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Department News
Welcome to the web site for the Department of Music Theory. Please browse through our pages for information about Music Theory at the Peabody.
THE 2009-2010 SCHOOL YEAR
For the 2009-2010 school year, the Department of Music Theory expects to teach approximately 280 undergraduate students in 17 sections of undergraduate Music Theory, 14 sections of Keyboard studies, and 12 Sections of Ear-training. We will also teach approximately 300 students in 24 Music Theory seminars.
DEPARTMENT MEETINGS
The faculty of the Music Theory Department will meet on the following dates in 2009-10. All meetings are on the first Thursday of the month (except for the first meeting, which is on the second Thursday in September.) All meetings will be held from 12:00-1:30 p.m. in the Marbury Room.
FALL SEMESTER
September 10
October 1
November 5
December 3
SPRING SEMESTER
February 4
March 4
April 1
May 6
Students who wish to have petitions considered should submit them in writing to the Chair, Steve Stone, one week in advance of scheduled meetings.
FACULTY NEWS
Armando Bayolo has received several commissions for new works during the summer of 2009. Upcoming projects will include a symphony for wind ensemble commissioned by a consortium led by Robert Ponto and the University of Oregon Wind Ensemble, a work for alto saxophone and harp, Crudely Spun Tales, for Jackie Pollauf and Noah Getz, a solo bass suite, Mix Tape, for Peabody and NSO bassist Jeffrey Weisner, and a trombone concerto for trombonist Phillip Brown and the South Jutland Symphony Orchestra of Denmark. In October, Dr. Bayolo will be a guest of the composition department at SUNY Fredonia, where he will speak about his work both as a composer and an advocate and conductor of new music. Upcoming premieres include Crudely Spun Tales in November at the Mansion of the Music Center at Strathmore, the cantata Kaddish:Passio:Rothko on January 31, 2010 at the National Gallery of Art, and the cello concerto, Orfei Mors, by cellist Phillip von Maltzahnn and the Syracuse Society for New Music (March 11, 2010) and the Western Piedmont Symphony Orchestra (April 11, 2010). In September, Dr. Bayolo returns to lead his band, Great Noise Ensemble, in their fifth season of concerts in Washington, D.C. and will conduct performances of works by Peabody composers Joel Puckett and David Smooke as well as major premieres by Andrew Simpson, Geoffrey Gordon, Robert Patterson, Carlos Carrillo and D.J. Sparr.
Lura Johnson has been appointed Artistic Director of Music in the Great Hall, a chamber music series serving Baltimore audiences. She can also be heard on the Baltimore Symphony's August 2009 release of Leonard Bernstein's Mass, released on the Naxos label, which has just been named an Editor's Pick by Gramophone Magazine.
Ildar Khannanov has published the following articles submitted in 2007-2008: “Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Aspects of Emotional Truth in Piano Music of Rachmaninov,” Acta Semiotica Fennica, XXIX. Imatra-Helsinki, 2008; “Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Aspects of Emotional Truth in Piano Music of Rachmaninov,” Translated from English into Russian, in Rachmaninov on the Watershed of History. Vol. 4. Kharkov, Ukraine 2007; “Signs and Meanings. International Congress on Musical Signification: the Overview and an Interview with Eero Tarasti,” Musical Academy Quarterly, Moscow, Spring 2007/2. He has also submitted six new articles for publication: 1) An overview of current Western concepts of musical meaning, “Aspects of Musical Content in the Works of American and Western-European Theorists of the 1990-2000s." Problemy Musikal’noi Nauki/Music Scholarship (Russian Journal of Academic Research in Music), to be published in the 3rd issue, in October 2008; 2) “Topological Alternative to Quantitative Methods of Analysis. A Virtual Interview with Dmitri Tymoczko.” Proceedings of the International Conference Sound, Number, System. Moscow Conservatory, 2008, to be published in the Fall 2008 by the Moscow Conservatory Press; 3) “Essay on Semiotic Analysis of the Etude-Tableau E flat Minor by Sergey Rachmaninov” for Ad musicum. Collection of articles dedicated to 75th Anniversary of Jury Kholopov. Moscow Conservatory, 2008 (The proceedings of the conference that took place in Moscow in September 2007); 4) “Revisiting Russian Music Theory: Victor Bobrovsky’s Functional Foundation of Musical Form (1978)” for Theoreia, UNT (curently under review); 5) “Rachmaninov’s Etude-Tableau “The Little Red Riding Hood”: Semeiosis of Musical Truth and the Structure of Musical Sign” for the Collection of articles Rachmaninov on the Watershed of History, vol. 5, published by Larisa Trubnikova, the grand niece of Rachmaninov, as the proceedings of the 5th Rachmaninov Festival in Kharkov, Ukraine; and 6) “To the Question of Deformation in a Sonata Allegro: Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet,” the paper that he read in Freiburg, for Music and Practice (also under review). In May 2008, Ildar read his paper, mentioned above, at the International Conference “Sound, Number, System,” at the Moscow Conservatoire. He has been invited to participate in the same conference next year together with Dmitri Tymoczko of Princeton University.
