Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology Anne Rasmussen will be featured in a segment of the radio program "With Good Reason" about Christmas music. The segment began airing Dec. 19 and will continue to run through Dec. 24.
News
The Society for Ethno- musicology awards several prizes each year for the best scholarship in the field. The College of William and Mary was extremely well represented this year in the roster of prize-winners. Congratulations are due to Max Katz and Ethan Lechner!
The music departments of historic Bruton Parish Church and the College of William and Mary joined with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for "A Handel Festival: Music in the World of George Frideric Handel". Click for photos from some of the events.
Katherine Preston, the David N. & Margaret C. Bottoms Professor of Music at William & Mary, is one of 33 scholars from all over the world to be selected as a National Humanities Center Fellow for 2009-10.
Callaway spent most of his summer building a contrabass recorder, with the finished product being only slightly shorter than he is. His creation will make its public debut during the William & Mary Early Music Ensemble's fall concert on Saturday, Nov. 7 at 8 p.m. in the Wren Great Hall. Admission is free.
Sophia Serghi and Susan Via rehearse Serghi's "Toward the Flame". It's all blissfully athletic business for the two William & Mary Department of Music professors as they prepare to perform six of Serghi's original compositions Sunday night at 6 p.m. on the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage in Washington, D.C.
Amadou Kouyate: Manding Griot, singer, performer of Kora (21 string harp-lute)and djembe and koutiro drummer will present a concert on Wednesday the 14th of October.
Anne K. Rasmussen's chapter "Indonesian Reciters of the Qur'an and the Juncture between Creation and Recreation" was just published in a new book from The University of Illinois.
NiCad, a multi-national experimental rock band from the Hague, will visit the William and Mary Campus for concerts and student workshops featuring their eclectic style and unique approach to digital music.
The Department of Music at the College of William and Mary mourns the loss of Mike Seeger and Horace Boyer, both of whom died recently (Mike on August 7, 2009, at age 75; Horace on July 21, 2009, age 73). Mike and Horace were of the same generation, and each man was passionate about music.
Serghi, an associate professor of music at William & Mary, met Cynthia and dozens of other children with similar stories during a week-long service trip to their school this summer. During the trip, Serghi helped construct a kitchen, participated in family interventions and taught music classes. Now that experience is serving as inspiration for the music professor's compositions, and she hopes to bring William & Mary students back to participate in ongoing work at the school.
Two years ago, Marc Presler ('10) started The Wham Bam Big Band at William & Mary to provide an additional way for student musicians at the school to perform jazz "in a modern and unique way."
Just two years after debuting his "Tragedy! A Musical Comedy" in New York's Fringe Festival, Michael Johnson ('09) is back again with a new musical, and a cast and crew of William & Mary students and alumni are helping to bring it to life.
Tucked up in the Appalachian Mountains, Rural Retreat, Virginia is home to less than 2,000 people—but what it lacks in population, it more than makes up for in song and heart. For Elizabeth LaPrelle (’09), it’s the place that gave her a beautiful voice.
The City of Williamsburg will be broadcasting a College of William & Mary Master Class in Music this weekend featuring senior Elizabeth LaPrelle. The show will air on the City's cable channel 48 beginning Friday, May 8.
The Department of Music is saddened to announce the passing of H. Burton ("Burt") Kester, Lecturer in Flute and Bassoon and director of the Gallery Players, a departmental student performance ensemble. Mr. Kester died around 6 p.m. at his residence at Chambrel of Williamsburg after giving a music lesson on Sunday, April 19. He was 78 years old.
While a storm raged outside of Phi Beta Kappa Hall last week, a small group of William & Mary professors, students and community members sat on the floor of the Dodge Room and combated the growling thunder with the sounds of traditional Balinese sacred performance.
On the heels of the Darwin bicentennial and at the end of women's history month, a William & Mary scholar will present her one-person play exploring the life of Victorian-era fossil-hunter Mary Anning.
While most of the campus was wrapped in silence at the end of winter break, William & Mary’s Phi Beta Kappa Hall was abuzz with students as they practiced lines, perfected dance moves and constructed a giant tree.
