Graduate News
Graduate composer Minato Sakamoto's "Pacific 21" presented at the Society of Composers National Conference
Tuesday, May 11, 2021View the video of the concert (Minato Sakamoto's "Pacific 21" is at 33:34) View the complete concert program. Minato Sakamoto is a Japanese composer, pianist, and improviser from Osaka. Ranging from classical concert music to electronic music with heavy uses of computational technologies... Read More »
Georgiary Bledsoe (Ph.D. musicology, 2002) is Co-Director of SankofaSongs Summer Institute
Wednesday, May 5, 2021With a theme of Scott Joplin’s grand opera Treemonisha, the 2021 institute will offer three days of programming featuring an expert faculty, panel discussions, presentations, workshops and experiential learning. This groundbreaking initiative is presented by SankofaSongs and the Hayti Heritage... Read More »
Graduate composer James Budinich's new EP, "scenes from a pigeon’s wing," released April 22
Tuesday, April 27, 2021Listen to scenes from a pigeon’s wing on bandcamp or Spotify. The 30-minute EP consists of four tracks: 1. Nascent 2. 5x8 3. White Stone (after Agnes Martin), feat. Kate Dreyfuss 4. The Way After All four tracks are from Budinich's collaborations with Pigeonwing... Read More »
Congratulations to our 2021 Ph.D. Graduates
Monday, April 26, 2021Graduate Degrees Conferred Meredith Graham, Ph.D. (Musicology) Dissertation: “Multi-Text Anthology in the Choral Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Grace Williams, and Elizabeth Maconchy, 1919-1979” Committee Chair: Philip Rupprecht Karen Messina, Ph.D. (Musicology... Read More »
Brittany Green receives New Music USA's Creative Development Fund Grant
Tuesday, April 13, 2021New Music USA has awarded Brittany Green, a graduate PhD student in Composition, $3000 to purchase equipment for an installation she is collaborating on with Duke CMAC (Computational Media, Arts, & Cultures) PhD student Kate Alexandrite. Green says, "The project, Black... Read More »
Portfolio Project: The Ciompi Quartet commissions Duke Graduate Composers 2020
Tuesday, March 30, 2021In the summer of 2020, the Ciompi Quartet commissioned a unique project from four composers in Duke Music’s graduate program. The parameters of the commission were unorthodox: to find a solution to the compositional and performing challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic by creating short works... Read More »
Brittany Green and Sid Richardson named 2021 Transient Canvas Composition Fellows
Tuesday, March 23, 2021Brittany Green, a current graduate student in Composition, and Sid Richardson (PhD Composition, 2018) were two of four composers chosen as winners of this year's Transient Canvas fellowship. Green and Richardson will each receive a stipend of $1000, three performances of their works, audio/video... Read More »
Graduate composer James Budinich's "White Stone" premieres at the Royal Danish Academy of Music
Tuesday, March 9, 2021On March 11, 2021 at 1:30 pm EST, Budinich's White Stone (after Agnes Martin) for violin and electronics has its Danish premiere as part of the PULSAR Festival at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. Watch the performance. Kate Dreyfuss premiered White Stone as part of her... Read More »
Katharina Uhde (PhD musicology, 2014) releases CD of rediscovered works by Joseph Joachim
Tuesday, March 2, 2021The new CD, Joseph Joachim: Two Fantasies Rediscovered, released on the Soundset label, features Uhde as a soloist with the Radio Orchestra Warsaw. View the CD trailer. In 2016, Uhde rediscovered the two early fantasies, composed in the 1850s. “Fantasies on Hungarian and... Read More »
Nicholas Stoia's book, "Sweet Thing: The History and Musical Structure of a Shared American Vernacular Form," released by Oxford University Press
Monday, February 8, 2021As children, many of us learn to sing "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands." But despite the familiarity of this tune, few of us realize that what we're singing is actually part of a pervasive - and centuries-old - musical scheme. This particular pattern, the "Sweet Thing" scheme, has... Read More »