From the Chair

We are pleased to bring you the inaugural issue of the IU Music Theory Newsletter.  Through this forum we will share recent news from the current and retired faculty, current students, and alumni.  More detailed information on faculty and student accomplishments, as well as our local professional activities, can be found in the Departmental News page.

Those who have been away from IU for a few years will notice a number of new faces.  By this fall, six of the ten members of the faculty will have joined the department within the past twelve years. The new faculty continue to uphold the high standards of teaching the department is known for, while at the same time bringing increased breadth to specializations represented in the department. I invite you to browse the Faculty Spotlights section to see what the faculty have been involved with during the past year. We are especially pleased to announce the appointment of Roman Ivanovitch as Assistant Professor, beginning fall 2004. A native of the U.K., Prof. Ivanovitch graduated from Yale University in May. His dissertation was on variation techniques in Mozart's music. 

We are pleased with both the quality and quantity of students who are choosing to pursue their graduate studies here.  This fall, we will have six new master's students and three new doctoral students.  This is one more than a year ago when we had five new master's students and three doctoral students.  It is a testament to the ongoing professional and personal engagement of the faculty on behalf of the students.  We are also grateful to those alumni who steer their very brightest students toward our program.  A number of our current students are of this second (or perhaps third) generation. 

We urge our alumni to keep in touch.  And be sure to attend the IU Reception at this year's SMT/AMS conference in Seattle!

Eric Isaacson

Student News

Congratulations Graduates, Job Seekers

Congratulations to Ryan McClelland and Rusty Jones, who defended their dissertations this spring and who donned their hoods at the commencement ceremony in May. Rusty has been hired permanently as Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri--Columbia, where he has been teaching the last two years. Ryan has been appointed to the faculty at the University of Toronto.

Four students completed their master's degrees this spring: Joerg Adler, Sheila Cullen, Michael DeMarco, and Erin Toelcke. Joerg begins doctoral studies at IU in the fall, while Erin will be continuing her studies at Florida State.

We are also pleased to announce that doctoral candidate, Stanley Kleppinger, has been hired to a tenure-track position at Butler University in Indianapolis, where he joins alumnus Jeff Gillespie (PhD, 1996).

Professional Activities

Our doctoral students were active on the lecture circuit in the last year. Three students, Brent Yorgason, Ryan McClelland, and Stan Kleppinger gave papers at the 2003 Music Theory Midwest conference, held in Bloomington.  Brent won the Arthur Komar award for Best Student Paper, while Ryan earned Honorable Mention. Stan will present at this year's MTMW conference in Kansas City, as well.

This spring, Amy Engelsdorfer presented a paper on poetic structure in music of Ruth Crawford Seeger at conferences in Toronto, Montreal, and Oxford.  She will present another paper at the Eth!Noise workshop in Chicago in May.  While Amy was presenting north of the border, Mike Baker was in the Southeast reading a paper on interruption at scale degree 3 at the Florida State Music Theory Forum and at the joint Music Theory Southeast/South Central Society for Music Theory conference.

A number of graduate students made a road trip to Madison to attend this year's SMT conference. Brent Yorgason, presented with Prof. Eric Isaacson at a special session on Music Informatics and Music Theory at the Society for Music Theory conference in Madison.

Finally, several doctoral students presented papers at this year's GTA Symposium, including Patrick Budelier (on a recent work by Carter; Pat teaches at St. Ambrose University), Victoria Malawey (on a Paul Simon cover of a Bob Dylan song), and Stan Kleppinger (on a movement from Copland's Third symphony).  Also presenting was Marjaana Orvokki Virtanen, a doctoral student at the University of Turku (Finland) who has spent the year at IU as a visiting Fulbright scholar doing dissertation research in collaboration with Prof. Robert Hatten. Marjaana will be presenting at Music Theory Midwest as well this year.

Alumni Updates

Mary I. Arlin (MM ’65, Ph.D.’72), professor of music at Ithaca College, is completing her second term as editor of the Society for Music Theory Newsletter and serves on the SMT Publications Committee. Her article, “Metric Mutation and Modulation: The Nineteenth-Century Speculations of F.-J. Fétis,” was published in volume 44/2 of the Journal of Music Theory, and she contributed an essay on Karel Husa’s “Concerto for Orchestra” in Karel Husa: A Composer's Life in Essays and Documents (Mellen Press, 2002). A founding member of the Music Theory Society of New York State, she served on the program committee for their annual meeting on 3–4 April 2004 at the Eastman School of Music and chaired the session on Nineteenth-Century Music.

Miguel Roig-Francoli's (PhD '90) textbook Harmony in Context (McGraw-Hill, 2003) is being used in over 50 schools this year.  He is completing another text for McGraw-Hill, Understanding Post-Tonal Music.  Miguel is Professor of Music Theory at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Mark Butler (PhD '03) recently gave presentations at the national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for Music Theory. Having just completed his first year as Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, he is currently working on a book entitled Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, and Musical Design in Electronic Dance Music, to be published by Indiana University Press.

