On April 20, 2006, the Jacobs School of Music lost five remarkably talented students in the crash of a small plane near Bloomington: Chris Carducci, Garth Eppley, Georgina Joshi, Zachary Novak, and Robert Samels. In the wake of the tragedy, Yatish and Louise Joshi, parents of one of the deceased students, have been extraordinarily generous in their support of the school. In 2012, a donation from the Georgina Joshi Foundation enabled the establishment of the Five Friends Master Class Series, to benefit several departments within the school with which the students were associated. The Robert Samels Visiting Scholar Program in the Department of Music Theory is a part of this series.
In 2013, the Five Friends Master Class Series began to invite established performers and teachers to the IU Jacobs School of Music to hold master classes, lectures, and residencies. The Series honors five talented students who attended the Jacobs School whose lives were taken in a plane crash in 2006. The invited musicians have been experts in the fields of music theory, composition, choral music, voice, and early music.
Bass-baritone and composer Robert Samels was born on June 2, 1981. 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. Samels is remembered for many things. He led instrumental and vocal ensembles in a wide variety of repertoires. His resonant bass-baritone voice earned him leading roles in several productions of the IU Opera Theater, including the world premiere of Our Town by Ned Rorem and the collegiate premiere of A View from the Bridge by William Bolcom; he was to have sung three roles at the Wolf Trap Opera in the summer of 2006. He was a regular announcer on WFIU, Indiana University’s NPR station; he wrote and announced many episodes of “Ether Game,” WFIU’s popular classical-music quiz show, and had begun writing and producing “Cantabile,” a program that creatively sampled many diverse nooks and crannies of the vocal repertoire. He composed more than 35 works, including a full-length oratorio and an opera, Pilatvs, whose premiere he conducted in 2005.
Along with his many other activities, Robert also worked as an instructor and aural skills coordinator in the Music Theory Department, and was well known to all in the department. He was a much-loved teacher, deeply committed to his students and to innovative pedagogy. The Robert Samels Visiting Scholar Program aims to honor the memory of this prodigiously talented and prolific young musician by bringing to campus scholars who share his breadth of interests and his zeal for scholarship, pedagogy, and all aspects of the musical experience.
Past visitors in the Robert Samels Visiting Scholars Program
2024–25
Eric Drott, University of Texas at Austin
Nadine Hubbs, University of Michigan
2023–24
Fred Maus, University of Virginia
Psyche Loui, Northeastern University
2022–23
Kofi Agawu, CUNY
René Rusch, University of Michigan
2021–22
Megan Long, Oberlin University
Michael Spitzer, University of Liverpool
2020–21
Sumanth Gopinath, University of Minnesota
Poundie Burstein, CUNY
2019–20
Judith Lochhead, Stonybrook University
Alexander Rehding, Harvard University
2018–19
Nancy Rao, Rutgers University
Dean Sutcliffe, University of Auckland
2017–18
John Covach, Eastman School of Music/University of Rochester
Ian Quinn, Yale University
2016–17
Eric Clarke, University of Oxford
Ellie Hisama, Columbia University
2015–16
Patrick McCreless, Yale
Lisa Margulis, University of Arkansas
Dora Hanninen, University of Maryland
2014–15
Christopher Hasty, Harvard University
Scott Burnham, Princeton University
Robert Gjerdingen, Northwestern University
2013–14
Jocelyn Neal, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Richard Cohn, Yale University
Danuta Mirka, University of Southampton
2012–13
Joseph Straus, CUNY Graduate Center
Janet Schmalfeldt, Tufts University
Peter Schubert, McGill University
For additional details about some of our past Five Friends lectures, visit our IU Music Theory Blog.