, in which The Washington Post noted she “sang with intelligence and skill, floating even her highest notes effortlessly.”

In addition to a busy performance schedule, Eversole has been on the music faculty at Frostburg State University, The University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Norfolk State University. She is currently on the music faculties of University of Virginia and James Madison University and is the Director of Education at Charlottesville Opera. Eversole received a BM from UNC-Wilmington, an MM from The University of Minnesota, and a DMA from The Catholic University of America, all in vocal performance.

Biography

Nicole Mitchell Gantt is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, conceptualist, bandleader and educator. A United States Artist (2020), a Doris Duke Artist (2012), and a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award (2011) her research centers on the powerful legacy of contemporary African American culture and black experimental art. For over 20 years, Mitchell’s critically acclaimed Chicago-based Black Earth Ensemble (BEE) has been her primary compositional laboratory with which she has performed at festivals and art venues throughout Europe, Canada, and the US. The former first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Mitchell composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size (from solo to orchestra and large jazz band) while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2022). Mitchell initially emerged from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 90s, having started as a co-founder of the all-woman group Samana, and a member of the David Boykin Expanse. Much of Mitchell’s creative process has been informed by literature and narrative, with a special interest in science fiction. Her album, Mandorla Awakening (FPE, 2017), combines Afrofuturism with intercultural collaboration and was selected by the New York Times as the #1 jazz album of 2017. As a composer, she has been commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Music NOW, French Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Art Institute of Chicago, the French American Jazz Exchange, Chamber Music America, the Chicago Jazz Festival, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and Bang on a Can. Mitchell has performed with creative music luminaries including Craig Taborn, Terri Lyne Carrington, Roscoe Mitchell, Joelle Leandre, Geri Allen, Mark Dresser, Anthony Davis, Myra Melford, Ed Wilkerson, Rob Mazurek, and Hamid Drake.

Biography

JoVia Armstrong is a percussionist, sound artist, composer, and educator from Detroit, MI. She endorses several companies, including Sabian, Gon Bops, QSC, and Icon Pro Audio. In 2015, she won the Best Black Female Percussionist of the Year through the Black Women in Jazz Awards and received the 3Arts Siragusa Foundation Artist Award in 2011 for her work as an educator. JoVia sits on the executive board of Chicago's AACM as Secretary. She has performed with Omar, Res, Syleena Johnson, Frank McComb, El DeBarge, Eric Roberson, Rahsaan Patterson, Maysa, The Impressions, Nicole Mitchell, Ballaké Sissoko, Babani Kone, JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, and Chilean artist Joe Vasconcellos. She also served as tour manager and percussionist for Les Nubians and others.

She earned a Ph.D. in the Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology program from the University of California- Irvine in June 2022. Her recently released album, The Antidote Suite, has received critical reviews in publications such as Downbeat Magazine, The New York Times, and The Wire. The album was listed as a notable release on NPR's All Things Considered and Bandcamp Daily's album of the day (July 27, 2022). As a sound artist, she has composed sound for art installations, scored films, and created sound designs for gallery spaces and short independent films. 

Biography

Elizabeth Ozment is Association Dean for Transfer Students and Assistant Professor of Music. She received a Ph.D. in musicology/ethnomusicology from the University of Georgia under the direction of Jean Kidula, and holds degrees in music education and clarinet performance from James Madison University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her teaching is characterized by inclusive student-centered learning environments that promote knowledge and analytical skills to succeed in a complex, diverse, and ever-changing society. She teaches Performing UVA: An Introduction to Performance Studies, Studies in Ninteenth-Century Music History, Music Video Analysis, Women & Music, and an introductory archival research seminar called Sounding the Archives.

Her research interests include cultural memory, environmental sound, critical theory, and the culture industries. Her work focuses on competing musical identities in the American South that influence regional and global representations of southernness. Her dissertation, “The Politics of Musical Remembering: Civil War Commemoration in American Culture,” discussed music and sounds that enable populations to ascribe new meanings to the past, and her more recent ethnographic study of sound at memorialscapes takes this work in new directions. Some publications from this project may be found in The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation (OUP, 2019) and The Arts as White Property: Interrogating Racism within Arts in Education (Palgrave, 2018).

As Association Dean for Transfer Students in the College of Arts & Sciences, she provides academic advising and support to UVA students with diverse backgrounds and intellectual ambitions. Students are encouraged to visit her Monroe Hall office to discuss their transition to UVA, research interests, short- and long-term academic plans, and strategies for balancing coursework with life responsibilities. For more information, see https://college.as.virginia.edu/people/ewo5n.

Biography

Dr. Elliott Tackitt joins the Academic General Faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia in Fall 2021 as Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Bands. Among his duties in this role, he directs the Cavalier Marching Band, conducts the Wind Ensemble, and provides artistic guidance to the entire band program.

A passionate advocate for music education at all levels, Tackitt is internationally active as a clinician, educator, and conductor, particularly throughout the southwest United States as well as Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He has also led classes in Vienna, Austria, as part of a three-week course sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Center for Global and Intercultural Studies. His research interests are focused on historic works written for the military band of San Marino.

