DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC AT UNC CHAPEL HILL - Key Persons
A. Kori Hill is a Ph.D. Candidate from Cincinnati, Ohio. Her dissertation, "A Creation of Tradition: New Negro Modernism in the Concertos of Florence B. Price," studies Price's three concertos as examples of Black/New Negro music modernism to further contextualize Price's style within American classical and Black cultural aesthetics. Kori has presented at the Society for American Music, FT&M17, MTSU Opera and Musical Theory Conference, The Arts in the Black Press in the Era of Jim Crow, and regional conferences in the Chapel Hill area. In November 2019, she gave the keynote address for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra's "Celebrating Florence Price" event. Her review, "Florence Price: Violin Concertos" was published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and her review of Naomi André's Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement is forthcoming. From July 2018 to late 2020, Kori was the Director of Social Media for The Harry T. Burleigh Society. She has bylines in The Harry T. Burleigh Society Blog, I Care if You Listen, and the Seattle Symphony. In addition to her work on Price, Kori also studies modernist aesthetics, networks of Black classical musicians, and music as method for cultural theorizing. She holds a M.A. in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a M.M. in music history and violin performance from West Virginia University, and a B.M. in violin performance from Miami University (of Ohio!).
Aaron Harcus (Assistant Professor) received a B.M. in music from St. Olaf College (2011) and his Ph.D in Music Theory from CUNY Graduate Center (2017). Before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he taught at Hunter College, CUNY, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research interests include musical hermeneutics and phenomenology, rhythm and meter in cross-cultural perspective, the analysis of rap music, and post-tonal music. He has presented his research at national conferences of the Society for Music Theory, MTSMA, and the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music.
Aldwyn is a Ph.D. student from the Bahamas. He previously spent six years in Canada completing his B.A. Hons. in Music at the University of Guelph, and his M.A. in Musicology at Western University. His dissertation research will explore what black music can tell us about the dyad of race and technology during the early to mid-twentieth century in the United States of America. He intends to focus on 2 objects and 2 events: the washing machine, the automobile, the advent of nuclear weaponry during the Second World War, and the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. Aldwyn is also very much interested in nightclubs and clubbing, both as a research interest and as a personal hobby. In fact, his recently completed M.A. thesis explored sound, affect, and community within queer nightclubs. Some of his other scholarly interests include: black spoken word poetry and oral performance in the Black Power era, aesthetic criticism, and Soviet Russian symphonies (once upon a time, he wanted to be a russianist!).
Alexander Marsden grew up in Lancaster, in the U.K. He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in music from the University of Cambridge (2010-2014). To date, his primary research has centered around electronic dance music and rap in Britain, focusing on issues of critical reception, the politics of genre definition, and the relationship between concepts of modernism and popular music. Outside of his academic work, Alexander enjoys cycling, walking, and curries.
Job Titles:
- Department Honors Advisor
- Director of Composition
Amanda Black holds a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and Spanish from UNC-Greensboro, and a Master of Arts in Translation Theory from the Universidad de Málaga (2011). After completing one year of the Bachelor of Music in Flute Performance, Amanda's studies broadened to include Latin American cultural studies and in-depth Spanish language study. She completed her final year of painting study at the Universidad de Guanajuato, in Guanajuato, Mexico, where she continued to play and teach flute and engage in new musical experiences. As an interpreter and translator, she would travel to Honduras, on return trips to Mexico, as well as to Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, and Spain. Translating and editing within a circle of scholars working towards decolonization, Amanda developed a strong interest in the intersection of music, immigration, the control of sonic space, and place. Amanda's other interests include ethnomusicological methodologies, race and representation, and dance practices.
Job Titles:
- Registrar
- Registrar / Campus Security Authority
Briana M. Nave (3rd-year graduate student) holds a Master of Arts in Music History and Literature from the University of Maryland, College Park (2019) and a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from Salem College (2016). She has explored topics in gender, criticism, and rock performance, specifically focusing on grunge/punk artist Courtney Love and foundational rock critic Ellen Willis. In spring 2019, her paper "Death and the Widow: Gender, Agency, and the Haunting of Hole's Live Through This" won the Lowens Award for Best Student Paper from the Capital Chapter of the American Musicological Society. In summer 2022, she presented on Ellen Willis's pro-sex feminist approach to musical evaluation at the Feminist Theory and Music conference at the University of Guelph. Her current research interests concern the cultural and scientistic construction of musical talent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the intersections of music, the scientific method, and biological determinism; and musical evaluation broadly.
