The IU Department of Music Theory welcomes Nadine Hubbs to deliver two talks as part of the Five Friends Master Class Series in Music Theory. Hubbs is a musicologist, historian, theorist of music and society, and professor of women’s and gender studies and music at University of Michigan.
Hubbs has published on topics ranging from Bernstein to queer disco to Taylor Swift; two award-winning books, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound and Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music; and the award-winning collection Uncharted Country: New Voices and Perspectives in Country Music Studies. Her public-facing work features in outlets including the New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, BBC, and the Dolly Parton’s America podcast. Hubbs’s current book project is Border Country: Mexico, America, and Country Music.
Tuesday, October 15
5:00 pm, Ford-Crawford Hall
Music Theory Five Friends Guest Lecture
Nadine Hubbs (University of Michigan), “Country-Loving Mexican Americans: Borderlands Country Music Lovers’ Duel Patriotism and Inevitable Fandom”
Wednesday. October 16
4:00 pm, SM267 (Library)
Music Theory Colloquium Series Guest Lecture
Nadine Hubbs (University of Michigan), “Queer Influences in Country Music: The First Hundred Years”
Five Friends Master Class Series – Honoring Robert Samels
The Five Friends Master Class Series honoring the lives of five talented Jacobs School of Music students—Chris Carducci, Garth Eppley, Georgina Joshi, Zachary Novak, and Robert Samels—was established in 2012 with a gift of $1 million from the Georgina Joshi Foundation, Inc. This annual series of lectures, master classes, and residencies by a number of the world’s leading musicians and teachers focuses on areas of interest most relevant to the lives of the five friends—voice performance, choral conducting, early music, music theory, composition, and opera. The Georgina Joshi Foundation was established in 2007 as the vision of Georgina Joshi’s mother, Louise Addicott-Joshi, to provide educational and career development opportunities for young musicians and to encourage and support public performance of music. The gift to the school establishes a permanent way for the world to learn about each of the five friends, their musical talents and passions, and to encourage the development of similar talents and passions in current and future music students. The establishment of this endowment by the families is administered by the IU Foundation.
Bass-baritone and composer Robert Samels was born on June 2, 1981, and died in a plane crash on April 20, 2006. He was a doctoral student in choral conducting at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and had studied voice with Giorgio Tozzi and Costanza Cuccaro. He began his vocal studies with Alfred Anderson at the University of Akron and Andreas Poulimenos at Bowling Green State University. Samels had recently appeared as Mr. Gibbs in the world premiere of Our Town by Ned Rorem, as Marco in the collegiate premiere of William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge, and as Joseph and Herod in the collegiate premiere of El Nino by John Adams. In September 2005, he conducted the premiere of his own opera, Pilatvs. As a member of the Wolf Trap Opera Company for 2006, he would have added three roles that summer, including Bartolo in Le Nozze di Figaro, Friar Laurence in Roméo et Juliette, and Pluto in Telemann’s Orpheus. Other opera credits included the title roles of Don Pasquale and Il Turco in Italia, as well as Leporello in Don Giovanni, Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the summer of 2004, he performed Creon in the New York premiere of John Eaton’s Antigone. Samels also frequently performed in the oratorio repertoire. In the spring of 2005, he was selected as a semi-finalist in the annual competition of the Oratorio Society of New York. He was an announcer with public radio station WFIU, as well as the host and producer of its Cantabile program. A soloist with Aguavá New Music Studio, he had recently performed a concert at the Library of Congress. Samels was an associate instructor in the Jacobs School’s Music Theory Department, where was loved and admired by his students.
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