See our Alumni Locator for a list of the last-known position/residence of our PhD graduates.

All graduates of the program are invited to send in information for the next newsletter or updates for the Alumni Locator.  Address them to isaacso@indiana.edu. 

Events

2003-04 Music Theory Colloquium Series

Our biweekly Colloquium Series, begun some five years ago, features invited guest speakers, faculty, and students, who have the opportunity to share their current research. Professional development sessions help orient students to issues they will confront as they begin their careers.

GTA News

This year's symposium, the thirteenth in the series dating back to 1980, featured eleven papers and a stimulating keynote address by Elizabeth West Marvin (Eastman School of Music).

The Indiana Theory Review continues to attract submissions on a wide variety of topics.  Recent special issues have highlighted art music written after 1960 and the analysis of popular music.  Matthew Boyer and Victoria Malawey are co-editors of ITR.

Miscellany

Congratulations, Yvonne!

Yvonne Gray, departmental secretary, completed her Associate of Arts degree in General Studies in December.  She has decided to go on and complete her B.A. As part of her studies, she's been taking courses in music theory and music appreciation, as well as piano lessons.  She even has a piano in her office now.  As if that wasn't enough, she was recognized in March for having completed 20 years of service to the university, all in the music theory/musicology office.  Congratulations, Yvonne!

Graduate Curricula Revised

Several changes in our master's and doctoral curricula will be going into effect in the fall.  We have eliminated the Master of Arts degree, which largely duplicated the Master of Music degree. For the MM, we have relaxed the counterpoint requirement to allow for a student to study counterpoint in any style, not just eighteenth-century. In the doctoral curriculum, we are eliminating the required seminars in tonal and atonal theory, along with the mysterious "dissertation track concentration," and have replaced them with additional variable topic seminars. In the major field, students will now take six seminars, chosen from among a wide range of topics to be offered each year, along with the two-semester History of Theory sequence. Master's students will also elect one of the seminars as a capstone course. The new structure will enable students to study more of the broadening diversity of topics found within the discipline and to work with more of the faculty.

New Program in Music Informatics

The recently created School of Informatics at IU has created a track in music informatics as part of its master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction. The program, developed by Prof. Eric Isaacson, builds on the Music Information Technology minor.  The School of Informatics has hired Christopher Raphael, currently Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Massachusetts--Amherst (and former professional oboist), to teach the majority of the courses.  Professor Raphael will hold an adjunct faculty appointment in music theory.

Music Theory Fund

If you would like to enhance our ability to attract the best students and provide them the best professional training, you are invited to contribute to the Music Theory Fund. You may give online by following this link to the IU Foundation Online Donation form.  In Step 2, enter "Music Theory Fund" in the "Other" box and the amount of your gift in the adjacent box. You may also simply send a check to the following address, being sure to indicate "Music Theory Fund" as the recipient.

IU Foundation
P. O. Box 500
Bloomington, IN 47402

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Faculty Spotlights

The last year saw completion of Robert Hatten’s (PhD '82) second book, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. It will be published by Indiana University Press in fall 2004, along with a paperback reprinting of Musical Meaning in Beethoven (1994), as two offerings in the new book series, “Musical Meaning and Interpretation,” for which Dr. Hatten serves as general editor. As Hatten elaborates, “I am indebted to the music editor at the Press, Dr. Gayle Sherwood, under whose direction the series will make its debut this fall at SMT/AMS in Seattle. Other books I have edited for the series include David Lidov’s new and collected essays on music semiotics, Peter Smith’s integration of Schenkerian and expressive interpretation of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C Minor, Michael Klein’s theory of intertextuality in music, and Jairo Moreno’s exploration of the listening subject in the history of theory from Zarlino to Gottfried Weber. And four more books are currently under contract.”

Last fall, Dr. Hatten gave invited presentations on musical gesture (The University of Connecticut) and the pastoral as expressive mode (New York University). This spring he presented papers at conferences on improvisation (University of Illinois) and Beethoven (Warsaw, Poland). “The invitation to present ‘Improvisation as Intimate Disclosure’ was from Bruno Nettl, distinguished ethnomusicologist. I thus began by exploring cultural values as attached to improvisatory practices, then demonstrated at the piano the expressive power of implied improvisatory passages in fully composed works by Chopin and Schumann, and concluded by questioning the presumed autonomy of the ‘work concept,’ even for this era of canon-formation.”