Job Titles:
- Communications Coordinator
- Communications Coordinator / Campus Security Authority
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Department Chair
Destiny Meadows (2nd-year graduate student) holds a master's degree in musicology from the University of Miami, where her research centered on music video and advocacy at the height of United States HIV/AIDS epidemic. She has also published on gender and sexuality in jazz communities in the US. She received her bachelor's degree from Furman University in clarinet performance, where she was active in orchestras and chamber groups throughout the Charleston and Greenville areas. In 2022, she was the recipient of the James W. Pruett Summer Fellowship, where she aided in processing the Sammy Nestico Collection and the Henry Donch Collection at the Library of Congress. She has also presented research at the International Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives conference, the Harvard Graduate Music Forum, and annual meetings of the American Musicological Society. Destiny's current research centers on sound construction and materialism in physical fitness media created in the United States during the 1970s and 80s.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Brazilian music was an object of scrutiny in Brazil and elsewhere. The disputes that swirled around the meanings of Brazilian music formed part of the process of emancipation from the nation's colonial and imperial pasts, as musicians and intellectuals built the country's cultural foundation. They addressed, among other things, the citizenship of composers and performers, the styles and genres derived from vernacular music of the territory, and the racial, gendered, and ethnic constructs of its population. My dissertation examines this process through a transnational lens, exploring how Brazilian music was recurrently negotiated in the context of transatlantic travels by following the routes of travelers who listened, performed, recorded, and wrote about music and sounds. By examining border crossings from multiple perspectives-those of Brazilians traveling elsewhere as well as Europeans and North Americans visiting Brazil-I will intervene critically in current discussions of travel, cultural circulations, and transnational flow. I focus on a period that includes tumultuous geopolitical situations both in Brazil and abroad, such as the Estado Novo and both World Wars. This was also a time of an accelerated development of mobility and sound technologies, and of the emergence of transnational networks of academic institutions. All of these affected the knowledge produced on music and on nation. I draw on extensive archival research as a practice of what I call "writing from the border," a strategy aimed at disrupting colonial and national hegemonic systems of narrating history. Furthermore, I contribute to the literature on decolonial histories of music that rethink notions of the West, of the Global North, and of centers and peripheries.
Eduardo Sato is a PhD candidate from São Paulo, Brazil. His dissertation focuses on how Brazilian music was recurrently negotiated in the context of transatlantic travels in the first half of the twentieth century. In this project he intends to contribute to the decolonization of cultural histories, by complexifying the routes in which music crossed borders.
He completed his M.A. in Brazilian Studies at the University of São Paulo, after receiving his B.A. in Social Sciences from the same institution. Eduardo has presented his research at conferences in Brazil, Mexico, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. His research has been supported by the UNC Institute for the Study of the Americas, UNC Center for the Study of the American South, the American Musicological Society (M. Elizabeth Bartlet Travel Grant) and FAPESP.
He is interested in the political stakes of studying music across borders, the challenges of writing music history in the twentieth-century and in the intersections of archival work, ethnomusicological methods and critical theories. In his free time, he loves to get visit craft breweries and coffee shops.
Eduardo is currently one of the co-organizers of the International Student Network at the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Royster Society of Fellows
Emily Hynes (5th-year graduate student) is a member of the Royster Society of Fellows at UNC. Originally from Winnebago, Minnesota, Emily holds a Bachelor of Music degree cum laude from St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. Her previous research has centered around carceral studies and intersection of identity, race, and gender. She has applied this to her research on music in the gulag and her work on folk music in prisons of the mid-20th century American South. Emily is also highly involved in Digital Humanities (DH) projects that utilize interactive mapping and storytelling to display data, make arguments, and communicate musicological findings to a broader audience. She has enjoyed mapping music in the Gulag, folk songs of the American south, and over 3,000 performances of the Ballets Russes. Examples of her work can be found at https://musicalgeography.org/.
Erin Pratt (Ph.D. candidate) is a graduate of Smith College, where she majored in Music and Classics. Her research focuses primarily on intersections between music and literature in Germany and Austria, particularly in song and prose fiction. Erin's dissertation project centers on problems of repetition and performance in German strophic song since the eighteenth century. She has a secondary interest in rock singer-songwriters ranging from the Drive-By Truckers to David Bowie. Her master's thesis, "Walmartland: Music and Corporate Philanthropy in Northwest Arkansas," combined these disparate interests through critical analyses of two Walmart-sponsored music festivals that respectively featured Jason Isbell and Ludwig van Beethoven. As a complement to her scholarly work, Erin studies classical vocal performance as a mezzo-soprano. Erin also enjoys baking, watching TV with far-flung friends, and playing far too many video games.