Previously, Tackitt served on the faculties of the University of Michigan as well as Arizona State University. In these roles, he taught undergraduate instrumental conducting, a graduate seminar on advanced rehearsal techniques, and also served as a conductor of the Concert Band and Wind Symphony, respectively.

From 2009–2016, Tackitt served as the Associate Director of Bands at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ, where he conducted the Symphonic Band, taught undergraduate conducting and secondary methods courses, developed and implemented a course on marching band techniques, directed all aspects of the NAU athletic band program, in addition to serving as the Director of the NAU Curry Summer Music Camp for student campers grades 6–12. While in Arizona, Tackitt appeared multiple times as a presenter and clinician at the Arizona Music Educators Association state conference.

Tackitt completed his Doctor of Musical Arts in Wind Conducting at the University of Michigan and his Master of Music in Wind Conducting at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He also completed a Bachelor of Music in trombone performance, as well as a Bachelor of Music in Instrumental Music Education, from the University of Michigan. His principal conducting mentors are Michael Haithcock and Steve Davis, and his trombone mentor is David Jackson.

Tackitt is a member of the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA), the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), and the Virginia Music Educators Association. Additionally, he is an alum of the Epsilon chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia (University of Michigan), an Honorary member of the Gamma Kappa chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi and the Alpha Chi chapter of Tau Beta Sigma (Northern Arizona University), and an Honorary member of the Nu chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi (University of Michigan).

Biography

Dr. Leah Reid (www.leahreid.com) is a New Hampshire-born composer, sound artist, researcher, and educator, whose works range from opera, chamber, and vocal music, to acousmatic, electroacoustic works, and interactive sound installations. Her primary research interests involve the perception, modeling, and compositional applications of timbre. In her works, timbre acts as a catalyst for exploring new soundscapes, time, space, perception, and color. In recent reviews, Reid’s works have been described as “immersive”, “haunting”, and “shimmering”.

Winner of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, Reid has also won the American Prize in Composition (Vocal Chamber Music Division), first prizes in the “Galaxies” 6th International “New Vision” Composition Competition in memory of Nicolaus Copernicus, Musicworks’ Electronic Music Composition Contest, the 8th KLANG! International Electroacoustic Composition Competition, the Gaetano Amadeo Prize, the Tesselat Electronic Music Competition, and the Franz Schubert Conservatory International Composer Competition, Sound of the Year’s Composed with Sound Award, the Film Score Award in Frame Dance Productions’ Music Composition Competition, the International Alliance for Women in Music’s (IAWM) Pauline Oliveros Award, and second prizes in the Iannis Xenakis International Electronic Music Competition and the 13th International Destellos Competition. She has received fellowships from the Guerilla Opera Company, Transient Canvas, Copland House, the Hambidge Center, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), the Ucross Foundation, and Yaddo.

Reid has worked with and received commissions from ensembles such as Accordant Commons, Blow Up Percussion, Concavo & Convesso, Ensemble Móbile, Guerilla Opera, the Jack Quartet, McGill’s Contemporary Music Ensemble, Neave Trio, Sound Gear, Talea, and Yarn/Wire. Her compositions have been presented at festivals, conferences, and in major venues throughout the world, including Aveiro_Síntese (Portugal), BEAST FEaST (England), Espacios Sonoros (Argentina), EviMus (Germany), Forgotten Spaces: EuroMicrofest (Germany), the International Computer Music Conference (USA, Ireland & Chile), IRCAM’s ManiFeste (France), LA Philharmonic's Noon to Midnight (USA), the Matera Intermedia Festival (Italy), the New York City Electronic Music Festival (USA), the OUA Electroacoustic Music Festival (Japan), the San Francisco Tape Music Festival (USA), Série de Música de Câmara (Brazil), the Society of Composers National Conference (USA), Soochow New Voice Concert Series (China), the Sound and Music Computing Conference (Germany), the Tilde New Music Festival (Australia), the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium (Canada), and the Workshop on Computer Music and Audio Technology (Taiwan), among many others. Her works are published with Ablaze Records, Cero Records, New Focus Recordings, Parma Recordings, RMN Classical, and BabelScores.

She is Vice President of the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM), Vice President for Programs and Projects for the Society of Electroacoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), and the Artistic Director of the Boston New Music Initiative (BNMI).

Reid received her D.M.A. and M.A. in music composition from Stanford University and her B.Mus from McGill University. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia, where she teaches courses in composition and technology to undergraduate and graduate students.

Biography

Kelly Peterson Peral is University of Virginia’s Lecturer in Oboe and Principal Oboe with the Charlottesville Symphony. An enthusiast of vocal music, Peral also regularly performs as Principal Oboe with The Virginia Consort, The Oratorio Society of Virginia, Victory Hall Opera, and Charlottesville Opera. Her performance background includes extensive engagements with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, New York City Ballet, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, numerous Broadway shows, Palm Beach Opera, Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, The Florida Orchestra, New World Symphony, and Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, among others. More recently she has enjoyed engagements with Staunton Music Festival, Williamsburg Symphony, Richmond Symphony, Roanoke Symphony, Norfolk’s Virginia Symphony, and National Symphony Orchestra.