In the fall of 2003, Jay Hook (PhD '02) returned to Bloomington as Assistant Professor following three years on the faculty at Penn State University. A long article, “Uniform Triadic Transformations,” based on his dissertation, will soon appear in the Journal of Music Theory; JMT editor David Clampitt describes this article as “a very important paper, one that has already had an influence in advance of its publication.”

Professor Hook presented a paper titled “Signature Transformations” at the SMT meeting in Madison in November; this paper is slated to appear in written form in a volume of essays to be published in memory of John Clough. A signature transformation, as formulated by Professor Hook, transforms a fragment of diatonic music by altering its key signature—changing a major scale to a Lydian scale, for example. “These transformations form a link between transformation theory and diatonic set theory,” Professor Hook explains. “They turn out to have some really interesting mathematical properties, and I think they have a lot of potential for explaining the interaction between diatonic and chromatic structures.”

Professor Hook continues to maintain ties with the mathematics community. In January he presented an invited paper titled “Pólya’s Enumeration Theorem in Music Theory (Or, Why Are There 29 Tetrachords?)” at the national meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Phoenix. In June he will present a survey of applications of group theory in music at a small mathematics conference in Vancouver.

In May-June 2003, Gretchen Horlacher was a visitor at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, to study compositional sketches of Igor Stravinsky for a book she is writing entitled Building Blocks: Repetition and Continuity in Stravinsky's Music. She reports that "it was a real thrill to work with Stravinsky's original sketches and drafts. I got to see how he cut and pasted fragments of music together as part of the compositional process."

Professor Horlacher was a scholar-in-residence at Florida State University 16 April 2004. She taught several classes about Stravinsky, twentieth-century rhythm and meter, and working at a scholarly archive; she also gave a paper previewing her book project. Her article "Multiple Meters and Metrical Process in the Music of Steve Reich," will appear this summer in the 2000 issue of Intégral. She continues to teach large-lecture music theory classes, and will be giving a paper at this fall's College Music Society conference on how to use sound effectively in large lectures. She will also be speaking at the fall Society for Music Theory conference on Stravinsky's sketches for Symphonies of Wind Instruments.

Eric Isaacson (PhD '92) has spent much of his time on the NSF-funded Variations2 Digital Music Library Project. "Variations2," he says, "will provide online access to audio and scores, which can be synchronized, bookmarked, edited, and annotated, and used to create timelines, classroom presentations, and student activities/assignments.  It will allow us to do things we simply cannot do with existing technologies." In the last year, Isaacson has given presentations on the project (often with music theory doctoral candidate and programmer Brent Yorgason) at MTMW, CMS, and SMT, and published an article (with Don Byrd, Senior Scholar) in Computer Music Journal.

Professor Isaacson will be offering his third summer professional development workshop for high school music theory teachers in June. In July, he will conduct a similar workshop at Columbia College of Chicago.  Isaacson says, "When I 'retired' from the development committee for the Advanced Placement Exam in Music Theory in 2002, I wanted to find a way to stay involved with AP, which helps prepare students for the rigors of the college core curriculum."

In March he visited Caracas as a consultant on music technology applications with the Venezuelan National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras and Choirs. With former faculty member Michael Buchler, Isaacson is developing a proposal for an edited volume on the role of similarity in post-tonal music. Finally, in May 2004, he will give the fifteenth William Poland Lecture at Ohio State University. His talk is titled, "The Technology of Music Scholarship and the Scholarship of Music Technology."

Last summer Marianne Kielian-Gilbert received an IU Instructional Development Grant to design a pilot study for teaching music analysis using different media. She also lectured on "Recontextualizing Music--Between Form, Meaning, and Materiality" for the Critical Studies & Experimental Practices (CSEP) group in the music department at the University of California--San Diego, and was a participant in the 2003 Mannes Institute on Transformational Theory and Analysis at Mannes College of Music in New York.

Her work on Chopin and contemporary media resulted in the recent publication of two essays, one on Chopin’s music in different cultural contexts, "Chopiniana and Music's Contextual Allusions," in The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (edited by musicology faculty member Halina Goldberg, Indiana University Press, 2004); the other, a study of the temporality of linear (left-to-right) and vertical (back-to-front) orientations in tonal music, "Interpreting Schenkerian Prolongation," published in Music Analysis 22 (2003).

This spring she was a Visiting Scholar in the IU Institute for Advanced Study for a sabbatical leave for her book in progress, Engaging Sounds: Music, Embodiment, and (Inter)subjectivity. For the upcoming academic year she has been awarded an IU Arts and Humanities grant for partial release time to continue work on this project. Professor Kielian-Gilbert has been promoted to the rank of Professor beginning this fall.

Gary Potter (PhD '71) continues to teach a theory course every semester, but the majority of his time and energy goes into the administrative position, Director of Music Undergraduate Studies, he assumed in 2000. He also continues as an active jazz performer, playing piano and bass in several dozen gigs each year.