Job Titles:
- Associate Chair for Performance, Composition, and Music Education Division
- Co - Chair Undergraduate Scholarship Committee
- Summer School Coordinator
The Asian American Movement (AAM) was a social movement for racial justice in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s that led to the creation of an "Asian American" collective consciousness. To study how music figured in this identity construction, my research examines the activities and products of Yellow Pearl, an Asian American folk trio formed in 1970 by three New York-based activists of the AAM. I will utilize archives of event flyers, meeting notes, photographs, press articles, and correspondence relevant to Yellow Pearl to understand how notions of Asian Americanness created music and was generated by musical performance. I also interrogate how the medium of records, sheet music, and live concerts forged or limited musical networks within the AAM. I focus on this moment of Asian American history to examine the robust disagreements and discussions about the racial and political constructions of Asian American identity. Through my research, I hope to uncover a musical network of listeners and participants and analyze how they mediated music into different cultural products. I bring together musical scholarship on Asian Americans that has been ethnographic and historical by looking at this moment, which has powerful resonance in living memory, but my project is driven through archival work. This study foregrounds the musical activism of Asian Americans as an example of how coalitional politics and musical communities intersected in a moment of racial and political turmoil in US-American history.
Grace Kweon (Ph.D. candidate) studies music's relationship to political organizing and racial consciousness in the context of broad social movements. Her dissertation project explores the grassroots activism of musicians within the Asian American movement from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. She has a secondary interest in the immigrant networks formed through New York City's popular music spheres, with a focus on Russian emigres and the Korean diaspora. She holds a BA in Music and Biology from Duke University and an M.Mus. in Music from Northwestern University.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Brooks de Wetter-Smith, is active worldwide as a recitalist, concerto soloist, and masterclass teacher, having performed in more than 20 nations (Eastern- and Western-Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, and South America) and nearly all 50 states.
His recordings have been released on the Albany, Aurophon, Centaur, Christophorus, Crystal, and Paulinas labels, spanning baroque, romantic, twentieth-century, and jazz-inspired repertoire; and his live performances have been featured on broadcasts in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. A number of his music editions have been published by International Music Company and Southern Music, and he is an internationally recognized authority on extended performance techniques. Dr. de Wetter-Smith was awarded a Fulbright Senior Professorship to teach at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich and Cologne, and at the Music Conservatory of Lisbon, Portugal.
In addition to his music accomplishments, he is a published photographer, creating multimedia collaborations, having worked in the Himalayas above Mt. Everest base camp, the Peruvian Andes, Lebanon, the deserts of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, the Amazonian jungle of Brazil, the rainforests of Panama and Costa Rica, the high Arctic regions, and Antarctica.
A former president of the National Flute Association, he is the James Gordon Hanes Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Job Titles:
- Research Fellowship at the Library of Congress, 2017
- Research Fellowship in Music at the Library of Congress, 2016
Job Titles:
- Director of Facilities and Operations
- Director of University Bands
Job Titles:
- Associate Chair for Academic Studies
Joshua Harton (BA, Belhaven University; MM, University of South Carolina) is a first-year graduate student whose master's thesis focused on Saint-Saëns, neoclassicism, and the early music renaissance in France, where nationalism and modernism intersected between 1860-1890. Having also written on Byrd's politically and religiously charged position in Tudor England, Stravinsky's convenient nationalism in fin-de-siècle Paris, and capitalist co-optation of Beethoven and Orff in North and South Carolina during the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic, Joshua enjoys thinking about moments of musical and historical fluidity, particularly as sonic markers for close, sociocultural listening. Similarly, interests in failure-both as a component of privilege (the opportunity to fail) and in its curatorial role (canonicity)-and musical/cultural borrowing are among Joshua's primary pursuits. Additional research curiosities include but are not limited to: art, economy, games, gender/identity, literature, and religion. Joshua is a Swiss American, was born in NC, and has also studied at Eastern University, SUNY Albany, and UNC-Greensboro.
