Ph.D. candidate Kaylee Feller-Simmons was awarded both the summer and academic-year Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships through Indiana University’s Institute for European Studies. These awards will support her recently approved dissertation project, which explores how adolescents in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic used popular music to shape and express gender identity. Feller-Simmons’ research focuses on songbooks marketed to youth that contain lyrics but little or no surviving music notation. By analyzing these texts, she uncovers the cultural influence of adolescents in early modern Europe, challenging dominant narratives that overlook the musical contributions of this age group.

Learn more about the FLAS Fellowship here.

We are thrilled to announce that Ph.D. candidate Travis Whaley has been awarded the Irene Alm Memorial Prize by the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (SSCM) for his paper “The Coexistence of Organ Tablature and Thoroughbass in the Seventeenth Century.” This prestigious award recognizes the best student presentation at the SSCM’s annual spring conference.

Named in honor of Irene Alm, a founding member of SSCM and an influential scholar of seventeenth-century theatrical and dance music, the prize has been awarded annually since 2001. It celebrates excellence in student scholarship and supports the recipient’s participation in the following year’s SSCM conference. Whaley will receive a $1,500 grant to cover travel, lodging, and conference expenses for 2026.

Whaley’s winning paper explores the parallel use of organ tablature and thoroughbass notation in the seventeenth century—a period marked by rich experimentation in musical notation and performance practice. His work contributes to our understanding of how musicians navigated overlapping systems of notation and sheds light on broader questions about transmission, pedagogy, and the development of keyboard technique during the early modern period and beyond.

We congratulate Travis on this well-deserved recognition and look forward to seeing how his innovative research continues to shape the field!

We are excited to share that Yishai Rubin, a Ph.D. student in musicology, has been awarded a Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant from IU’s Office of the Vice President for International Affairs (OVPIA). The $3,500 grant will support Rubin’s research trip to the United Kingdom in summer 2025, where he will conduct archival work at the British Library in London.

Rubin’s research focuses on the life and career of Johann Peter Salomon (1745–1815), an underexplored figure in eighteenth-century European music history. Best known for arranging Joseph Haydn’s celebrated visits to England and helping to shape London’s burgeoning public concert scene, Salomon was also a violinist, composer, and impresario with deep ties to major musical figures of his time, including Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Many aspects of Salomon’s early career, however, remain obscure—especially his fifteen years as concertmaster at the court of Prince Henry of Prussia. Rubin’s archival work aims to uncover new material about this lesser-known period, as well as to locate information about Salomon’s largely lost compositional output and his interactions with key musical families like the Bachs and the Bendas.

The British Library holds several promising collections for this line of inquiry, including the papers of William Ayrton (1777–1858), a music critic and personal friend of Salomon’s who inherited part of his estate. With digital access currently limited, on-site consultation is essential for advancing this research.

We congratulate Yishai Rubin on this prestigious award and look forward to the discoveries his summer research will bring to light!

Jacobs School of Music student Kathryn Reilly has been named recipient of the 2025 Austin B. Caswell Award. The award was given for Reilly’s paper, “Cantonese Opera Singers—Composers and Masters of Communication: The Role of Linguistic Tones and Vocal Improvisation in Cantonese Opera.”

The committee was impressed by the creative topic and argument. They described the paper as well-cited and researched, praising its clear and effective writing and the substantial list of sources. The author shows a convincing personal voice and a deep connection to the topic. Through a clear argument and effective use of graphics and examples, the author makes a technical argument founded on linguistics and a non-Western repertoire accessible to non-specialists.

Reilly is a senior from Mamaroneck, New York studying ​vocal performance at the Jacobs School of Music, with a minor in media advertising. She studies voice with Michelle DeYoung. Her Chinese, Irish, and Puerto Rican heritage deeply influences her identity, musically and artistically. On the rare chance she isn’t singing, you can find her whipping something up in the kitchen, biking around campus, or snapping pics of IU’s finest residents—its squirrels. She is also the social chair of Indiana University’s premier all-female a cappella group, Ladies First. She graduates in May 2025 and is planning to get her Masters in Vocal Performance post-graduation.

