Natalie L. Haslam College of Music

Alumna Sarah Nordin Performs at Carnegie Hall for Special United Nations Event

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Sarah Nordin (MM, ’07) is a singer of diverse talents.  She can sing opera as well as Broadway style and has sung in nearly a dozen different languages.  But her most recent adventure was a new one.  She was asked: ‘Can you learn to sing in two new languages in two weeks?’ 

As it turns out, she can.  Nordin was recruited in November to sing at a special concert for Azerbaijani diplomats and their family and friends, who were in New York City for the United Nations Environment Assembly.  After working with a native speaker on her diction, she was able to sing the Azerbaijan national anthem, as well as a series of art songs in Azerbaijani and Turkish.  The concert, made possible by the Azerbaijani American Cultural Association at Carnegie Hall, featured a sold-out venue (at reduced capacity).   

“It’s a lot like interpreting poetry,” she says of the process of learning to sing in a new language. “The words themselves can mean a lot of different things.  Most music has at least two if not three meanings. So I spend a lot of time just thinking through what the different possible meanings could be, and trying to figure out how this song speaks to me.  I can’t really memorize it until I’ve done that, because I have to have my emotions in the right place to remember the words.” 

Her skill for learning languages quickly is something that she connects to her time at the University of Tennessee.  At the end of her time as an undergraduate at Lee University, she won the Atlanta district competition of the Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions (now known as the Laffont Competition).  As a result, several universities were interested in recruiting her to their program, but from the beginning, Nordin was most interested in the University of Tennessee. 

“It was largely because of Carol Freeman, who was in charge of the opera program at the time,” she said.  “I really wanted to work with him.  And it turned out that I was also able to do a young artist program with Knoxville Opera.  As part of that program I sang a lot, but I also helped with marking parts and the logistics before the orchestra came up.  So I was getting real-world experience at the same time that I was getting a graduate degree.  That was really useful for me as a singer to see that side of it, the ‘office work’ you might say of the opera world.” 

The combination of that experience with the high-quality education of the University of Tennessee School of Music provided a breadth of experience that allowed her to excel and, later, to develop a flexibility as a performer and an artist.  That would become key to her success as her career developed post-graduation. 

“My key has been taking the initiative myself as a self-empowered person to cast a wide net,” she said. “I had to try a lot of different things and see where my niche was.” 

Fast-forward to the present, and that wide net has allowed her to gain a tremendous variety of experience as a performer.  Partially due to that experience, the prospect of performing in the context of a United Nations assembly did not intimidate her, she said.  But learning the language well enough to perform in front of native speakers was still a challenging task.  The performance was not televised in the United States, but it did broadcast to Azerbaijan.  After the concert began, however, she received immense positive feedback in real time. 

“People were cheering and standing up in between songs, not just at the end,” she said. “The song at the very end of the concert was a folk song that most of the audience would sing while at home.  They sang along and were clapping along and I sang it through several times.”

Going forward, she says she’ll continue doing what has gotten her to this point: ambition and initiative.

“You have to create your own path and constantly be working in order to get more work,” she said. “Being willing to be your own boss is the thing for being an opera singer.” 

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

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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

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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

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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.”

Gregory Tardy awarded Jazz Road Creative Residencies Grant

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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – University of Tennessee School of Music Associate Professor Gregory Tardy has a rather unique proposition.  He is writing music inspired by classical literature.

Or rather, a specific work of classical literature.  He is currently writing a suite inspired by themes from the classic allegorical work Pilgrim’s Progress.  Originally published as The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which is to Come in 1678, the work is considered one of the most significant religious allegories in the English language.  The suite will not be a soundtrack, he says, but will use music to capture particular moments from the book and explore the themes that are embedded there.  Tardy sees the themes of the book as deeply tied to what has inspired him throughout his musical career, particularly in the music that we currently call jazz.  He credits famed tenor saxophonist John Coltrane with inspiring much of his musical journey, as well.

“Those that have followed my career will notice a lot of spiritual themes in my music throughout the years,” he said.  “I was very touched by this particular novel, and it has so many rich themes.  I think that even people who don’t share the same faith can identify a lot with these same themes.”

In his pursuit of the project, which he started writing at the beginning of the pandemic, Tardy has been named a recipient of the Jazz Road Creative Residencies Grant, which aims to remove financial barriers that prevent musicians from investing deeply in their artistic endeavors.  Jazz Road is a national initiative of South Arts, which is funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with additional support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 

If you ask Tardy about his creative process, a theme quickly emerges – it is constant.  Whether he’s sitting down for a formal writing session or not, he’s always listening for a new idea.