A passionate educator, Ms. Peral has served on the faculties of The Juilliard School Pre-College Division, Miami’s New World School of the Arts, and Florida International University, as well as the Cleveland Music School Settlement. She had the honor of teaching at the 2016 John Mack Oboe Camp in Little Switzerland, NC, a tremendous opportunity to continue sharing John Mack’s legacy with oboists from throughout the United States and Canada.

Having grown up in Central Virginia, Ms. Peral is grateful for her early musical training in Charlottesville with Yvaine Duisit (piano) and David Goza (oboe). Her first orchestral experience was as a member of the Charlottesville Youth Orchestra YOCVA. Ms. Peral finished high school at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, after which she made her solo debut at the John F. Kennedy Center Concert Hall as a 1987 NFAA Presidential Scholar in the Arts. Ms. Peral holds degrees in music performance from The Juilliard School (MM) and the Cleveland Institute of Music (BM). Her major teachers include Elaine Douvas, John Mack, and Daniel Stolper.

Ms. Peral currently lives in Orange, her hometown. She also enjoys gardening, exploring local farms, pickleball, great books, and her entertaining cat. She is proud to see her parents still performing with the Orange Community Band, which they helped establish in 1978.

Biography

A graduate of Juilliard (where she was the Winner of the Taranow Prize in Voice) and Barnard College, Brenda Patterson’s artistic instinct has always been to question and experiment. Even during her days as a student, she extended her own role as singer into production, creative design and performance art. Her international opera career began at the Hamburg State Opera before continuing to the Teatro alla Scala in Milan and the Metropolitan Opera, where she was a Principal Artist for seven seasons, and at Opera Colorado, Glimmerglass Opera, Carnegie Hall, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, and Florida Grand Opera, among many others. A passionate vocal teacher who believes in imparting a solid technical foundation to her students, Patterson has presented classes at Juilliard, Mannes, Tanglewood, Opera Philadelphia and for the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artists. She is also a co-founder and the Director of Music of the award-winning Victory Hall Opera in Charlottesville.

Biography

Biography

Active as a conductor of choral, orchestral, and operatic/musical theatre repertoire, Michael Slon is Director of Choral Music and Professor at the University of Virginia, where he leads the University Singers, UVA Chamber Singers, and guest conducts the Charlottesville Symphony. He also serves as Music Director of the Oratorio Society of Virginia, and a conductor and chorusmaster with Charlottesville Opera. Having led the University Singers and Charlottesville Symphony in a gala performance for UVA’s 2017 Bicentennial Launch Celebration (which included Copland’s Appalachian Spring with the Martha Graham Dance Company), he and the Singers presented the regional premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass at UVA in 2018. His UVA ensembles have sung for composer Philip Glass, Peter Phillips (director of the Tallis Scholars), and the creators of Les Misérables (Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg), performed with Bobby McFerrin and Meredith Monk, and held virtual master classes with Alice Parker, Jake Runestad, and Eric Whitacre. They’ve also toured Europe, Canada, and the United States, and received more than half a million views on social media platforms.

Believing in the unique power of music to inspire and unite across cultures, and committed to broad programming perspectives, his repertoire has ranged from Palestrina and Bach masses, Verdi’s Requiem and Mahler’s Symphony #4, to Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George and Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard, and programs featuring African-American composers, Latin-American works, contemporary women composers (including Betinis, Higdon, Powell, and Shaw), and choral music from film and the Broadway stage. In 2024, the Chamber Singers partnered with the UVA Center for Politics for a concert of Campaign Songs, and were joined on stage by Martin Luther King III. His ensembles have commissioned new work from composers including Stephen Paulus, Forrest Pierce, Adolphus Hailstork, Eric Whitacre, and Judith Shatin, and most recently gave the 2024 North American premiere of the Ēriks Ešenvalds St. Luke’s Passion with the composer in residence. For his work with students, UVA's Mead Endowment and Seven Society have both recognized him as an outstanding faculty mentor.

Since 2011, he has also served as Music Director of the Oratorio Society of Virginia. In that time, he has created a series of new artistic partnerships with the chorus, including a 2014 semi-staged production of Bernstein’s Candide with Charlottesville Opera; a 2022 collaboration with the University Singers on Rachmaninoff’s Vespers; performances with the Charlottesville Ballet, regional orchestras and youth choruses; an Adolphus Hailstork-Rita Dove commission for the group’s 50th anniversary (later featured on regional PBS), and a Community Sing-In to benefit local charities. In 2024, he led an all–Beethoven program including the finale of Symphony no. 9 for the 200th anniversary of its premiere. He has also collaborated as an artist with the Virginia Theatre Festival, Buffalo’s Opera Sacra, Victory Hall Opera, the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival, Staunton Music Festival and Wintergreen Music Festival, a Defiant Requiem (Verdi) performance at the Strathmore Music Center, and returned post–pandemic to Charlottesville Opera to conduct The Sound of Music and the new FestivAll – Arts for All performances at the Ting Pavilion. While serving as Interim Director of the Charlottesville Symphony, he led works including Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, and in 2005, also co-created the University Singers-Symphony Family Holiday Concerts, now a beloved community tradition.   

