School of Music alumnus named recipient of Willard J. Hines Music Scholarship

November 22, 2021 by Alissa Galyon

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Brandon Bell (MM, ‘17), an alumnus of the University of Tennessee School of Music graduate program in voice, has been named one of two 2021 recipients of the premier scholarship in vocal performance. 

The scholarship was named in honor Willard J. Hines, a Detroit Choir director-educator.  The scholarship committee, composed of his former students, aims to financially assist young leaders in music, and can be granted to vocalists of any style.  Bell is a baritone opera singer, whose recent credits include Dr. Grenvil in La Traviata, the British Major in Silent Night, General Arlie/Bartender in Fellow Travelers, and Garcia/Zuniga in La tragédie de Carmen. 

“I’ve been really big on trying to find the ways to or the projects that make me feel like I’m using my voice to tell honest stories,” he said. “For me, the important thing is the text. As a little kid who grew up listening to Whitney Houston and Beyoncé, I was always drawn to the beautiful voices, but also the lyrics. I used to just look at the CD liners and pour over the text.I love using my voice as a way to convey text, and I think that makes it easier to draw myself in as an actor as well as a singer. My primary goal in both is just to make sure that I’m being honest and portraying the text in the way that I feel is the most truthful.” 

Singing itself has been a passion for Bell from a very young age. He was surrounded by various kinds of music, and continued to experiment with different musical styles.  In middle school, he auditioned for the Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, Virginia.  His freshman year of high school, all of the students at the school were introduced to opera.  From there, he immersed himself in the artform.  Once he saw his first opera, The Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach, he knew that he wanted to be an opera singer. 

“The majority of the students there walk in knowing we love to sing, but not knowing anything about opera at all. Then you spend four years learning,” he said. “I went to the Met in New York every year, the Virginia opera three times a year, and very quickly began to find out more and more about this artform. For the first time I felt true ownership over my voice.” 

Since his graduation from the University of Tennessee with a Master of Music in Vocal Performance, Bell has continued to excel as an opera singer. He is currently a Lesley Resident Artist with the Fort Worth Opera.  He is featured on the main stage in multiple roles this opera season. His role also includes singing at various community, donor, and social events, performing recitals, and receiving voice lessons, language and diction coaching, as well as participating in masterclasses.   

Before that, he was a two-year Resident Artist with the Utah Opera, and has performed on numerous stages across the country, including Chautauqua Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, West Edge Opera, Opera Saratoga, the California Symphony, and the Oakland Symphony.  His other accolades include an Encouragement Award in the Utah District of the 2021 Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition, 4th Place in the 2018 East Bay Opera League Young Artist Scholarship Awards Competition, and national auditions finalist in the 2018 Mondavi Center Young Artist Competition, among others.   

“It’s been rewarding after all of this training to really have ownership over my voice,” he said. “My journey from school to the young artists’ program has really been a process of discovering my voice and getting comfortable with it.  Now I can use it to tell the stories that I want to.”

School of Music Alumnus Wins Latin Grammy for Best Engineered Album

November 22, 2021 by Alissa Galyon

For Delbert Bowers, it was an honor just to be nominated. 

But the win is nice, too. 

His path to the Latin Grammy win (Best Engineered Album, for his work on El Madrileño by C. Tangana) is a rather unusual one.  He graduated from the University of Tennessee with an undergraduate degree in trumpet performance, then went on to pursue his Master’s at Ohio University and his DMA at the University of Southern California.  It was at this final destination that one course changed Bowers’s entire career trajectory. 

“I’ve always been a techie person, and a large part of what we do as musicians involves computers,” he said. “But I didn’t really realize until I took a class in audio engineering that this was a much better fit for me.” 

He loved it so much that he immediately pursued the first entry he could find into the recording industry.  That was a position as a runner at Larrabee Sound Studios – a position that included tasks such as coffee and lunch runs – which he worked at until he was given the opportunity to become an assistant engineer.  “Anything to get my foot in the door,” he said, at which point his passion and wealth of experience as a trained musician came into play.  He emphasized how important patience and persistence are to the process, the sheer hard work of professional musicianship.

 “One of the things that was installed in me at the University of Tennessee was to think about musicianship – you’re thinking musically all the time,” he said.  “A lot of people forget that being a producer or a mixing engineer is a craft. It’s a slow process of learning how to do something, and being meticulous and learning that craft, and slowly working on something until it becomes second nature.”

 After four years at Larrabee Sound Studios, during which he worked on thousands of records, he left to jumpstart his freelance career.  During that time, he’s had the opportunity to work with several high-profile artists, including Eminem, JoJo, Linkin Park, PitBull, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, & The Rolling Stones.

He was nominated for three American Grammy Awards in 2017 for his work on the Lukas Graham song “7 Years.”  This year’s Latin Grammy win also comes amidst three nominations for El Madrileño, including Record of the Year and Album of the Year, as well as winning in Best Engineered Album.  This project in particular was a bit different from the start, Bowers says: 

“Usually, by the time an album gets to me, the car’s already been painted and put together, so to speak, and I’m just making it a little bit better of a car,” he said.  “With El Madrileño, I was told, ‘go wild, be bizarre.’”

 When asked about the key to his success, as well as what advice he has for current students, a couple of themes emerge.  He emphasizes the importance that experience played in his ability to transition to music engineering, but also the importance of having an open mind.  Working in the music industry can open many paths – not only that of a performer.

 “When I took my first business class, I realized that there are so many jobs out there that hadn’t been on the radar for me as a musician,” he said.  “Keep an ear open and do not limit yourself on what it means to be a musician, and what it means to work in the music profession itself.”

Photo courtesy of Delbert Bowers.

UT Professor of Musicology co-edits book on medieval French gender and voice

November 4, 2021 by Alissa Galyon

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – A new book co-edited by School of Music Professor of Musicology Rachel May Golden analyzes gender and voice in medieval French literature and song.  It’s a project that merges a variety of different perspectives from a wide range of disciplines – one that Golden believes will aid in granting a fuller understanding of the period.

“Sometimes medieval times are viewed in a negative way like that it was a dark age, or that all knowledge and learning was lost, or that it was exclusively filled with war and hardship and disease and those sorts of things,” she said.  “In some ways, medieval people were not so different from us.  We’re a society that’s been heavily affected recently by disease and wars, and we’re a society that struggles with inequities. There’s truth to those things affecting the human condition a lot more broadly than in just one era.”

The book, titled Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song, is composed of essays that offer analyses of medieval French writings and song from a variety of perspectives, including literary, historical, and musical, to better understand the history of women’s voices in the time period.  The work grew out of a series of sessions on the topic at the long-running International Congress on Medieval Studies.  Katherine Kong, an independent scholar and previously associate professor of French at the University of Tennessee, co-led these conference sessions with Golden, and co-edited the book along with Golden as well.

Golden’s interest in France originally was piqued, she says, by accident.  She discovered a couple of Christmas albums in graduate school that featured Latin religious repertoires of southern France and were some of the first polyphonic music written in western Europe.  She was drawn to the history of that development, as well as how overlooked it was at the time – while students frequently first learn about the polyphony of northern France at Notre Dame in studying the form, these pieces of southern France preceded those – in some cases by as much as 100 years.

 “I started working on them and thinking about them because they’re a bit less set.  They don’t necessarily notate rhythm between parts, so they have a much more improvisatory feeling than the later Notre Dame pieces, which tend to be very structured,” she said.  “This makes them a bit more challenging to perform, to figure out how the two voices might fit together, and what kind of dissonances might be part of the practice of the time.”