“I try to leave myself open for what’s happening around me,” he said.  “Sometimes when I’m walking down the street, I’ll hear something that strikes me, and I’ll get out my phone and record it.  I have probably 100 or more recordings on my phone, and before smartphones, I would carry around a recording device. Before that, I would write on scraps of paper, and that’s the way I’ve done it for years.”

In some ways, it’s difficult to pinpoint the beginning of Tardy’s musical career.  The son of two opera singers, he was exposed to various styles of music early on, and began his work as a clarinetist.  While in the school stage band, he was exposed to the saxophone, but wouldn’t return to it until after he had become a classically trained clarinetist. 

“The thing that changed everything was my band director recommended me for a gig playing saxophone in a polka band,” he said. “I also started really wanting to play this music that we call jazz and began practicing for eight-plus hours a day.”

He continued this level of hard work and commitment throughout the rest of his career, which included 15 years working as a professional musician in New York before coming to the University Tennessee 11 years ago.

As for this particular suite, Tardy anticipates performing the music around the end of March 2022, as well as leading a masterclass for University of Tennessee music students around that same timeframe.

Music graduate student Mikeila McQueston places second in American Prize Student Division for composition

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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – University of Tennessee Graduate Student Mikeila McQueston has added another accolade to her slate of compositions – this time in the American Prize competition.

The composition, which features the Luci Shaw poem “Descent,” placed second in the student division of the American Prize for composition (choral – short works). It’s a piece that McQueston said she was particularly eager to work on, due to the opportunities in the poem to illustrate the text through music. The poem begins, for example, with “Down he came from up/and in from out,” which she saw as ripe for musical illustration.

“There’s a lot of word painting I wanted to do in that particular song,” she said. “Whenever I’m composing, I really want to capture the speech-like aspect and the storytelling of the poem while still using my voice.”

Such experimentation, a common theme throughout her career thus far, has reaped tremendous rewards for McQueston. This American Prize placement is only the latest of her many accolades.  She has been selected as a Presser Scholar, a Herman E. Spivey Graduate Fellow, and while at Louisiana State University, she was a winner of the LSU Symphonic Winds Call for Scores and the Constantinides New Music Ensemble Call for Scores. Her work has not stopped since the American Prize competition, either – in April 2022, one of her compositions will be played at Carnegie Hall. She also continues work on her thesis, a fully-orchestrated two-act opera.  Her key to success?

“Enjoy the process. This work can be really intimidating, and it’s so easy to compare yourself to your peers or get frustrated for not having the ‘perfect’ technique. But that takes the joy out of studying your craft.”

And though it is hard work, joy is a key part of the process for McQueston. During the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic, many musicians were forced to work individually, with asynchronous collaborations. This resulted in some rather creative projects, with separately recorded parts being knitted together to form quintets and choirs. It also allowed her to spend more time focusing on her technique, which she says will make her a better performer in the long run. But now that she is able to work in the same room as other musicians, even masked and socially distanced, McQueston has found a resurgence of excitement in the collaborative creative process.

“As wonderful as virtual collaborations are, they’re difficult because you don’t get the joy of making music in the same room. That’s so special, and the fact that we get to start going back to that now is like falling in love with music all over again.”

McQueston anticipates graduating in Spring 2023 with graduate degrees in composition and voice. She says, “I feel called to pursue this line of work. I owe it to myself to try these things because I really do love them and I want to see where it goes.”

Photo by Franklin Green

Inclusion in the Arts: Grant to Help School of Music Incorporate More Diversity in Curricula

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The inclusion of diverse viewpoints in musical curricula can be a challenge for educators—one that is often made harder by a lack of funding.

As Hillary Herndon, associate professor of viola, pondered various ways to overcome this challenge, she found the Sphinx Venture Fund—a fund that invests money in a wide variety of music areas to aide in transforming the future of cultural diversity, equity, and inclusion in the arts. The fund seeks to invest $1.5 million over five years.

Herndon knew how transformational the grant could be for the School of Music, as well as music educators around the world, in advancing the music of underrepresented composers.

“Audiences only hear music written from one viewpoint,” Herndon said. “This has to change.”

After working with the UT Office of Sponsored Programs to complete the grant application, the Sphinx Venture Fund committee met with Herndon to discuss the School of Music’s plans for the grant money. And they announced the School of Music as a recipient shortly thereafter. 

Herndon is already working with the string area to celebrate diversity and feature underrepresented composers. This will entail collecting material by composers of color, representing as many eras in history as possible, and arranging the works to create three levels of books—beginning, intermediate, and advanced. Each instrument will have its own solo compilation, and there will be ensemble books for use in the School of Music orchestra classroom.

The grant will allow the School of Music to print and distribute over 800 of the books to educators around the country. There also will be books reserved for schools that serve large populations of Black and Latinx students.