Prior to UVA, he served as visiting conducting faculty at the Oberlin Conservatory, and assistant conductor of the Cornell University choruses and Cincinnati's May Festival Chorus, where he prepared and co-prepared choruses for concerts with the Cleveland Orchestra and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Also active as a composer, pianist, and writer, his first book – Songs from the Hill – has been cited in a variety of other publications, and his work on Leonard Bernstein has appeared in the Choral Journal, won the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Julius Herford Prize, and appeared in Bernstein in Context (2024) from Cambridge University Press.  As a composer, he has had work presented by the Vocalis Chamber Choir in concert at NYC’s Merkin Hall, and at the 2018 ACDA Eastern Convention.  He holds degrees from Cornell University (where he was named a member of Phi Beta Kappa), and the Indiana University School of Music. 

To follow on Instagram: @michaelslonmusic

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Biography

Biography

Biography

Karl Hagstrom Miller is a culture historian.  His work examines popular music in the United States through the intersections of race, gender, sound, and money.   His first book, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Duke, 2010), combines cultural, economic, and intellectual history to chart the development of a segregated commercial music industry in the early twentieth century.  A musical color line, corresponding to the physical color line of southern segregation, emerged as both commercial record companies and academic folklorists scoured the south for fresh songs and categorized them according to the racial ideologies of the day.  Segregating Sound received the Woody Guthrie Award for the best annual book on popular music from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. 
 
Dr.  Miller is currently completing Sound Investments: Amateurs Make Pop Music, a two-hundred-year history of pop music in the United States told from the perspective of amateur musicians rather than well-known pop stars.  Amateurs, from 19th-century parlor pianists to 21st-century YouTube warblers, have propelled the sound, economy, and cultural meanings of popular music.  Sound Investments give them center stage.  He is writing a history of music in Texas for the University of Texas Press. 
 
Dr. Miller received a Ph.D. in history from New York University.  He has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institute and the American Council of Learned Societies.  His writing on a variety of pop music topics has appeared in Wax Poetics, Texas Observer, American Music, American Historical Review, and Popmatters, among other venues.

Biography

Fred Everett Maus teaches music at the University of Virginia. He has written on music and narrative, gender and sexuality in relation to discourse about music, queer popular music, embodiment, music therapy, trauma, and other subjects. He was a founding member of the editorial board of the journal Women and Music and for several years its book review editor. He served as the first Chair of the Queer Resource Group of the Society for Music Theory, and more recently as the first Chair of SMT’s Standing Committee on LGBTQ+ Issues. Recent essays include "Narrative and Identity in Three Songs about AIDS" (2013), “Classical Concert Music and Queer Listening” (2013), “Sexuality, Trauma, and Dissociated Expression” (2015), “LGBTQ+ Lives in Professional Music Theory” (2020), “The B-52s, Loss, and Defiance” (to appear 2023), and “Queer Sexuality and Musical Narrative” (to appear 2023). He is co-editor, with the late Sheila Whiteley, of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness (published February 4, 2022).

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Biography

Michelle Kisliuk. Ph.D. NYU Performance Studies. Associate Professor of Music, University of Virginia. Ethnographic research with BaAka forest people in the Central African Republic focusing on musical life, dance, and the arts and politics of everyday. Additional field research in African popular musics and American bluegrass. Conceptual areas of interest include sound/listening studies, improvisation, play, dance and gesture, Jewish identities (including African Jews), performance theory, conceptual and experimental performance/art, climate/environmental activism as intersecting with creative/expressive life, and the interests of African hunter-foragers/the politics of indigeneity (circling back to environmental activism). I endeavor to disrupt essentialisms, hierarchies, supremacies and binaries (e.g art/life, theory/practice, performance/scholarship, objective/subjective, tradition/modernity, including binaries and supremacies of race, gender, and class). Emphasizing processes rather than objects, I teach undergraduates and graduate students in courses including “Listening to Everyday Life: play, improvisation, making community;” “Ethnography of Performance” (creative nonfiction and poetics); “Performing Antiquities and Modernities” (graduate seminar); “Performance in Africa” (undergraduate combination of ensemble and seminar); and the UVA African Music and Dance Ensemble (currently subtitled Roots and Shoots). In all of my courses we connect practice to the realities of students’ lives, the politics that surround us, including issues of representation and legacies of racism and privilege. I recently co-led the UVA-wide Mellon lab in Embodied Creative Practices with a focus on the “global south.” Books: Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (Oxford University Press 1998/2001) and Forthcoming co-edited volume (with Sidra Lawrence) intimate entanglements in the ethnography of performance: race, gender, vulnerability (University of Rochester Press) which includes my essay “Ethnography and its Double(s): theorizing the personal with Jews in Ghana.” Selected essays in collections include “(Un)Doing Fieldwork: Sharing Songs, Sharing Lives” in Shadows in the Field (Barz and Cooley eds), “Performance and Modernity Among BaAka Pygmies: A Closer Look at the Mystique of Egalitarian Foragers in the Rain Forest" in Music and Gender (Diamond and Moisala eds), “The Poetics and Politics of Practice: Experience, Embodiment, and the Engagement of Scholarship” in Teaching Performance Studies: Theories, Practices, Pedagogies (Stuckey and Wimmer, eds.), “Writing the Magnified Musicking Moment” in Theorizing Sound Writing (Kapchan ed), “BaAka Singing in a State of Emergency: storytelling and listening as medium and message” in Cultural Sustainabilities (Cooley ed), “What’s the ‘It’ That we Learn to Perform? Teaching BaAka Music and Dance” in Performing Ethnomusicology (T. Solis ed), and “A Special Kind of Courtesy: Action at a Bluegrass Festival Jam Session” in TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies (Schechner ed).

