Alumni News

Todd Bashore (B.A. 1994) received his masters degree in music and is a freelance musician in the NYC area. He plays saxophone in the Charles Tolliver Big Band, which performed in Page Auditorium in October 2007 as part of Duke Performances' Following Monk series.

Sam Breene (Ph.D. 2007) has been awarded a one-year Mellon Postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania in the Humanities Forum.

Camille Crittenden (Ph.D. 1997) is Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at University of California, Berkeley. She recently participated in a radio interview about The Merry Widow broadcast on the BBC. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and 2-year-old daughter.

Claire Fontijn's (M.A. 1989, Ph.D. 1994) book, Desperate Measures: The Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo (Oxford University Press) was selected for the 2007 Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography in the concert music field from ASCAP-Deems Taylor in its 40th Annual Awards, which took place at Lincoln Center on December 13, 2007. The book presents singer-composer Bembo (c. 1640-c.1720), whose career—hitherto largely shrouded in mystery—spanned the resplendent cultures of Venice and Paris. Fontijn’s work in Italian and French archives pieced together a story that, in the words of Italian scholar Giovanni Zanovello, "stands midway between scholarly work and novel—with the rigor of the former and the readability of the latter.” Now in her fourteenth year at the Wellesley College Department of Music, Fontijn served as Chair from 2002 to 2007.

William D. Gudger (B.A. 1969; Chapel and Music Dept. staff 1974-76) will retire next June after 30 years in the Music Department of the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, where he teaches courses in music history and theory. He recently completed several articles for the forthcoming Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia. He continues as organist at the Cathedral of St. Luke and Paul in Charleston.

Heather Hadlock (B.A. in Music, History, and Women's Studies, 1988) has joined the Editorial Board of the journal Nineteenth-Century Music. She is an Associate Professor of Musicology at Stanford University and the author of Mad Loves: Women and Music in Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann (Princeton U Press, 2001) and of numerous articles on opera and gender.

Dr. Dorothy Hindman's (M.A. 1989) work for guitar solo, Needlepoint, was released on the Musings CD released by the Society of Composers, Inc. series on Capstone Records, and her work Seconds, for electronics is featured on Vox Novus’ 2004-05 60x60 double disc. Selected recent performances include two performances of Incarnation for choir by the Coro Odyssea in Portugal in July; five performances of Streaming for orchestra by the Alabama Symphony Orchestra in September; a performance of her guitar quartet, Taut, by the Corona Guitar Kvartet on the “Nuovi Spazi Musicale” Festival in Rome, Italy in October; the premiere of Tapping the Furnace for speaking percussion solo by Stuart Gerber on a Bent Frequency concert in Atlanta, GA; two performances of Needlepoint for guitar solo by Paul Bowman in San Diego and Birmingham; and a performance of Beyond the Cloud of Unknowing for marimba solo, performed by Scott Deal at the College Music Society National Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, in November.

Lily E. Hirsch's (Ph.D. 2006) article, "Weaponizing Classical Music: Crime Prevention and Symbolic Power in the Age of Repetition" appeared in the Dec. 2007 issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She also has a forthcoming article in Musical Quarterly and will present a paper in London in April 2008.

Raymond Knapp, (Ph.D. 1987) Chair of Musicology at UCLA, organized an international, interdisciplinary conference on the musical, with nearly 50 invited guests, in October: “The American Musical on Stage and Screen: An Interdisciplinary Extravaganza.” Stacy Wolf (UT-Austin) and Mitchell Morris (another Duke Music alum) were also co-organizers of this conference.

Penka Kouneva (Ph.D. 1997) has recently composed scores for two TV films on the SciFi Channel: Cold Snap and Nuclear Hurricane. She has also composed the score for a drama/prison indie feature, The Third Nail, which will have a theatrical release in Feb. 2008, and the indie feature Richard III, which was awarded a Platinum Remi for Best Score at WorldFest-Houston. She also wrote the score for Reflections, an environmentalist documentary about the Florida Keys that plays daily at the Florida Keys Eco Discovery Center. Recently she was an orchestrator on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007), and The Transformers, and a Lead Orchestrator on The Transformers videogame, Dragon Wars, When Nietzsche Wept, and Vantage Point.

John MacLeod (B.A. 1989) is Executive Director of Granite State Opera in Portsmouth, NH. He has also served as Principal Trumpet of the Portsmouth Symphony Orchestra since 2005.

Caroline Mallonee (Ph.D. 2006) participated in the American Opera Project's “Composers and the Voice” in New York last fall. Read about her opera, Jane Austen's Persuasion.

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Email Elizabeth Thompson, Publicist, Dept. of Music