Albany Records, a label devoted to American Music, releases a CD of music by William & Mary music professor Brian Hulse.
Anne Rasmussen was appointed University Professor for Teaching Excellence for a three-year term beginning Fall 2008.
Music serves as a lens through which the West can view Middle Eastern culture. "It is an excellent way to investigate important aspects of culture-from history to colonialism and from contemporary politics to social constructs, like gender," says Anne Rasmussen.
The Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, a forum for exploration and performance, is an extension of the ethnomusicology curriculum in the Department of Music. Established 14 years ago by Anne K. Rasmussen, the ensemble, when performing at full strength, consists of 15-25 musicians, primarily undergraduate students.
Professor Katherine K. Preston has been named the Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair of American Culture by the Fulbright Center of the Netherlands.
The W&M Early Music Ensemble has released a new CD featuring music of Bach and Handel, performed on period instruments in area period buildings by students of the College of William & Mary.
This summer, four of the College's Music majors will travel to Pavia, Italy, to participate in the 2008 soundSCAPE festival.
This summer William and Mary's beloved Choir, along with the Botetourt Chamber Singers, aka "The Bots," will have the opportunity to take their talents to Europe as part of an international tour program.
Sunni Fass '97 has been hired as Assistant Curator of Musical Instruments at The Musical Instrument Museum (MIM), a new institution that is currently under development in Phoenix, Arizona.
Hurdy-gurdies, lutes and the occasional sackbut: For 14 years, the College of William and Mary's Early Music Ensemble has brought medieval, renaissance and baroque music to life with reproductions of instruments such as these.
The Botetourt Chamber Singers, under the direction of Dr. Jamie C. Bartlett, was selected to perform at the Virginia Music Educators Convention on November 16 in Norfolk.
The William and Mary Choir under the direction of James Armstrong will perform Joseph Haydn's oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation), the first universally acclaimed masterwork in the history of Western music, on Friday, April 6 and Saturday, April 7 at 7:30 PM in Phi Beta Kappa Hall on the College of William and Mary campus in Williamsburg.
Duo46, a Grammy-nominated violin and guitar duo that specializes in the works of living American composers, will perform "Seastone" by Brian Hulse during their concert at Ewell Recital Hall Sept. 30 at 8 p.m.
When Michael Johnson talked to his composition professor about taking what is widely regarded as Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedy and turning it into a musical comedy, he wasn't expecting the response he got. She told him it was a great idea. "She called my bluff, so I had to write it," he said. He had no idea that, a few months later, his adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus would be playing to hundreds in New York City.
This is the second semester of the William and Mary in Washington program. Last semester focused somewhat predictably on government. The theme this semester is Washington and the Arts, under the instruction of Anne Rasmussen.
Laura Smith is well known around Ewell Hall. To say that she is a participant in the Department of Music is a remarkable understatement: she has been a 4-year member of the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble (of which she is Assistant Director), the Appalachian Ensemble, and the William and Mary Chorus.
May 2007 marks the 400th anniversary of the landing at Jamestowne and the establishment of the first permanent English settlement in the New World. With the landing site just a few miles down the road, students at W&M will be following the musical trails that lead to and from that event.
When Anna Kijanowska came to the United States from Poland in 1995, all she had was her parent's life savings of a few hundred dollars, a ticket for a three-day bus ride to Idaho and a dream.
For the second consecutive year, the William and Mary flag was flown on a table at the annual conference of the Middle East Institute (MEI) in Washington, D.C.
In April 2006 the department hosted a dedicatory concert for the newly restored fortepiano.
With two books published and a research award from the National Science Foundation, musicologist and violinist Mark Katz is on a roll.
In fall 2006 the department welcomes world-renowned jazz saxophonist and composer Donald Harrison as its Class of 1939 Artist-in-Residence for the semester.
Strange bedfellows? Sometimes, but it's better to think of technology and music as dancing partners-the kind of dancing partners that take turns leading.
Likening his student life to that of an athlete, Matthew Klein '06 found a good balance between academic study and a busy performance schedule.