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Biography

A music historian who works across disciplines and creative practices Bonnie Gordon has published widely on Early Modern music and gender and Early American Sound. Her latest book Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano and other strange sounds was published in 2023.  Monteverdi’s Unruly Women appeared in 2004 and The Courtesans Arts; a co-edited essay collection appeared in 2006.  She is currently working on a new book on sound in Early America. A 2024 Shannon fellow at UVa, she  is a founding faculty member of the Equity Center at UVa and a co-director of the Sound Justice lab and a co-founder of C-Ville Tulips. In the music department she teaches classes on music history, noise, gender, race, and history as storytelling. She has also taught in the Engagements and the Pavilion Seminars and frequently offers classes focused on community engagements. Outside of the classroom she works with students in a variety of community engagement/public service programs. In addition to her scholarly writing, she has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate and the C-ville Weekly. She plays jazz, rock, and classical viola. She is the recipient of a dissertation grant from the American Association of University Women, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Brandeis University, a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She has also been the Robert Lehman Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She plays Rock, Jazz and Classical Viola.

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Biography

Luke Dahl is Associate Professor of Composition and Computer Technologies in the Music Department at University of Virginia where he teaches classes on music technology, audio signal processing, and music interaction design. His research is primarily situated in the interdisciplinary field of New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) which investigates and explores the intersection of technology and musical practice through the activities of design, musical performance, and empirical research. He is especially interested in systems for digitally-mediated real-time music collaboration, and in the role of human gesture and movement in music.

Dr. Dahl earned his PhD in Computer-Based Music Theory and Acoustics from the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, and a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan. At CCRMA he was a founding member of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra and the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra. His musical works include SoundBounce for mobile phone orchestra, which was performed at NIME in Sydney, and TweetDreams for audience interaction and live Twitter data, which was premiered at the MiTo Settembre Musica Festival in Milan and has been performed in Oslo, San Francisco, Stony Brook, and at TEDx Silicon Valley.

Before returning to academia Luke worked at the Joint E-mu/Creative Advanced Technology Center where he developed reverb algorithms for the SoundBlasterLive sound card products and co-authored patents on audio signal processing, and at Apple where he worked on audio for iPod and laptop products.

Dr. Dahl has recently released alpha versions of two software libraries: Modosc is a Max library for processing motion-capture data in real-time to enable movement-based interactions, which was created in collaboration with Dr. Federico Visi. Bf-Pd is a library written in PureData which facilitates real-time data-sharing and collaboration between musicians in spontaneously formed ensembles. Bf-Pd was developed in collaboration with Dr Florent Berthaut at Université de Lille.

Biography

Ted Coffey makes acoustic and electronic music, sound installations, and songs. His work has been presented in concerts and festivals across North America, Europe and Asia, at such venues as Judson Church, The Knitting Factory, Roulette, Symphony Space, and Lincoln Center (NYC), The Lab, New Langton Arts, Zellerbach Hall, and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Wolf Trap and The Kennedy Center (DC), the Korean National University of the Arts (Seoul), The Carre Theatre (Amsterdam), and ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). He studied composition with Jon Appleton, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Paul Lansky, among others, receiving degrees in music from Dartmouth (AB), Mills College (MFA) and Princeton (MFA, PhD). Since 2011, Coffey has collaborated with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company on several projects, including the evening-length work Story/Time, which he toured widely with the Company. Other dance projects include works made with Abigail Levine, Paul Matteson, and Jennifer Nugent. Coffey is active in national and international academic communities associated with music and technology, and currently serves as President of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). His writings on aesthetics and politics in the performing arts have been honored with significant awards from the Josephine De Kármán and Andrew C. Mellon Foundations. Recordings of his work are available on the Ellipsis Arts, Everglade, Innova, Audition Records, SEAMUS, crackletimesfavor, EcoSono, and Ravello labels. Coffey is currently a College Fellow and Professor in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses in composition, music technologies, music aesthetics, and pop.