Job Titles:
- Area Head for Brass, Wind, and Percussion
Justin Frankeny is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology, whose research interests concern the networks of power and prestige in so-called "high art" musics across the Americas, especially Cuba and the United States. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Justin received a Bachelor of Music from Baldwin Wallace University and a Master of Arts in Musicology from UNC Chapel Hill. His master's thesis explored issues of distinction and exclusion in the genre of progressive rock during the early 2000s "prog rock resurgence," with the music of The Mars Volta as his primary case study. His dissertation investigates how composers of the Cuban diaspora navigated the art world of contemporary art music amidst their experiences of migration and the rapidly-changing political and economic climates of the United States and Cuba in the years after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. As a complement to his musicological research, Justin also has a special interest in music librarianship and the digital humanities. He worked for over three years as a graduate assistant to the UNC Music Library, wherein his work included preparing over 1,000 Italian opera libretti for digitization. Justin also has a background in composition and performance of contemporary art music (on clarinet and saxophone), and he continues to perform throughout the Triangle.
Justin Wilson (first-year graduate student) comes by his love of music honestly, as he started playing piano around age 3. He has devoted much of his life to the study and performance of music, and he earned a B.M. and M.M. in Vocal Performance from St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN) and Towson University (Towson, MD), respectively. He also holds a J.D. from Duke University. Justin has a multi-decade career as a professional opera singer and practiced law in Washington, D.C. for several years. His research interests encompass opera in the 21st century, music in drag culture, and music and addiction. When not singing, reading, or researching, Justin can be found playing Dungeons & Dragons and teaching private lessons in piano and voice.
Job Titles:
- Band and Facilities Administrator
Kari Lindquist (3rd-year graduate student) holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago with an interdisciplinary focus on Music History and English and a double BA in Comparative Literature and Arts & Ideas in the Humanities from the University of Michigan. Her current research explores tours of U.S. wind bands abroad during geopolitical conflict in the 20th century. She uses archival materials to reconstruct individual musicians' sonic experiences and encounters in public spaces. She is interested in how individuals formed musical collectives that were influenced by institutions of power, including race, gender, nationalism, and capitalism. She has presented her research at the Society for American Music conference, Feminist Music & Theory conference, and the Southeast Chapter of the American Musicological Society. As an advocate of community music education, she previously worked as the Marketing & Community Engagement Coordinator in the DePaul University School of Music and for six years as a music teaching artist in Chicago. She served as a fellow with Carolina Performing Arts as part of Humanities for the Public Good at UNC from 2021-2022.
Music, songs, and sound were powerful tools that individuals and groups on opposing sides of the woman suffrage debate enlisted to influence lawmakers, voters, and disenfranchised women. Suffragists sang new lyrics to borrowed melodies and commissioned works that aided in the construction of their identity as patriotic citizens deserving of the right to vote. Like the movement itself, the resultant music is coded so that the deserving patriotic citizenry is narrowly conceived along racial and classed lines. My dissertation suggests that the use of musical signifiers of whiteness, wealth, education, and nationality was not just the result of vanity, ignorance, or malice on the side of the white, upper-class women who drove the campaign. I argue that this problematic, albeit effective, self-fashioning was also a defensive reaction to the characterizations of suffragists coming from antisuffragists, whose music and songs are replete with offensive connotations of the Other on the same axes of identity. This latter body of music has been neglected in musicological scholarship to date. My dissertation places these two musical repertoires in dialogue in four case studies that span the duration of the American women's suffrage movement. In so doing, I uncover a previously undertheorized, embattled sonic characterization of women's suffrage and its supporters.
Kendall Winter is a Ph.D. candidate from coastal Maine. She completed her M.A. in musicology at Tufts University and earned B.A. degrees in music and classics from Colby College (Waterville, ME). Her dissertation in progress is entitled "Suffragist and Antisuffragist Music and Sound in the United States, 1867 - 1920." Therein, she interprets pro-suffrage musical idioms, lyrics, performative modes, and sonic signifiers of whiteness and other privileges based on class, education, and citizenship as a problematic, albeit effective, answer to the racism, classism, xenophobia, and sexism that characterized the musical and lyrical choices of the opposition. Her dissertation research has received generous financial support from the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and, at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Graduate School, Music Department, and Graduate and Professional Student Government. She has had the privilege of presenting her research at numerous conferences, including national meetings of the Society for American Music (2020) and American Musicological Society (2022). Outside of research and teaching, Kendall is enthusiastic about service and engagement, holding a number of volunteer, elected, and appointed positions in academic, professional, and community settings.