The overall goal for the grant is to get books in the hands of students and educators, so they can begin to incorporate more diversity into educational programming.

“In an increasingly global world, we can do better,” said Herndon. “The goal is not to abandon the rich history of our craft, but to provide additional repertoire for students to study and perform that are written by those not well represented in our musical canon, by ethnicity or gender.”

The students assisting with the project will gain direct experience with researching the composers, as well as transcribing and arranging music for skill-level appropriate students. 

“All of our students will benefit from the enhanced understanding we collectively are gaining from working on this project,” said Herndon.

Herndon and the entire string faculty hope to start a national and global initiative to celebrate diversity in string music. The Sphinx Venture Fund is only the beginning.

“The recognition from the Sphinx organization places the School of Music firmly in the vanguard of music schools proactively seeking to address systemic racism in the United States,” said Herndon. “It provides a vehicle for innovative leadership in string pedagogy, both nationally and internationally.”

Now, the work begins.

Murphy Honored for Interdepartmental Collaborative Scholarship and Research

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Each year, Dean Theresa Lee and members of her cabinet, with help from department heads, recognize faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences for their excellence in teaching, research and creative activity, and lifetime achievements. 

Due to the ongoing pandemic, however, we were unable to host the annual awards banquet in-person. Each faculty member received a plaque and congratulations from the dean. We posted a video to the college YouTube channel here, which features each faculty award winner. 

Some of the most exciting and creative scholarly work takes place at the interface between disciplines, which is why the college recognizes the efforts of those who reach out beyond their departmental and disciplinary borders to explore new areas. This year, the college honors Jacob Levy and Barbara Murphy with the Interdepartmental Collaborative Scholarship and Research Award. 

Murphy, an associate professor of music theory, focuses her research theory pedagogy and technology in music theory. Recent research projects include the incorporation of theatrical improvisation in pedagogy classes, chunking in music dictation, and the development and use of online educational resources in music. Levy is an associate professor of psychology and applied personality researcher who studies psychological factors that influence academic and occupational satisfaction and performance. He is particularly interested in examining person-environment fit factors, and performance success in the context of the performing arts. 

Professors Levy and Murphy first met in fall 2008 when Murphy asked Levy to give a talk on music performance anxiety for students living in the Crescendo LLC. Their meeting led to several collaborations examining the intersection psychology and music pedagogy. Their collaboration is particularly impressive because their interdisciplinary work has been recognized by both of their respective disciplines. To date, their collaboration has led to one published paper, two paper presentations at national conventions in music, and two poster sessions at national conventions in psychology. They have also served together on five dissertation committees in psychology. 

“I have loved working with Jake Levy on a range of topics from the musicians’ learning styles to the mental and physical health of music majors,” Murphy said. “For me, this award shows that this kind of interdepartmental collaboration is valued by the college.”

Their collaborative work demonstrates a clear passion for examining and addressing the health, wellness, and educational needs of music students. It is evident by the progress of their work that their studies are developing into a clear, continuing interdisciplinary program of research relevant to both the psychological and music communities.

Aulos String Quartet Named Finalist in National String Competition

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The UT School of Music’s Aulos String Quartet is among seven finalists recently named to compete in the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) national string competition. MTNA is the oldest and largest musical organization in the US. The finals will be held virtually on February 18.

The quartet includes four undergraduate music students—Kristen Barret (violin), Becky Hearn (cello), Samantha Hearn (violin), and Zach Miller (viola).

Zach Miller, who is president of UT’s MTNA student chapter, is excited to take on the competition with the quartet. “We are honored to be recognized at the national level,” says Miller. “We are up against incredible conservatories across the US, and it gives us confidence to be in such good company.”

For this year’s competition MTNA chose seven finalists among applicants from all 50 states. Because of COVID-19, the competition was held online, allowing more ensembles to apply that might have been limited by travel. 

For Miroslav Hristov, the quartet’s coach and professor of violin at the School of Music, proud is an understatement for how he feels about this group. 

“It has been an incredible experience for me to watch them grow and develop into fine young artists and human beings,” said Hristov. “These four friends have supported each other, learned from each other, and have come together to make music with a level of artistry rarely seen in such a young ensemble.”

The group has been friends since their freshman year at UT, studying and learning under the direction of Hristov. Once they finally got the chance to form a quartet, it all came full circle.

For the finals, the quartet will be playing the first movements of the Haydn Sunrise Quartet and Johannes Brahms’ String Quartet No. 2.

No matter the outcome, Hristov is proud of his students and also extremely excited about the direction that the string area is headed at the School of Music.

“I have seen tremendous growth in the string area over the past 10 years,” said Hristov. “I am confident that when others see the level of technical and artistic mastery our students are capable of, UT will be highly sought after by young music professionals wishing to develop their craft.”