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Biography

Mary Beth Bauermann is a writer, tap dancer, and guitarist from Baltimore, Maryland. She studies American cultural history through the lenses of popular music, performance, dance, literature, and media. Her research investigates sonic and kinesthetic manifestations of social tensions through popular music performance. 

She holds bachelor's degrees in American Studies and English from William & Mary. Her research projects have focused on 1960s popular music (especially Motown and The Beatles), the history of tap dance, the singing voice in literature, popular music in film soundtracks, and the cool aesthetic of music and movement. Her most recent article, "'Wake Up!' with Narrative Film Music: Optimizing Narrative Power Through Spike Lee's Soundtracks of Popular Music," can be found in Film Matters Magazine. She also writes on various topics for public-facing audiences.

Mary Beth is a guitarist in the UVA Jazz Ensemble and she enjoys playing rock guitar in her spare time. Ever inspired by George Harrison, she also started taking sitar lessons in 2023. Mary Beth has trained for most of her life in tap, ballet, modern, and jazz dance technique. Her dance training informs her research on movement and choreography in popular music performances.

Biography

Alonya Castillo is a PhD student in the Critical and Comparative Studies program. Her research interests include: Black feminism; Black performance in R&B and Hip-Hop music and horror films; Afrofuturism; and the Romantic notions of the sublime, grotesque, the uncanny, and the Other. More specifically she is interested in the ways in which Black music and performance are used as sites of resistance.

In 2022, she became an AMS Eileen Southern Scholar and graduated with her master's degree in musicology from the University of Mississippi. Her master’s thesis explored (re)negotiations of Black femininity and expressions of Black feminist and Pan-Africanist rhetoric in R&B and Hip-Hop. In 2020, she received her B.A in music from UC Davis with emphases in ethnomusicology, music history, music theory and music composition. Her senior thesis focused on operatic syntax and dramaturgy and Afrofuturism in Janelle Monaé’s Dirty Computer (2018).

Biography

Gabrielle Cerberville (b. 1991 in Sleepy Hollow, NY) is a curious American composer turned creative alchemist. She writes with an experimental flair that is at once familiar and alien, and her work regularly blends the lines between disciplines and discrete art forms. Her work is an exploration of communication, primarily between humans and our natural neighbors (plants, fungi, animals, and finding our place within ecosystems). She holds a Masters of Music in composition from Western Michigan University and a Bachelor of Music from Butler University in composition, and is pursuing her Ph.D in Music Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia.

Gabrielle’s works have been featured across the US and Europe. She has been honored with residencies at United Plant Savers in Ohio, Port Austin AiR in Michigan, Listhus in Iceland, Arts Letters and Numbers in New York, NES in Iceland, Convergence in Indianapolis, and has participated in several festivals, including the Ammerman Symposium, MOXsonic, Impulse New Music, EMM, Skammdegi, and A! Festival. Gabrielle’s striking and welcoming compositions have been highlighted by the artistic talents of Shanna Pranaitis, Forward Motion, Elizabeth A. Baker, Ashley Walters, Kory Reeder, Ascending Duo, Circuit721, Sotto Voce, Nicholas Tolle, Verdant Vibes, and others. She is also a well-known figure in the mycology and foraging communities, and lectures widely about sustainability, edible wild plants and fungi, identification, and environmental activism.

Biography

Kristin Hauge received her undergraduate degree in 2018 from Princeton University, where she majored in music with a focus in composition. Her work thus far includes orchestral and chamber works, choral compositions, collaborative piano arrangements, and a composition for jazz piano trio. She is interested in pursuing interdisciplinary projects that incorporate acoustic and electronic media. Through her work, she hopes to explore many facets of musical expression, including the relationship between music and nature (with a particular focus on birdsong, motion capture, and soundscapes), recording and production techniques, synthesizers and electric string instruments, and immersive audiovisual experiences such as interactive websites and installations. In addition to composing, Kristin plays piano, violin, and viola, and is an avid pit orchestra musician (primarily on keyboards). Before joining CCT, she taught high school orchestra for three years in New Jersey.

Biography

Brian Lindgren is composer, instrument builder, and violist based in Charlottesville, VA. He is pursuing his PhD in Music Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia. He holds a BA from the Eastman School of Music (John Graham) and an MFA in Sonic Arts from Brooklyn College (Morton Subotnick, Doug Geers).

His work has been featured in the International Computer Music Conference, SEAMUS, and NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival. His work has been performed by Hypercube, Popebama, and Tokyo Gen’on Project. He has performed with Alarm Will Sound, the Triple Helix Piano Trio, and Wordless Music. His music has been featured at gallery openings by Anton Kandinsky, Shari Belafonte, and Brian Reed. He has recorded for Tyondai Braxton (Warp), RA The Rugged Man (Nature Sounds), David Liptak (Bridge) and Joe Phillips (New Amsterdam). He was a semi-finalist in the 2022 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition for the EV, a new digital-acoustic instrument, which was also presented at the NIME 2022 conference. IG @bklindgren

Biography

Carlehr Swanson is a doctoral student in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music. Her research interests include sacred music, Black American Music, and civic engagement through music. Through her organization, Music is Unity, Carlehr implements music in her community by taking performances to those who may not experience it otherwise. She has planned and performed more than a dozen virtual events for local nursing homes and schools throughout this year. In 2017, she was named the People's Choice and 3rd Runner-up in the Miss Virginia Pageant.

