News

Professor Emeritus Paul Bryan was interviewed on Czech National Radio in early August as part of a remembrance of the 200th anniversary of the death of composer Johann Baptist Vanhal (1739-1813). Bryan Gilliam delivered a talk at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York on Aug. 24. Philip Rupprecht is on a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, hard at work on his monograph Avant-Garde Nation: British Musical Modernism in the 1960s… read more about Faculty News: August 2013 »

Penka Kouneva (Ph.D. composition, 1997) is lead orchestrator & score producer for Elysium, the TriStar science fiction blockbuster released in August.  Kouneva has the distinction of being the first woman to work as a lead orchestrator & score producer on a $100M Hollywood studio film. She will be visiting Duke this fall during DEMAN weekend to conduct a workshop with aspiring film/video/game composers on Nov. 2. George Lam (Ph.D. composition, 2011… read more about Alumni News: August 2013 »

This is a follow-up to my original post about my summer project working with students in Qingyan, China. During the final week of my project, Prof. Hsiao-mei Ku was able to join me (as her Duke Engage Zhuhai program has come to a close) to assist with a weeklong foreign language and arts camp in Qingyuan, Guangdong, China. In the photos, each of us is conducting a group of mostly primary but some middle school students from Qingyuan and Guangzhou in ensembles performing both Western classical and some… read more about Jason Maher, Class of 2014: Final thoughts from Qingyan »

All master classes are free and open to the public. Sunday, October 27Cello and Chamber Music Master Class with Pamela Smits7 pm. Nelson Music Room, East Duke Building Monday, October 28Piano Master Class with Sabine Simon4:30 pm. Bone Hall, Biddle Music Building Friday, November 8Piano Master Class with Kirill Gerstein* THIS MASTER CLASS HAS BEEN CANCELED Thursday, November 21Violin Master Class with Jennifer Curtis5 pm. Bone… read more about Master Classes, Fall 2013 »

This past year, we had two small exhibits of musical instruments from DUMIC's collection. One featured free reed aerophones, an accordion and concertina, and the other, our Tabla. If you did not get the opportunity to see them while they were on diplsay, you can visit them below. Enjoy! Tabla are pairs of asymmetrical, tunable, hand-played drums that have been popular in South Asia and India since the eighteenth century. Pairs of tabla consist of the treble tabla, or daya drum, played by the right hand, and the… read more about Recent Exhibits: Tabla »

(The following is a guest post from Jason Maher, a premedical student and Music Major in Duke University’s Trinity College Class of 2014.) Greetings from southern China! Here in Guangdong Province the weather averages in the 90s Fahrenheit and the term “light showers” is laughable, seeing as a 100 degree day can change to a couple of inches of rain in a mere two minutes, with heavy winds and dark clouds that fly over the mountains as though they’re late for one of Professor Rupprecht’s music theory… read more about Duke Music Reaches Qingyan: Guest Post from Jason Maher (Class of 2014) »

Kirsten Rutschman presented the paper "Swedish Opera in Translation: Gustaf Adolf and Ebba Brahe" at the Lyrica Dialogues at Harvard University on May 3. A DVD of the 2012 workshop of Amy Scurria's opera Pearl will be screened at the Feminist Theory and Music Conference at Hamilton College in NY, July 31-August 4.  [ “FTM 20-21: New Voices in the New Millennium” ].  Scurria will introduce her work before the screening and hold a Q&A session… read more about Graduate Student News, June 2013 »

It has been well over a decade since the G. Norman and Ruth G. Eddy Collection of Musical Instruments took up residence in the lobby of the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building and became the Duke University Musical Instrument Collections (DUMIC). The pioneering group was soon joined by the Frans and Willemina de Hen-Bijl Collection of Musical Instruments, the Robert Miller Collection of replicas and other material, and numerous individual gifts. The collection… read more about Duke University Musical Instrument Collections (DUMIC) Update »

One of the many instruments in DUMIC's collection is a small portative organ, made by Georg Steinmeyer in the early 1950s. John Santoianni, the Ethel Sieck Carrabina Curator of Organs and Harpsichords here at Duke, wrote the following post after examining the instrument as he prepared it for the Duke Collegium Musicum concert this past April. This modern instrument reflects a style of small pipe organ which was used from medieval times to the 16th century. Typically, such examples had only one rank, or set, of… read more about Our Steinmeyer Portative Organ »

Undergraduate Degrees Conferred First Major Nicholas James Gubbins Jordan James Kvale Long Cameron Allan Alvarez ThompkinsThe Anne Marie Parsons Memorial Prize For excellence in the field of jazz studies Jenny Louise WaltersPaul Bryan Award To recognize outstanding musicianship and exemplary service to the Duke University Wind Symphony Second Major Niloy Ghosh Matthew Robert… read more about Graduation and Awards 2013 »

Filmmaker Rodrigo Dorfman presents a short documentary about the Ciompi Quartet, Duke's resident string quartet. read more about The Ciompi Quartet: a short documentary »

Music Department graduation and awards, Ciompi Quartet Presents summer chamber music series and a new Ciompi Quartet video by Rodrigo Dorfman, Interactive Computer Music (MUS 274S) final project by Clara Starkweather, and more!  Read it here! read more about Duke Notes 05/22/2013 »

This is Duke Senior Clara Starkweather demonstrating one of her final projects for MUS 274S (Interactive Computer Music), taught by Scott Lindroth. In the class, students developed interactive motion-to-music systems using web cameras as well as the Kinect camera. They all wrote their own computer code using a software synthesis programming language called SuperCollider. They designed their own instruments and wrote algorithms that determined what those instruments played in response to… read more about Interactive Computer Music: A Duke Student Project »

​Stradivarius wanted violins ‘to sing human vowels’ According to a short article on this Arts Journal blog, a study conducted by Joseph Nagyvary, a retired professor of biochemistry and biophysics with an interest in how stringed instruments are made, found that violins made by famous historic makers produce tones similar to those produced by the female singing voice. The instruments that he used in his research included one made by Guarneri del Gesù and currently played by Itzhak Perlman. Nagyvary argues that… read more about Did you see this article? »