“Cantonese Opera Singers—Composers and Masters of Communication: The Role of Linguistic Tones and Vocal Improvisation in Cantonese Opera.”
by Kathryn Reilly

In the Western operatic tradition, the writing of libretti—which contain the plot and the poetry—precedes the composition of the music. Composers don’t start their work from a blank page but from a finished dramatic text, which dictates the type of setting each part will require. This practice is reversed in Cantonese opera (Yueju), a musical tradition from far south China. In this kind of opera, librettists create new texts for pre-existing melodies, having to align—as much as possible—the six tones of the Cantonese language with the chosen melody. This paper describes the compositional process emphasizing the crucial role of performance, where singers interpret and improvise upon the written text to ensure the best artistic result of the complex setting.

Austin B. Caswell was a devoted teacher and member of the musicology faculty at Indiana University

The Austin B. Caswell Award was established in 1998 in honor of Caswell, a devoted teacher and member of the musicology faculty at Indiana University from 1966 until his retirement in 1996. Each spring, the award recognizes the best undergraduate music history projects submitted at the Jacobs School.

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).

Doctoral candidate Miguel Arango Calle has been invited to participate in the international conference “Towards a New History of German Music Theatre: Embodiment, Sounds, and Global Mobilities, c. 1650–1820,” to be held in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic. The workshop will bring together contributors to the forthcoming Cambridge History of German Opera, to which Arango Calle will contribute a chapter.

The gathering, hosted at the Krumlov Study Centre, will offer participants the opportunity to present and discuss draft chapters in an intimate, collaborative setting. For those still in progress, the event also welcomes trial runs of work in development. In addition to scholarly exchange, attendees will have access to the Schwarzenberg archive and a guided tour of the eighteenth-century baroque theater in Český Krumlov—one of the best-preserved historical theaters in Europe.

The workshop coincides with the town’s celebrated Baroque Night hat features a candlelit opera production in the historic theater, access to the palace, and a garden illuminated for the occasion.

While in Europe, Arango Calle also plans to visit archives relevant to his dissertation research and gain hands-on experience as a stagehand at the historical theater—a rare opportunity to explore baroque stagecraft from behind the scenes.

Congratulations and good luck, Miguel!

ELIGIBILITY

Students may nominate their own projects. Alternatively, students’ projects may be nominated or encouraged by faculty members, associate instructors, and classmates. To be eligible for this year’s award, a project must have been submitted in fulfillment of course requirements for a music history class during the 2024 calendar year. You may revise the project before submitting it for the award (that is, it is not required that the version submitted be exactly what was turned in for a grade).

A student need not be currently enrolled as an IU undergraduate in order to be eligible to submit a project; for example, a student who submitted a project for M402 in Spring 2024 may have since graduated, but is still eligible to submit that project for consideration. Each student may submit only one project.

PRIZE

Each winner will receive a certificate and $250 award. The IU Department of Musicology will also post an award announcement on its website.

DEADLINE

Submissions must be received by March 10th, 2025.

HOW TO APPLY

Complete the electronic submission form. For papers, upload a clean PDF version (without comments from instructors or editorial marks), identified by title only (not by student name). For research projects delivered in podcast or lecture-recital formats, please submit the written script and final audio file with student names removed.

Submitted projects will be read and judged by a committee of faculty members in the Musicology Department. The committee will not consider submissions that arrive after the deadline or that fail to meet the submission guidelines. If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to the musicology department at musicol@iu.edu.

The Austin B. Caswell award was established in 1998 in honor of Prof. Caswell, a devoted teacher and member of the musicology faculty at Indiana University from 1966 until his retirement in 1996. The Caswell Award recognizes the two best undergraduate music history projects (such as research papers, podcasts, and lecture-recitals) submitted at the Jacobs School of Music each year.