Before coming to the University of Virginia, Carlehr received an M.M. degree from the University of Miami in Jazz Vocal Performance. In addition to performing, her paper "Queens on the King's Highway: 'Herstories' of Black Women in Gospel Music" was selected for the University of Miami's Graduate + Postdoctoral Research Symposium. Additionally, Carlehr was a graduate assistant in the Office of Civic and Community Engagement. She oversaw their High School Partnership program, a mentorship program created to increase competency in English and History. Carlehr received her B.M. degree in Jazz Studies from George Mason University.

Biography

Daniel Fishkin’s ears are ringing. Composer, sound artist, and instrument builder. Completely ambivalent about music. Daniel studied with composer Maryanne Amacher and multi-instrumentalist Mark Stewart. He has performed as a soloist on modular synthesizer with the American Symphony Orchestra, developed sound installations in abandoned concert halls, and played innumerable basement shows. Daniel’s lifework investigating the aesthetics of hearing damage has received international press (Nature Journal, 2014); as an ally in the search for a cure, he has been awarded the title of  “tinnitus ambassador” by the Deutsche Tinnitus-Stiftung. Recent activities include Composing the Tinnitus Suites: 2016, a concert series about hearing damage, taking place in Philadelphia, PA, supported by a Project Grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Daniel received his MA in Music Composition from Wesleyan University, has taught analog synthesis at Bard College. He is currently a PhD Fellow in Composition and Computer Music at the University of Virginia.

Biography

Sam Golter is a PhD student in the Critical and Comparative Studies program at UVA. His work looks at the intersection of music and American politics during moments of hegemonic state-building. His Master’s thesis at the University of Oregon, “Women Rappers and the Neoliberal Politics of Indifference,” questions the lack of attention paid to female gangsta rappers in the early 1990s, a time when the genre’s violence and misogyny was used by lawmakers and pundits as a symptom of a criminal culture that necessitated massive prison expansion. He has also done work on themes of dying and transcendence in San Francisco disco during the AIDS epidemic, the relationship between eugenics and Anglo-Saxon folk song collecting during the Progressive Era, and amateur music-making in the contemporary Flat Earth movement. He has recently presented his research at Pop Con in the Museum of Popular Culture in Seattle, the South Central Graduate Music Conference, and the University of Virginia’s annual Flute Forum. He is the editor of Pauline Oliveros’ Anthology of Text Scores and was a line editor for William Cheng’s Just Vibrations: The Politics of Sounding Good.

Before coming to the University of Virginia, Sam received Masters degrees in Musicology and Flute Performance from the University of Oregon where he worked and taught in the Ethnic Studies department as well as the music department. He also holds undergraduate degrees in Flute Performance and Gender Studies from Lawrence University.

Biography

Juan Carlos Vasquez is an award-winning composer, sound artist, and researcher. His electroacoustic music works are performed constantly around the world and to date have premiered in more than 30 countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Vasquez has received grants and commissions from numerous institutions, including the ZKM, the International Computer Music Association, the Nokia Research Center, the Ministry of Culture of Colombia, the Arts Promotion Centre in Finland, the Finnish National Gallery, and CW+ in partnership with the Royal College of Music in London, UK. Some of the events and venues that have featured Vasquez’s works include Ars Electronica (AU), the Ateneum Art Museum (FI), The New York City Library for Performing Arts (Lincoln Center, NY, USA), the Berklee College of Music, Matera Intermedia Festival (IT), Sonorities Festival Belfast (UK), BEAST FEaST (UK) and the New Music Miami ISCM Festival (USA) along with a large number of academic events held by universities across the globe.

As a researcher, Vasquez’s writings can be found in the Computer Music Journal, the Leonardo Music Journal, and the proceedings of all the standard conferences of the field. Vasquez received his education at the Sibelius Academy (FI), Aalto University (FI), and the University of Virginia (US). His scores are published by Babel Scores, and his music is distributed by Naxos, MIT Press (US), Important Records (US), and Phasma Music (Poland).

Biography

Emily Mellen joined the PhD program in Critical and Comparative Studies of Music in Fall 2017. Her research interests include voice studies, radio studies, music and sound in the Arab world, music & politics, theories of colonialism and anti-colonial movements, and postcolonial, feminist, and sound-based approaches to the digital humanities. Her dissertation will discuss Radio Bari, a Fascist propaganda radio station that broadcast in Arabic from Southern Italy towards the Middle East & North Africa from 1934-1943. 

Emily was a Praxis fellow in the digital humanities from 2019-2020 and previously worked as an intern in web design for Take Back the Archive (an archive of the history of sexual violence at UVa) and for the President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation. Currently, she is serving as an intern for the provost’s office for Global Affairs. She has received travel grants from the African Urbanism Lab and the Institute of World Languages, as well as grants to attend the Summer School in Global Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna and the Collections as Data course at the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching at Indiana University/Purdue University. 

