Department of Music

A symposium on and concert of music by Judith Shatin, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emerita at UVA celebrates her contributions in acoustic, electroacoustic, and digital media during her 39 years on the faculty of the McIntire Department of Music. First trained as an acoustic composer, she was an early adopter of digital technologies, founding the Virginia Center for Computer Music in 1987-88, and establishing both undergraduate and graduate curricula combining acoustic and digital music.

The Symposium will include three talks on Shatin’s music. Two of her PhD students, now professors themselves, return for the occasion: Steve Kemper, Assistant Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and Juraj Kojs, Assistant Professor at the University of Miami. They will be joined by Denise Von Glahn, Curtis Mayes Orpheus Professor of Musicology at Florida State University. The program includes the following topics.

Steve Kemper:  Sounding the Word: Exploring Religious Symbolism in the Music of Judith Shatin
Religious stories, figures, and symbolism represent an important source of extra-musical association in Judith Shatin’s music. In these compositions, music evokes both the symbols and narrative of these sources through a variety of musical devices, including narrative-constructing musical gestures, quotation, and text painting. This presentation will explore contrasting approaches to the relationship between music and religio-textual referents in three pieces: Elijah’s Chariot (1996) for string quartet and electronic playback, The Passion of St. Cecilia (1985) for piano and orchestra, and Vayter un Vayter (2012), a setting of three poems by Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever for bass singer, clarinet, cello, and piano.

Juraj Kojs: Streams and Voices in the Electro-acoustic Music of Judith Shatin
In this presentation, diverse paths in Judith Shatin’s electro-acoustic music are explored. Voices, instruments, everyday objects and electronic media weave a fabric of her compositional narratives and histories. What trajectories manifest through interactions among acoustic, sampled and synthesized sonorities? Liveliness and imagination provide guidance through her emerging soundscapes. The talk offers both an overview and analytical zoom into selected works. Mezzo Jennifer Beattie joins in with a live demonstration.

Denise Von Glahn: Judith Shatin Composes Environmental Awareness
In a composing career that spans over forty years, Judith Shatin has written a body of works that reveals both her joy in a world of infinite sounds and her deep concerns for a limited environment. Making music from every imaginable source— human voices, acoustic instruments, electronics, processed recorded sounds—Shatin engages with the natural world in a dozen pieces that speak of ice and earth, birds and trees, mountains and coal, and seas of reeds. This paper explores Shatin’s decades-long deployment of music to heighten awareness of the most pressing challenge of our time: living harmoniously with our environment.

Co-sponsored by the McIntire Department of Music, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Women, Gender & Sexuality Department.

Date: April 5, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m, Location: Nau Hall 211

Professor Shatin will also have a concert on April 6 at 8:00pm in Old Cabell Hall. Concert page here.

Read more about all the events in the Shatin Music Month