On May 23, 2003, Lewis Rowell presented the fourteenth annual William Poland Lecture in Music Theory at Ohio State University, with the title "The Public Life of Musical Works: Musical 'Icons' and Twenty-First-Century Culture." This prestigious endowed lecture series was established in 1990 as a memorial to Bill Poland, one of the legendary figures in music theory in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. The lecture will appear this summer in a volume of papers to be published by the International Semiotics Institute, Imatra, Finland.

On December 4, Professor Rowell received an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, in recognition of his article "New Temporal Horizons and the Theory of Music." The article appears in a collection of studies entitled Music in the Mirror: Reflections on the History of Music Theory and Literature for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Andreas Giger and Thomas J. Mathiesen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).

Rowell adds a personal note: "I would like to let my friends and former students know that I am planning to retire from the Indiana University faculty at the end of the 2004-2005 academic year, after a total of 30 years at IU in two separate appointments (the first beginning in 1959)."

In November of last year, Frank Samarotto read a paper entitled, “Treading the Limits of Tonal Coherence: Transformation vs. Prolongation in Selected Works by Brahms,” at the SMT meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, and in the following April, at a MTSNYS meeting at the Eastman School in Rochester, a paper on, “Schenker’s ‘Free Forms of Interruption,’ and the Strict: Toward a General Theory of Interruption.” On the latter, Samarotto notes that, “It is my most 'theoretical' paper yet: interruption has presented a something of a Gordian knot to Schenkerian logic, and I think I was able to do a bit of untying of that knot.”

Professor Samarotto was also invited to be a visiting scholar at both Emory University and Pennsylvania State University; at both he lectured on, “Sublimating Sharp 4: An Exercise in Schenkerian Energetics.” At Emory, he also conducted a workshop on teaching Schenkerian analysis for local music faculty in the Atlanta area. “It was a small group but an intensely interested one; after three-and-half hours, attendees seemed reluctant to leave. I really appreciated the interest in a form of analysis that I love.”

In the summer of 2002, long-time department chair Mary Wennerstrom (PhD '67) was appointed Associate Dean for Instruction in the School of Music. Although that position carries with it duties too numerous to count, she continues to teach a course each semester. In November 2002, in recognition of her services as treasurer of the Society for Music Theory for the first fifteen years after its founding, and later as chair of the Professional Development Committee, Prof. Wennerstrom was made an Honorary Lifetime Member of SMT.  As Prof. Robert Hatten noted in the citation he wrote for the event, "Her efforts have helped to shape the musicianship of many of the best performers today, as well as a whole generation of grateful theorists." Professor Wennerstrom's remarks at the 25th anniversary banquet, "SMT at 25: A View from the Balance Sheet," were published in Music Theory Online 9/1.

Our Emeritus Faculty

Vernon Kliewer (PhD '61). "Green Valley, Arizona, has been our home since 1997. Until recently I was the president of our homeowner’s association. My wife and I are avid consumers of music—former student George Hanson is the conductor of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra—and theater, as well as listening to and visiting with former IU students who are on faculty at the University of Arizona. Reading music theory journals, European 20th-century history, late 15th- and early 16th-century vernacular Dutch music theory and numerous contemporary writers on Southwestern subjects, fiction and otherwise, are strong interests. We enjoy learning about and understanding the culture, art, and crafts of the American Indians of Arizona/New Mexico and Mexican arts and crafts, particularly the pottery of Mata Ortiz and the Tarahumara baskets of Copper Canyon. To get away from Green Valley we travel with small group tours in Mexico and Arizona, or drive on our own in the U.S."

Benito Rivera. "Diane and I are still in Bloomington and intend to stay here for a long time to come. I spend a good amount (a great amount?) of time trying to lower my golf score, and for thrills, I am learning to ice-skate. Then I keep my piano fingers practiced by having weekly music-making sessions with a baritone (Sae-Jung Park, DM, IU 1990). In leisurely fashion I get to read more and think of some (actually, many) things I have not understood about early music theory. I recently contributed an entry on Johannes Lippius for the new edition of MGG and am currently serving on the AMS50 Committee of the AMS."

Allen Winold (PhD '62). "My wife Helga and I have been playing chamber music and visiting children and grandchildren whenever we can. I have also been working on completing an online version of my book on the analysis of the Bach Cello Suites and trying to learn Spanish."

Gary Wittlich. "Since retiring from the School of Music in 1997, then from the Office of the Vice-President for Information Technology in December, 1998, I retain a position as consultant for teaching and learning IT with University IT Services. My wife and I spend winters in Florida enjoying the sun and our friends there. In general I spend my time reading (mysteries, science and technology, politics), playing the piano (I continue to do an annual program on American popular song for the IU MINI-University, as well as some programs in Florida), playing golf, and spending time with family and friends."