School of Music to Host College Music Society Super-Regional Conference

In honor of its 50th anniversary, the College Music Society (CMS) is holding four Super-Regional conferences (two regions combining efforts) at the end of March, and one will take place at Illinois State University on March 28 and 29, presented by the Great Plains chapter and Great Lakes chapter of the CMS.

CMS is a consortium of college, conservatory, university, and independent musicians and scholars interested in all disciplines of music.  Its mission is to promote music teaching and learning, musical creativity and expression, research and dialogue, and diversity and interdisciplinary interaction.

The two-day event at Illinois State will include more than 45 presentations on a broad range of topics, including a presentation by acoustician David Kahn and architect Gary Reetz, who were part of the design team for ISU’s Center for the Performing Arts.  The keynote address at 11 a.m. Saturday will be Bruno Nettl, professor emeritus of music and anthropology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.  His topic will be “Heartlands Revisited: Exercises in Musical Ethnography.”

Two composers concerts are scheduled in the Center for the Performing Arts Concert Hall, each open to the public free of charge. 

At 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 28, performers will be ISU’s Concert Choir, Belle Voix, Madrigal Singers and Wind Symphony, faculty members flutist Kimberly Risinger and clarinetist David Gresham, and instrumentalists violinist Tricia Park, pianist David Gompper, composer and classical guitarist Timothy Ernest Johnson and vibraphonist Michael Malgoza.

At 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 29, performers will include the ISU Faculty String Quartet (violinists Sarah Gentry and Emily Morgan, violist Katherine Lewis and cellist Adriana Ransom), ISU Faculty Piano Trio (violinist Sarah Gentry, cellist Adriana Ransom and pianist Tuyen Tonnu), soprano Alicia Purcell and the Avalon String Quartet (faculty quartet-in-residence at the Indiana University-South Bend Raclin School of the Arts), Chicago State University faculty pianist Mark Sudeith, composers and percussionists Carrie Biolo and James A. Strain performing their own work assisted by interpretive dancer Maria Formolo, and the Illinois Wesleyan University Jazz Ensemble.

In his keynote address at 11 a.m. Saturday, Nettl will revisit, after more than a decade, his experience as described in the book "Heartland Excursions," and contemplate the role of ethnomusicological approaches in higher education generally.  He will include a brief but critical account of his experience doing and writing musical ethnography in American academic culture, using Blackfoot and Asian Indian cultures as context.  His conclusion will look at recent changes in the world's musical cultures and how they are reflected in changes in schools of music, and how these relationships can be interpreted by ethnomusicologists.