Before joining the University of Virginia, Emily received a B.A. in Music History with a minor in Arabic and Islamic Studies from UCLA. Her B.A. thesis, entitled Voicing Arab Nationalism: Interpreting Singers Fairuz and Umm Kulthum, was awarded the Friends of Musicology Best Undergraduate Senior Thesis prize.

Biography

Rami Stucky was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, but left when he turned 18 to attend college in the Northeast. In 2013, he moved to Seattle to pursue a career as a rock drummer, but realized he arrived to the city’s local music scene about twenty years too late. In 2016, he enrolled in the University of Virginia’s Critical and Comparative Studies program where he focuses on America’s 1960s bossa nova craze. His father, only half-jokingly, often asks when he will finish his dissertation on “elevator music.” 

Biography

Kristina Warren is an electroacoustic composer and vocalist based in Virginia. Interests include creating and playing graphic and text scores, digitally processing her voice, and noise and repetition. Her music has been played across the US and Europe; at festivals such as EABD, FEASt, ICMC, N_SEME, and NYCEMF; and by ensembles such as Dither, Ekmeles, loadbang, the Meehan/Perkins Duo, and Sō Percussion. In 2014 she was named a finalist in the American Composers Forum National Composition Contest. Warren is pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition and Computer Technologies from the University of Virginia, and holds a B.A. in Music Composition from Duke University.

Biography

Max Tfirn is a third year Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia, pursuing his degree in Composition and Computer Technology. He received a Masters degree from Wesleyan University in Music Composition and a Bachelors degree in Music Education as well as a performance certificate in percussion.  Rich timbres and diverse sounds is a focal point of Maxwell's compositional practice. He tries to create sounds that can stand on their own and be used to create both thin and thick densities without changing the root of the sound.  Sounds that are not familiar to the listener are at the core of his compositions. Every composition is an exploration of sound, how sound can be created and what emotional effects they can create.

Max has had work performed at Society of Electro Acoustic Music United States (SEAMUS), FIU FEAST Festival, 12 Nights Festival of Electronic Music and Art Series as well as the Subtropics Music festival, N_SEME (National Student Electronic Music Event), Electroacoustic Barn Dance, Technosonics Festival, and the South Central Music Consortium (SCGMC). He has worked with Dr. Ted Coffey, Dr. Matthew Burtner, Anthony Braxton, Dr. Paula Matthusen, Ronald Kuivila and Dr. James Paul Sain.

Biography

Biography

Biography

Donald Loach is Associate Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Virginia where he taught courses in music history and theory, and conducted numerous student choral ensembles including the University of Virginia Glee Club, University Singers, and Coro Virginia. In the Charlottesville community, he was for many years music director of the Charlottesville/Albemarle Oratorio Society now called the Virginia Oratorio Society and of the senior choir of St. Paul's Memorial Church. He continues to teach general music courses, primarily for older students, through the UVa School of Continuing and Professional Studies and Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. His principal field of scholarship centers on the history of Renaissance Music.

Loach was born and raised in Denver and became a conducting student of Antonia Brico when he was 14 years old. After completing the BA degree in music studies at the University of Denver, he continued his studies of music theory and organ at the Yale School of Music, earning both a BMus and MMus. After a few years as assistant in instruction at Yale he returned to graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in musicology. At Yale he studied under Paul Hindemith and managed Hindemith's Collegium Musicum. He also spent one year with Hindemith at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.^[1]

Loach joined the University of Virginia faculty in 1964. Loach was popular as a professor, noting in a 1972 Cavalier Daily interview that his classes were oversubscribed and that growth in the music department was inevitable.^[2] During his tenure as director of what was then known as the University of Virginia Glee Club he developed a choral section of countertenors, which enabled the ensemble to perform a wider repertory including masterpieces of Renaissance polyphony. These included masses by Josquin des Prez and Cipriano De Rore, Thomas Tallis's "Lamentation of Jeremiah," and many secular pieces. He led the Glee Club in participation in the inaugural Harvard Festival of Men's Choruses in 1977.^[3]

In addition to his work with the Virginia Glee Club, Loach also conducted the University Singers and founded Coro Virginia, a smaller mixed-voice ensemble, that he founded in 1989, the year he resigned as Virginia Glee Club conductor. Each December the University Singers produced a Renaissance Madrigal Dinner and Concert. During his time as music director both the Virginia Glee Club and the University Singers embarked on numerous European tours, beginning with a Virginia Glee Club tour of Italy, Austria, Germany, and Switzerland in 1972. Tours to Russia (then the Soviet Union), Paris and northern France, Spain, Belgium and the Rhineland, and Italy followed. Often the concerts were performed jointly with choirs from the visited communities.

In addition to the choral ensembles at the University of Virginia, he served as music director of the Oratorio Society of Virginia and as organist/music director of St. Paul's Memorial Church in Charlottesville. In his retirement, Loach continues to lead the University community's annual Messiah sing-alongs.^[4]