Kira Gaillard is a first-year graduate student originally from Sarasota, FL. She recently graduated from the University of Florida where she received a Master of Music in music history and literature with a cognate in vocal performance. Previously, she attended the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami where she obtained a Bachelor of Music in vocal performance. After graduation, she enjoyed a career in performance and music education in both the public and private sectors. Kira's current research topics marry her background in opera performance with her interest in gender studies and passion for representation in today's art music repertoire. Her graduate recital, entitled "When There Are Nine," featured the work of exclusively female composers and questioned the implications of canonical vocal art music repertoire. Kira's thesis concentrated on the late works of composer Marc Blitzstein and explored how issues of masculinity, sexuality, and censorship became entwined with the tensions of the McCarthy era. Kira's other research interests include representations of the American South in twentieth-century opera. As a recipient of an Emerging Scholar Award from the Southern Futures initiative, she hopes to pursue this research as part of UNC's exciting cohort working to redefine the American South.
ken tianyuan Ge (he/him) - sound and tourism, neocolonialism, jazz pedagogy and historiography, Black geographies, climate crisis, affect theory, experimental ethnographic writing
Job Titles:
- Director of Undergraduate Studies
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Studies
Matteo Sammartano (first-year graduate student) is originally from Aix-en-Provence, France, and received a Master's degree in Musicology from Aix-Marseille Université. His former research project focused on the representation of the Night in Early music, with an emphasis on baroque opera's "sleep scenes". He worked as an intern at the Opera de Marseille library in 2018 and as an Assistant Editor at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2019. His current interests are in baroque cello, French baroque music, and the study of animality and the use of animals as representation or embodiment in the construction of musical material.
Originally from Princeton, N.J., H. Meg Orita (Ph.D. candidate) holds a Bachelor of Music degree, summa cum laude with program honors, in Voice & Opera Performance with a Minor in Musicology from Northwestern University's Henry and Leigh Bienen School of Music. She recently completed her Master's thesis, addressing how music of different genres is arranged for figure skating programs. Her current research focuses on narratives of trauma and recovery in the work of 1990s/2000s singer-songwriters. Meg's research interests incorporate social media ethnography, body-positivity, and feminist theory.
Melissa Camp is a Ph.D. candidate and is originally from Arlington, Texas. She earned a Master of Music in Historical Musicology degree (2018) and a Bachelor of Music Education degree (2016) from Texas Christian University. Her dissertation project explores the introduction of the phonograph and record companies to the Eastern Mediterranean at the height of the Arab nahda during the early twentieth century. In particular, she focuses on how Arab women musicians used the recording studio as a political space to promote anticolonialism, modernity, and early Arab feminism, as well as the subsequent effects as these recordings were distributed throughout the Arab world. Her research has been supported by the American Musicological Society, US Department of Education, Middle East Studies Association, and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. In the fall of 2022, Melissa has received an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship from the UNC Graduate School to study at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin.
Michael Carlson is a Ph.D. Candidate who specializes in the music of the Italian Renaissance. His current research focuses on the subversive potential of the genre of madrigali spirituali in Early Modern Italy as a Humanist spiritual response to post-Tridentine authoritarianism.
Michael earned his B.M. in music history from The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. He then studied philosophy at Boston College before continuing his graduate education in theology by earning an S.T.B. and S.T.L. from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Italy. His six years living in Italy formed his great fascination for Italian culture and history. Michael then earned a graduate certificate from Fairfield University (CT) in Spiritual Direction according to the Ignatian method. He completed a M.M. in musicology from The University of Hartford (The Hartt School) with a master's thesis exploring the Ignatian dimension of Domenico Zipoli's mission-opera, San Ignacio de Loyola.
Michael's research interests include opera, the history of theory, historical notation, and queer studies. He also has a scholarly passion for the operatic works of Luigi Dallapiccola, Samuel Barber, and Giancarlo Menotti.
Job Titles:
- Director of Graduate Admissions
Sarah Lindmark holds a master's degree in Musicology from the University of California Irvine, where her research focused primarily on theories of allusion in popular music and the mainstream hip hop music video. She has worked for the Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music under conductor Marin Alsop, reported on the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival for the New York Public Radio show New Sounds, and has presented her work at conferences such as the German Society for Popular Music Conference in Oldenburg, Germany, the Annual Plenary of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society. She has received awards including the Holmes Fellowship, the Leo Freedman Fellowship, the Plantronics Creativity and Innovation Scholarship, and the Barati Cello Scholarship. Her current research interests include electronic music technologies of the 1970s, beatmatching practice, the history of DJing, and dance club culture. Her dissertation is titled "A Cultural History of Beatmatching Practice, 1965-1979.
Email: lindmark@live.unc.edu
Job Titles:
- Director of Choral Activites
Job Titles:
- Coordinator of Minor / Non - Major Voice Study