April May 2023 College News

John Denis and music studies major Geneva Le were featured in an Inside TXST article, “TXST School of Music Tunes up the Next Generation of Music Educators.” Cynthia Gonzalez presented the paper “Think Aloud Videos: A Pedagogical Tool for Music Theory” at the April 20-22 meeting of the Sociedad de Análisis y Teoría Musical held in Madrid. Kari Klier performed as soloist in John Psathas’s Koolish Zein with the McNeil High School Percussion Ensemble at the Music for All National Festival. Lynn Ledbetter , Ames Asbell , Karla Hamelin , and Ian Davidson were invited to present master classes and concerts on February 13th, at the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon in Monterrey. This year’s concerts represented the fourth collaboration between Texas State and UANL. Lynn Ledbetter was a featured concerto soloist with the Angelo State Symphony Orchestra for the Van der Stucken Music Festival at St. Joseph’s Halle in Fredericksburg on April 22th. The Van der Stucken Music Festival was founded in 1991 in honor of Frank Van der Stucken, a native of Fredericksburg and the first conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Kevin Mooney presented his paper “Goethe and Schubert: In Search of Conceptions of Bildung” at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and Goethe Society of North America Conference in St. Louis on March 11th. This was an invited presentation for the session “Musical Responses to Goethe’s Works: Texts, Contexts, Genres.” In addition, Dr. Mooney was the featured guest on “The Bookmark,” a program on KLRU-TV, Austin PBS. Mooney discussed his newly published book, Texas Jazz Singer Louise Tobin in the Golden Age of Swing and Beyond , on the February 20th live broadcast. Dimitar Ninov won two Big Special Prizes at the Sixth International Composition Competition “Artistes en Herbe” Luxembourg 2023: Festival Bridges 2 for his Gallery of Images , a collection of piano pieces for children to be performed in concert, and Prize Pianissimo for his Piano Album: Thirteen Light and Descriptive Piano Pieces . [2] College of Fine Arts and Communication | 19 Todd Oxford was chosen a semi-finalist in the 2022 Petrichor International Music Competition. Amin Sharifi, Petrichor Records Artistic Director, wrote that his “exceptional talent and outstanding music stood out among the many submissions we received.” Dr. Oxford also received the Petrichor Records Publishing Award in recognition of his outstanding achievement. This award provides a comprehensive package of publishing and label services, including administrative services, graphic design, digital distribution, social media marketing and promotion, media exposure, interviews, a press release kit, and optional sound engineering services. Nico Schüler presented a paper at the international conference Possibilities and Limitations of Digital Annotation Tools for Audio-Visual Material with a Focus on Sound and Music at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany. He was invited to present on “The Harmonic Language of African American Composer Jacob J. Sawyer (1856- 1885)” at the national conference Theorizing African American Music, held in Cleveland. At the Twenty- First Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society in Athens, Greece, Dr. Schüler presented his latest research on “Black Minstrel and Jubilee Music in the Early 1880s: Repertoire, Touring Schedules, Geography, and Forgotten Musicians.” And at the international conference on Musical Multimedia in Kraków, Poland, he presented the paper “On the Religious and Political Functions of Reggae and Reggaetón.” Last but not least, Dr. Schüler published a research paper on “Online Research Methods for Rediscovering Forgotten Composers: Using Online Databases and Archives” in the book Music in the Disruptive Era (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), edited by David Hurwitz and Pedro Ordóñez Eslava. [3] Jack Wilds served as the clinician for the Alabama Middle School All-State Band in Huntsville. They prepared a concert over the course of twelve hours of rehearsal. The band was an auditioned group made up of over 100 students from across the state. The audience included hundreds of band directors from Alabama. The program included one of his compositions and a piece by JaRod Hall , one of our graduate composition students. The other clinicians were Frank Ticheli, Rebecca Phillip, Ben Lorzeno, and Arris Golden. [4]