Musicology

The life, music, and visual art of Dr. Yusef Lateef will be celebrated September 12-13, 2025, as the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music hosts the Yusef Lateef Symposium. The two-day conference will include panel discussions, viewings of the Yusef A. Lateef Collection housed at Vanderbilt, a… Read More

Guest artist Peter Sheppard Skærved’s “Knowledge Exchange Violin: A Performer’s Odessey” program will be presented at Blair’s Turner Recital Hall on Monday, October 21, 7:30 p.m., The second event in the yearlong Music in the Real World Colloquium, Skærved brings together historic instruments, composers, nature, painting, ecologists, architecture,… Read More

Blair Professor of Musicology Cynthia Cyrus with Ariel Olaleye Blair vocal performance major Ariel Olaleye shared her Immersion Vanderbilt capstone presentation on Tuesday, recounting her summer of international travel and research findings on the intersection of Western and Nigerian classical music traditions. Olaleye was one of four Vanderbilt students honored… Read More

Blair School of Music will host a yearlong series of lectures and events throughout the 2024-2025 academic year investigating the complex, powerful, and infinitely various roles that music plays in the lives of individuals and communities. The Music in the Real World Colloquium seeks to present diverse perspectives from… Read More

Cynthia Cyrus Blair Professor of Musicology Cynthia Cyrus is currently in Austria on a nine-week research trip as she continues her studies of the Thalbach convent in Bregenz. Cyrus will be visiting the Austrian National Library in Vienna and topical archives housed in Innsbruck. She began her research… Read More

Blair professors Melanie Lowe and Douglas Shadle have been honored with editor roles for two leading music research journals. Lowe has been named editor-in-chief of The Journal of Music History Pedagogy and Shadle has been appointed editor-in-chief of The Journal of Musicological Research. Serving on the… Read More

Photo: Jimmy Katz Lauded musician, composer, and educator Wadada Leo Smith will be at Vanderbilt November 28 – December 1 for a residency that will include two musical performances and a special forum interview event. A creative visionary, Smith’s lengthy list of accomplishments and accolades includes a Guggenheim Fellowship, Doris… Read More

In her new book, From Dixie to Rocky Top, published by Vanderbilt University Press, Carrie Tipton shares the surprisingly complex stories behind some of the iconic collegiate fight songs that we all know; a history that encompasses class, race, gender, and regional identity. In a recent interview with literary… Read More

Kathryn Huether An essay by Kathryn Huether, visiting assistant professor of musicology, has been published in the online educational journal Music and the Holocaust. “Heiling or Holding? Jojo Rabbit (2019), the Beatles, and Cognitive (Sonic) Dissonance” offers an introspective insight into the coupling of visual and musical symbolism, focusing… Read More

Florence Price: A Celebration Florence Price: A Celebration, a multi-event music festival, will pay tribute to the life, music, and enduring legacy of a woman who broke barriers of race and gender in classical music. Taking place at venues across Nashville October 3 through November 14, the series is produced… Read More

The Wilson Music Library has completed the installation of five exhibits in Ingram Hall that complement the upcoming immersive concert, Voices of Mississippi, on September 15. Three exhibit cases feature a newly acquired archival collection of Otha Turner, a Mississippi fife musician. Turner was one of the last well-known fife… Read More

Russell Platt(photo: Alejandro Otero)Russell Platt, Adjunct Associate Professor of Music, has been awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship in composition from the Tennessee Arts Commission. “I am grateful to have been awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship,” said Platt. “I have been living and composing in Tennessee and at Vanderbilt… Read More

The Academic Pathways Postdoctoral Fellowship at Vanderbilt is a research/mentorship program that is designed to bridge fellows between academic training and entry-level faculty positions. The program includes teaching and leadership training, grant and manuscript writing and preparation, a multi-level mentoring framework, as well as substantial “protected time” for the pursuit of each… Read More

From Left: John R. Schmidt, Shadle, Alex Ross, Riccardo Muti (Photo: Dennis Polkow)   Douglas Shadle (Associate Professor and Chair, Musicology) celebrated the publication of the book A Portrait in Four Movements: The Chicago Symphony under Barenboim, Boulez, Haitink, and Muti (U. of Chicago, 2019) at a panel… Read More

Gregory Melchor-Barz conducted field research in Israel during the summer on a research fellowship funded by the Jewish National Fund and Mediawatch. His current fieldwork project focuses on the politics of Israeli drag performances in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Melchor-Barz is Professor of Ethnomusiclogy, chair of the Department… Read More

Three musicologists affiliated with the Blair School of Music received honors at the 42nd Annual Conference of the Society for American Music held in Cambridge, MA, March 9-13. Dale Cockrell, Professor of Musicology (Emeritus), received the Lifetime Achievement Award “in recognition of his pioneering… Read More

UPDATE: For those who are not able to attend this evening’s Conversation with Robben Ford in person, the event will also be streamed live online starting at 8 p.m. CST. The feed may be viewed via our streaming site in the Steve & Judy Turner Recital… Read More

2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 2017 Applegate, Celia. The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. – Reviewed in Central European History (2017) Fry, Robert W. Performing Nashville: Music Tourism and Country… Read More

The Society for Ethnomusicology recently honored The Cambridge History of World Music (ed. Philip Bohlman, Cambridge, 2014) with the Bruno Nettl Prize, an award that recognizes “an outstanding publication contributing to or dealing with the history of the… Read More

The Blair School of Music will offer its first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) early in 2016: “Understanding the Music Business: What is Music Worth,” taught by Assistant Professor of Musicology Jen Gunderman and offered through the Coursera… Read More

Update (10/5/2015): See a video of the performance here. Join us for a theatrical reconstruction of conversations between the Austrian composer Hanns Eisler and the Bertolt Brecht scholar Hans Bunge. The conversations will be performed by… Read More

  Joy H. Calico, Professor of Musicology at the Blair School of Music and Director of the Max Kade Center for European Studies at Vanderbilt University, recently spoke about her latest book, Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor from Warsaw”… Read More