President
Byron Adams
Professor of Composition and Musicology in the Music Department of the University of California, Riverside
byron.adams@ucr.eduByron Adams’s scholarly work was recognized in 1985 when he was awarded the first Ralph Vaughan Williams Research Fellowship. He has published widely on the subject of English music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, speaking on this topic over the BBC and at three National Meetings of the American Musicological Society. He is co-editor of Vaughan Williams Essays, and has contributed four entries to the revised edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In 2000, the American Musicological Society bestowed the Philip Brett Award on Adams for his work on British music. He was recently named scholar-in-residence for the 2007 Bard Music Festival, “Elgar and His World.”
Vice-President
Allan Atlas (2007-2008)
My interests in music of Victorian England are threefold: (1) music as represented in contemporary fiction (articles about music in the novels of Wilkie Collins and George Gissing; (2) amateur music-making among England socio-economic elite (a recently completed article is “Lord Arthur’s ‘Infernals’: Arthur James Balfour and the Concertina,” while a project that is at its very earliest stage is “Mary Gladstone: The Prime Minister’s Daughter as Music Critic”); and, having mentioned the magic instrument, (3) the role of the English concertina during the period.
Treasurer
Christina Fuhrmann
Assistant Professor of Music, Ashland University
cefuhrmann@hotmail.comDr. Fuhrmann received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis with a dissertation titled “‘Adapted and Arranged for the English Stage’: Continental Operas Transformed for the London Theater, 1814-33.” She has published articles in Nineteenth-Century Music Review and in Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music, delivered lectures at Washington University and the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, and presented papers at numerous national and international conferences. Her current work focuses on theater music and imported opera in early nineteenth-century London.
Secretary
Eric Saylor
Assistant Professor, Drake University
eric.saylor@drake.eduEric Saylor is Assistant Professor of Music History at Drake University. He holds an M.A. in Musicology from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan. His main area of specialization is British music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has focused on the life and works of Ralph Vaughan Williams in both his master’s thesis (“‘If Silence Could Speak’: A Reassessment of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral Symphony”) and doctoral dissertation (“The Significance of Nation in the Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams”). During the 1998 academic year, Dr. Saylor served as editorial assistant at the British Library (London) helping collect, transcribe, and annotate Vaughan Williams’s complete correspondence. He has presented papers at the University of New Mexico, the University of Michigan, the British Library, Oberlin College, and the University of Paris, and recently served on the program committee, presented a paper, and chaired a session for NABMSA’s second biennial conference. He is currently helping co-edit a collection of essays on opera and blackness, to which he will be contributing an article on Frederick Delius’s opera Koanga, and is pursuing studies of English pastoral music of the early twentieth century.
Webmaster
Kendra Preston Leonard
National Coalition of Independent Scholars
caennen@gmail.comKendra Preston Leonard the author of The Conservatoire Américain: a History, and her work has also included gender studies, music and Shakespearean film, and music and satire. She has presented her research at conferences including those of the Society for American Music, the International Association of Women in Music, the British Shakespeare Association, and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. She received the Yosef Wosk Award for Independent Scholarship in 2004 and in 2006 was appointed the National Coalition of Independent Scholars’ representative to the American Council of Learned Societies.
She is currently at work on two books, Shakespeare, Madness, and Music: Scoring Insanity in Cinematic Adaptations and Il Faut Souffrir: Women in the Studio of Nadia Boulanger. Leonard also speaks on issues in independent scholarship and publishing culture.
Christina Bashford
Christina Bashford holds degrees in music and musicology from the University of Oxford and King’s College, University of London. She taught music history for 11 years at Oxford Brookes University in the UK, before taking up a position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in January 2005.
Her work on British music has centered on the 19th and early 20th centuries, and is at the intersection between performance history, reception history and the social-economic history of musical life. Concert institutions, chamber music, audiences and listening, and Mozart and Beethoven reception are among the topics she has published on both in journals and essay collections. With Leanne Langley she edited Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Christina has recently completed a monograph, The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London, to be published by Boydell & Brewer as part of their new British Music 1600-1900 series; she is currently collaborating with the Coull Quartet on outreach lecture-recitals intended to bridge music and social history, and with Simon McVeigh and Rachel Cowgill on the Concert Life in 19th-century London Database project. She has delivered papers at many national and international conferences in the UK, and she gave the keynote address (“In the pantry, or the library ... upstairs in the bedrooms”: Britain’s Hidden Chamber Music) at this year’s NABMSA meeting in Vermont.
Brooke Bryant
Ph. D. candidate in historical musicology at the CUNY Graduate Centerniversity
brooke@brookebryant.comI am a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where I am enrolled in the interdisciplinary Renaissance Certificate Program. A CUNY Writing Fellow, I work with undergraduates on learning through writing at the College of Staten Island. My dissertation uses early modern optics to theorize the role of gesture in seventeenth-century singing. I also research popular music, and have presented papers on punk rock and the British trip-hop band Portishead.
A soprano, I specialize in performing seventeenth-century English music. I have staged concerts of seventeenth-century British songs and theatrical productions with period gesture, including Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.
