Congratulations to Dr. Elizabeth Grace Elmi who has been offered a tenure track position of Assistant Professor in Musicology at Williams College (MA), starting in Fall 2023. She was Visiting Professor at UNC Chapel Hill for the 2021-2022 academic year and she has spent the last year in Italy, first as a Fulbright fellow at the University of Basilicata (Potenza) and currently as a Rome Prize fellow in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the American Academy in Rome. She has been conducting archival research on the topic “Inscribing the Self in Occupied Southern Italy”, which will be the basis for her post-dissertation book project. Along with her husband Dorian Jackman (JSoM DM in double bass), she is looking forward to beginning her next chapter at Williams College, a top-ranked private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Dr. Elmi received an M.A. in Italian literature and a Ph.D. in musicology from Indiana University. Her research on “the vernacular song practices of 15th- and 16th-century Italy, as well as other cultural contact zones of the Mediterranean, through questions of orality and literacy, creative agency, politics, and identity” soon yielded international recognition. Her 2019 dissertation, titled “Singing Lyric among Local Aristocratic Networks in the Aragonese-Ruled Kingdom of Naples: Aesthetic and Political Meaning in the Written Records of an Oral Practice,” and advised by Professor Massimo Ossi, received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the International Musicological Society (IMS). Shortly after, Dr. Elmi was awarded the 2021 Susan J. Ridyard prize for her conference paper, “L’arboro captivo fa captivo fructo: Pastoral Politics in the Lyric Song of Late-Fifteenth Century Southern Italy” at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, held at the University of the South in Sewanee (TN).

Dr. Elmi extends her gratitude to the department for all the support over the years. Of her advisor, she says that, “Massimo Ossi was a steadfast teacher and mentor to me throughout my PhD. Our discussions about music, literature, manuscripts, the humanities, and so much more remain some of the most intellectually stimulating and influential of my career.”  She also feels “particularly indebted to the other members of my dissertation committee, Giovanni Zanovello and Giuliano Di Bacco, for their feedback on my dissertation project and to Peter Burkholder for his guidance in questions of both pedagogy and research.”

We welcome Dr. Elmi back to the U.S. for her new position and wish her the very best start to her well-earned professorship.

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 17^th 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).

Next week, the IU Musicology Department will host Anna Maria Busse Berger, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Medieval and Renaissance History and Theory at the University of California Davis, as she visits Bloomington to deliver the Inaugural Peter Burkholder Lecture, established in May 2019 in honor of Distinguished Professor Emerita J. Peter Burkholder and in celebration of his retirement. The event will take place in Ford Hall (located in the Simon Music Center) on Friday, April 1, at 12:30 pm. Her talk, titled “Bruno Gutmann, the WaChagga, and Jugendbewegung,” will present her research on the work of the most important German missionary and ethnographer active in East Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. See abstract below.

Anna Maria Busse Berger she served on the music faculty at UC Davis from 1989 through her retirement in 2020. Busse Berger has published articles and books on notation, mensuration and proportion signs, music and memory, mathematics and music, historiography, and music in African mission stations. Her article “Spreading the Gospel of Singbewegung: An Ethnomusicologist-Missionary in Tanganyika of the 1930s” won both the Colin Slim Award for best article by a senior scholar from the AMS and the Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2014. Her book In Search of Medieval Music in Africa and Germany: Scholars, Singers and Missionaries 1891–1961 was published by University of Chicago Press in 2020.

This event is co-sponsored by the Jacobs School of Music Lecture Committee, the Department of History, the Department of Germanic Studies, the African Studies Program, the Institute for European Studies, and the Department of Musicology.

Please email musicol@indiana.edu with questions or for more information.

This weekend, on Friday and Saturday, March 25 and 26, the IU Graduate Theory and Musicology Associations will host the Twenty-Eighth Annual Symposium of Research in Music. The event will feature keynote presentations by Catherine Coppola (Hunter College of CUNY), Michèle Duguay (Indiana University), and Sergio Ospina-Romero (Indiana University) as well as an interactive workshop titled “Doing Meaningful Musicology with Canonic Opera,” which will be led by Prof. Coppola.

The symposium was started in 1994 by the Graduate Theory Association. For the last two years, the GTA has partnered with colleagues in the Graduate Musicology Association to increase the symposium’s diversity and impact in the graduate population. The symposium invites graduate students from the US and Canada, IU professors, and a guest keynote speaker to present research, participate in workshops, and engage in lively debate about music scholarship and its impact.

This event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, the Departments of Music Theory and Musicology, and the Indiana University Funding board.

Schedule and information are available on the symposium website.