The Austin B. Caswell Award was established in 1998 in honor of Professor Caswell, a devoted teacher and member of the musicology faculty at Indiana University from 1966 until his retirement in 1996. The award recognizes the two best undergraduate music history papers written at the Jacobs School of Music each year and students may nominate their own papers or papers may be nominated by faculty members, associate instructors, and classmates.
The selection process was delayed this year, due to the evolving novel coronavirus (COVID-19) situation and the rapid shift to online teaching and learning, but the IU Musicology Departmental Awards Committee has now announced two winners of the 2020 awards.
Soprano Amane Machida will be a senior at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music this fall, studying voice with Carlos Montané. Her paper, “Handel’s Two Divas,” successfully compares two Handel arias using computer-assisted score analysis and a “group science” approach to musicology. Presented here on a small scale, Machida’s exemplary study offers a clinic for identifying and learning appropriate digital tools (in this case the MIT MediaLab’s music21), locating and creating datasets, and collaborating with experts across a variety of fields.
Amane loves creating music with her friends. Some of her recent projects include performances of Schubert’s Shepherd on the Rock with both periodic and modern instrumentation. She is a member of NOTUS and actively performs new compositions to share the messages of living artists. She performed Second Lady/Spirit in The Magic Flute at Lyric Opera Studio Weimar and Second Lady at Le Voci. At IU Opera Theater, she has appeared as Youca in L’Étoile, in the chorus for The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs and Parsifal. In 2019, after participating in SongFest, she gave her first recital in Tokyo, Japan.
Regretfully, her 2020 summer performance plans were all cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic but she continues working on new projects, including research on legato singing.
Alex Tedrow is a composer, musician, and educator who strives to inspire and connect performers and listeners of all ages to fresh, fun, innovative music and technology. His paper, “The Brevity of Breves,” lays out a sophisticated and elegant history of relative note durations during the Medieval Era. Effectively synthesizing a series of distinguished studies into an efficient narrative covering four centuries of developments, Tedrow’s narrative brings us into a complex and dynamic world of rhythmic representation that, in his words, “gradually shifted from being a preservative resource for memory aid to a multi-faceted tool for composition, conception of music, performance reading, an educational resource for proportions and philosophy, and a canvas for visual art.”
Alex is pursuing a B.M. degree in music composition with minors in education, electronic music, and conducting at the Jacobs School of Music. His diverse catalogue includes band, orchestra, choral, chamber, solo, electroacoustic, and sound installation pieces. In 2019, Alex studied at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris where he premiered Planet Playground – an interactive, data-driven project incorporating crowd participation via mobile devices. He was also recently awarded the IU Morris and Sheila Hass Award in Computer Music and was semi-finalist for the ASCAP Morton Gould Award.
He is currently co-composing the soundtrack for The Shadows that Linger, a new video game by Red Ink Games. He is an avid animal lover, biker, and spelunker – all themes that often inspire his work.
AUSTIN B. CASWELL
Caswell was born in Minneapolis, MN, the son of Austin B. Caswell Sr. and Corice Woodruff Caswell. A graduate of West High School (Minneapolis, 1949), Caswell received his B.A. in History from Amherst College (1953), and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Minnesota (1957, 1964).
His early years of teaching included the Vermont Academy and the University of Minnesota General College. But the bulk of his teaching career was as Professor of Musicology at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music (1966-1996) where he served as Chairman of the Musicology Department for several years. He also taught for the IU Honors College (1973-2006) and the IU Intensive Freshman Seminar program.
A lifetime choral musician, Caswell also served as Music Director for several churches including Wayzata Community Church (Minneapolis, MN, 1961-1966) and First United Church (Bloomington, IN, 1966-1971).
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