Paul Mathews' translation/commentary "Anatomie et physiologie de l'orchestre by Delius and Papus" appeared in Theoria 15, which was published in July 2008. A new book, Inside Pierrot lunaire, co-authored with Phyllis Bryn-Julson, will be published in January 2009 by Scarecrow Press. Paul is spending the year out of the classroom in the role of Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.
This past summer, Courtney Orlando's group, Alarm Will Sound performed at the Bang on a Can Marathon in New York. On the Marathon, Courtney took part in the inaugural performance of the new music ensemble Signal, which also performed at California's Ojai Festival the following week. In spring 2009, Signal will record its first album for Cantaloupe records, and will have additional performances at Vassar College and in New York. This fall, Alarm Will Sound will be making its Russian debut with concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In the spring, the group will perform at the Kimmel Center, the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and at the grand re-opening of Alice Tully Hall. In November, Courtney will be premiering a multi-media song cycle by Michael Gordon and Ridge Theatre entitled Lightning at Our Feet. Based on poems of Emily Dickinson, the four female performers are singers and multi-instrumentalists who have helped to arrange the music to reflect their own personal styles and interpretations of the poetry. The premiere will take place at the University of Houston, and will premiere in New York at BAM's Next Wave Festival in December.
This new year has brought performances of Joel Puckett's music by ensembles in Tokyo, Sydney, Atlanta, Eugene, Dallas, Knazawa City, Iowa City, Detroit, Waco, Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Birmingham, Athens, Ann Arbor, Lancing, Lubbock, Potsdam, San Antonio, and Osaka. This spring saw the premiere of two new pieces by Joel. The first is Southern Comforts, which is a violin concerto commissioned by 10 universities. This work was premiered in Waco, TX by Baylor University and was then featured at the national College Band Directors Association convention in Austin, TX. The second work, Moonlight Through The Pines, was commissioned and premiered by the Atlanta based new music ensemble, Bent Frequency.
David Smooke completed works including Trompe l'oeil, a commission for the Chicago-based wind quintet, Quintet Attacca; Introspection #10,824 for seven-string electric violin; and Saturn, for the student ensemble Sonar and the New York Miniaturist Ensemble. David's performances in New York City took place at Symphony Space, Queens College, the Galapagos Art Gallery and Juilliard. Other performances included those by the Nucleus Ensemble in Los Angeles, at the Nuits d'Ete festival in Savoie, France, and at Louisiana State University, Southern Illinois University, Illinois State University and Rhode Island College. David also completed a residency fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and gave pre-concert lectures for the Shriver Hall Concert Series, the Baltimore Symphony, the National Philharmonic, and the Columbia Pro Cantare. His upcoming performances include those on the Evolutions Series at An Die Musik and with Ensemble Dal Niente in Chicago (supported by a Peabody Faculty Development Grant). David will be offering a new seminar on Song Analysis in the spring, and sponsored a student project by Rebecca Orchard that won a Johns Hopkins Provost's Undergraduate Research Award.
Having completed four years as Chair of Peabody's Music Theory Department, Kip Wile is looking forward this year to supervising the Department's newly reorganized program for undergraduates in need of remedial music theory. Among his other teaching duties, Kip will again offer a course in Chamber Music Analysis, taught in coordination with Peabody's Chamber Music program, which he introduced last year. Kip also served on the Program Committee for the 2009 Conference of the Music Theory Society of the Mid Atlantic (the regional branch of the national Society for Music Theory), and he was elected to a term as Member-at-Large on the MTSMA Executive Committee for 2009-2011.
WELCOME ADJUNCT FACULTY
The Department of Music Theory welcomes back its distinguished faculty member, Thomas Benjamin. Dr. Benjamin, an active composer, is also the author of several articles and books on music theory and musicianship pedagogy. In Spring 2010 he will teach a seminar in Tonal Chromaticism.
We also welcome back five additional adjunct faculty members. Judah Adashi will teach Instrumentation in both the Fall and Spring, Sarah Kuzmak will return to teach Theory I, Mark Lackey will return to teach Theory II, and Armando Bayolo returns to teach Theory III. Joel Puckett will be serving as a full-time replacement for Paul Mathews, who will be continuing as Interim Dean for Academic Affairs. Joel will teach Theory I-II, Theory II, two sections of Graduate Review, and a graduate seminar on Wind Music Analysis.
PEABODY AT HOMEWOOD
On the Homewood campus, Faye Chiao will teach Music Theory and Musicianship 1; John Crouch will teach Rudiments and Music Theory and Musicianship 1; Travis Hardaway will teach Rudiments and Music Theory and Musicianship 1, 2, and 3; and Steve Stone will teach Music Theory and Musicianship 2 and 3.
GRADUATE TEACHING FELLOWS
Finally, three of our Masters of Music Theory Pedagogy students are assisting in Music Theory 1 (Intensive) as Graduate Teaching Fellows. Lonnie Hevia, Stefan Petrov, and Robert Walliczek will teach sections of the class under the supervision of Kip Wile. Patrick Handler will assist in Ear Training 1 (Intensive) under the supervision of Courtney Orlando.