Dorothy de Val
Associate Dean of Fine Arts, Associate Professor, York University, Toronto, CanadaDorothy de Val is Associate Dean of Fine Arts at York University, Toronto, and is also an associate professor in the Department of Music. A musicologist and pianist with research interests in art and folk music, she has published on pianos and pianism, ranging from early pianos to early 20th-century pianists such as Fanny Davies and Ignaz Paderewski; she is also a regular reviewer for Music and Letters. In 2002 she contributed to Italian conferences and publications on Muzio Clementi, marking the 250th anniversary of his birth. More recently she has presented papers at NABMSA and the Society of Ethnomusicology dealing with the English folk song and dance revival of the early twentieth century. She has published articles on the folksong scholar and collector Lucy Broadwood and Percy Grainger and is currently working on a biography of Broadwood for Ashgate. She has also contributed to many music reference works as well as to the New Dictionary of National Biography.
She complements her research with performances on early and modern pianos, and is also an experienced accompanist. In addition to York University and University of Toronto she has taught at the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of Music, Oxford Brookes University and the University of Oxford.
Jenny Doctor
Senior Lecturer at University of YorkLibraries and archives, editing and writing have always intermingled with British music and social history for me, and continue to inspire new ways to question and approach research. I was awarded a Fulbright Grant to the UK in 1989 and have remained here ever since, rummaging around the BBC archives whenever time permits. Such investigations eventually led to The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–36: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes (CUP, 1999), and also contributed to Humphrey Carpenter’s history of Radio 3 (1996). With Nicholas Kenyon and David Wright, I’ve co-edited essays investigating the Proms’ social history, in The Proms: A New History (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming in April 2007) and with Sophie Fuller an edition of letters exchanged by Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams (to be published by University of Illinois Press). As a Senior Lecturer at University of York, my recent work involves the preservation, access and research potential of recordings of off-air British broadcasts.
Nathaniel Lew
I received my Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2001 with a dissertation on British opera, opera policy, and opera funding in the period immediately following the Second World War. I have published on Vaughan Williams’s opera The Pilgrim’s Progress and am currently working on a performing edition of the 1906 incidental music that served as the source for that opera. I have delivered papers on Alan Bush’s Wat Tyler, and am researching a book on classical music and opera commissions, premieres, and performances in the 1951 Festival of Britain. As a performer, I sing tenor in the Vermont-based professional vocal ensemble Counterpoint. I teach music history and music theory at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont, where I also direct the choral program. Most of you know me as the local host of the 2006 NABMSA meeting, which was held at St. Mike’s.
Aidan Thomson
Queen's University Belfast
a.thomson@qub.ac.ukSince 2003 I have been Lecturer in Music at Queen’s University Belfast, where I currently convene the BMus degree programme. To date my research has concentrated on Elgar: I have had articles and book chapters published in The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, 19th-Century Music, Edward Elgar and His World and Elgar Studies (forthcoming), and am currently completing a monograph, accepted for publication by Boydell and Brewer, entitled Demythologizing Elgar. Other interests include Bax, on whom I gave a paper at last year’s NABSMA conference, and early twentieth-century musicological institutions, particularly the Internationale Musikgesellschaft.
Jessie Ann Owens
Dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in the College of Letters and Science and professor of music at UC-DavisJessie Ann Owens (B.A., Barnard, M.F.A, Ph.D., Princeton) taught at the Eastman School of Music and Brandies before coming UC-Davis in 206.. She has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Foundation, Villa I Tatti, and the Fulbright program.
A specialist in Renaissance music, her interests include music historiography, theory and analysis of early music, and compositional process; she has published articles concerning Josquin, Isaac, de Rore, Palestrina, and Monteverdi. She is the editor of British Music Theory 1500-1700 (Ashgate), Criticism and Analysis of Early Music (Garland, now Routledge), Sixteenth-Century Madrigal (Garland Publishing), and Renaissance Music in Facsimile (Garland Publishing). Her book Composers at Work: The Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; paperback ed., 1998), the first systematic investigation of composers' autograph manuscripts from before 1600, received the ASCAP Deems Taylor Prize in 1998.
Professor Owens served as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis from 2000 to 2003. She is Past President of the American Musicological Society and President of the Renaissance Society of America. She was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. At present she is working on a book about key in early modern England.
Ruth Solie
Sophia Smith Professor of Music, Smith CollegeAfter receiving my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1977, I returned to my undergraduate alma mater, Smith College, to take a “one-year position” teaching elementary music theory. Though the appointment lasted somewhat longer than a year, I still teach theory rather than music history; this has produced an odd partition of my professional life that I rather enjoy. My musicological work, focussing on the nineteenth century, has increasingly moved away from conventional categories toward, first, intellectual history and, subsequently, gender and other aspects of the social history of music-making.
Awards Committee
Christina Fuhrmann, chair
Janet Pollack
Katherine PrestonBibliographic Review Committee
Jennifer Oates, chair
Jane Girdham
Brooks Kuykendall
Donna ParsonsBook Series Committee
Jenny Doctor, chair
Byron Adams
Stacey Houck
Eric SaylorDevelopment Committee
Byron Adams and Allan Atlas, chairs
Gary Cannon
Renée Clark
Christina Fuhrmann
Eric Hung
Kevin Pih
Janet PollackNewsletter Committee
Kendra Leonard, chair
Brooks Kuykendall
Andrew Nardone
Donna Parsons
Eric Saylor
Webmaster, Kendra Leonard
Last updated November 2007