The IU Musicology Department would like to congratulate Jamey Guzman and Ari Schwartz on being awarded the 2022 Austin B. Caswell Award! Each spring, the Caswell award recognizes the excellent research and writing being done by undergraduate students in the IU Jacobs School of Music. It was established in 1998 in honor of Dr. Caswell, a devoted teacher and member of the musicology faculty at Indiana University from 1966 until his retirement in 1996.
Jamey J. Guzman is a rising senior pursuing B.M. degrees in Flute Performance and Music Composition. As a composer, Jamey is deeply passionate about contemporary opera and vocal music, and strives to use the unique power of the human voice to tell necessary stories of today’s people with excitingly experimental, innovative, and interdisciplinary techniques. Her paper, “The Accademia degli Incogniti: Roots of Misogyny in Seventeenth-Century Opera,” revisits and rethinks key moments in Western music history. It offers a model example for reexamination of gender representation in two libretti from a foundational collective of 17th century Venetian opera creators. The committee admired Guzman’s efforts to transcend mere reporting on scholarship. Her careful analysis of primary sources, strong framing with secondary sources, and an original and confident scholarly voice help us see the early years of opera in a new light.
Recently, Jamey’s work has been featured at the N.E.O. Voice Festival in Los Angeles as well as at Really Spicy Opera’s concert at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris. She has been commissioned by New Voices Opera for their 2022 mainstage event, Strange Trace Opera for their 2022 Stencils Festival, and SONIT for a new flute work which will premiere in New York City in the summer. She looks forward to her upcoming summer residency with Nightingale Opera Theater, where she will study with Jake Heggie and have her chamber opera and two aria collections performed. Jamey is a flute student of Kate Lukas, whose guidance and support led her to specialize in contemporary chamber music and take on dozens of student composition premieres each year; she cites this deep exposure to myriad musical styles as a core inspiration in her own work. She has studied composition with Don Freund, Tansy Davies, and P.Q. Phan, as well as with John Gibson and Chi Wang in the IU Center for Electronic and Computer Music.
Ariel Sol “Ari” Bertulfo Schwartz is pursuing B.M. degrees in Harp Performance and Music Composition. Through his music, Ari aims to create community through person-oriented performance experiences. His dedication to the human experience is also reflected in his academic writing. His paper, “Spanish Colonial Era Filipino Music as an Interpretive Process”, interrogates ideas of musical hybridity by re-examining colonial encounters in the Philippines. Rather than assuming indigenous Filipino music to assimilate smoothly into Spanish musical practices, Schwartz argues for a different musical dynamic: of Spanish imposition followed by Filipino reaction. This different approach to intercultural contact acknowledges the complexity of colonialism, while offering an alternative view on the content and development of traditionalism in Filipino music. The committee particularly admired Schwartz’s creativity in building an argument through diverse and interesting primary sources.
As an internationally recognized composer, producer, and harpist, Ari is at the cutting edge of musical arts. A 2022 Performance Today Young Artist in Residence, he thoroughly enjoys interdisciplinary work and strives to dismantle traditional accessibility barriers to diversify both the stage and audience. Ari studies with professors Jeremy Podgursky (composition) and Elzbieta Szmyt (harp). He is a winner of the USA International Harp Competition Ruth Inglefield Composition Contest and his compositions and commissioned works have been performed in such places as the Peoria Civic Center, Grant Park Music Festival’s Music in the Parks Series, and Dominican University’s Lund Auditorium. Through his synthesis of experiences and identities, Ari brings a genre-defying, multimedia approach to contemporary performance practices.
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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