Natalie L. Haslam College of Music

Jennifer Salamone

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Jennifer Salamone

Lecturer of Music Theory

Dr. Salamone serves as a Lecturer of Music Theory at UT’s College of Music. She has authored several articles on creative pedagogy, and is always seeking out new and relevant ways to captivate the classroom. With a current research thread focused on utilizing culturally relevant music in therapeutic settings for substance abuse, Dr. Salamone is excited to settle into the Appalachian region to deepen her work with bluegrass music and opioid abatement.

Previously, Dr. Salamone served on the faculty of Florida Gulf Coast University and the Oberlin College Conservatory. She holds degrees in music theory from the University of Kentucky and a degree in voice from The Hartt School. Her personal interests include running, baking, furniture restoration, and befriending all of the neighborhood dogs.

Education

PhD, Music Theory – University of Kentucky (2017)
MA, Music Theory – University of Kentucky (2012)
BM, Voice – University of Hartford—The Hartt School (2010)

Juan Carlos “JC” Quintero

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ADDRESS
Natalie Haslam Music Center 1741 Volunteer Blvd, Knoxville, TN 37916
Website
https://www.juancarlosquintero.com/

Juan Carlos "JC" Quintero

Professor of Practice, Director of Music Business & Communications, Area Coordinator of Music Business & Communications

Those well versed in Latin American culture know Medellín, Colombia is often referred as, “La ciudad de la eterna primavera (the city of eternal spring),” a reflection of the vast Andean Valley’s culture, art, flowers, music and people.  Both musically and spiritually, the heart, soul and guitar of Juan Carlos Quintero’s music reflects the colorful sounds and diverse rhythms of his cherished birthplace. 

Latin music was a very natural gravitation for JCQ when he first picked up the guitar at age eight: “No matter what style I ever played in, I always came back to my heritage. Music from Colombia crosses so many boundaries and its ability to seduce while celebrating life has always moved me. Colombian rhythms are so majestic, they have a strong natural appeal to me. This music seems to show up every time I compose or perform, I can’t help it! A few years before I picked up the guitar, I remember being mesmerized by a band that played in a high school next door to my elementary school in Brussels. They were a cover band playing Latin music and I was convinced, ‘Those are the guys from the radio!’ I was hooked from then on.”

JCQ was particularly inspired by masters like Quincy Jones, Gato Barbieri, Cal Tjader, Miles, Tito Puente, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Jeff Beck and Carlos Santana, but he felt that Chick Corea, Eddie Palmieri, Gato Barbieri and Gary Burton best brought out the excitement of bridging melodic improvisation with composition. JCQ took this lead both attending Berklee College of Music in the early 80’s and when he launched his own solo career later in the decade.  He studied composition at Boston’s New England Conservatory with George Russell before moving to Los Angeles, where he plugged into the city’s studio scene with the help of his mentor Tommy Tedesco (The Wrecking Crew). While developing his freelance guitar-work by day, JCQ composed a volume of original music and sought out old Boston schoolmates to help bring the music to life via gigs throughout Los Angeles. An opportunity to open for longtime hero, Gato Barbieri convinced him to keep writing and start making records… 

Dreams come true…Achieving his goal of producing music blending contemporary jazz with music styles from Colombia, JCQ quickly became a staple of NAC, World, Jazz and Smooth Jazz radio with tracks from his first two albums, a self-titled effort in 1990 (featuring Tommy Tedesco) and Through The Winds in 1992 on Nova Records. Critically acclaimed records followed in 1997 with The Way Home on Escapade records segueing to releases on Moondo Records, a label he founded in early 2000 and distributed by Robert Fripp’s label, DGM. A decade of music ensued with notable releases, Medellín, Los Musicos, Los Primos, Las Cumbias…Las Guitarras, Joy To The World, and Guitarras De Pasión compilation series featuring music by JCQ (Vol. 1 Charted #1 on iTunes/World Music for 7 months). Amongst many highlights in JC’s recording career, a standout remains when featured on Jazz on the Latin Side Volume 1 (2000) and Volume 2(2001), all-star live recordings at B.B. King’s Blues Club in Los Angeles (Ubiquity/Cubop Records) alongside Alex Acuna, Poncho Sanchez, Justo Almario, Otmaro Ruiz, Francisco Aguabella and Luis Conte, to name a few. Joining forces with top tier music collaborators and label partners has bolstered JCQ’s profile as a world-class guitarist/recording artist able to produce, perform and record a world of music while nurturing a signature sound.

When his hands aren’t on the guitar, JCQ’s career in music expands to session work, teaching, producing, custom music, music licensing, publishing, and consulting. Career highlights includes teaching music business, composition and jazz studies at Colleges throughout Los Angeles (College of the Canyons, California State University), launching Moondo Records Inc. into a formidable world/jazz record label (distributed by Ryko, WEA, Eone Ent.), securing a publishing deal with BMG Rights Management to administer his Publishing, and establishing Café Moondo, a Production Music-label partnership with Warner Chappell to produce music of multiple genres for TV and Film licensing. A recent chrysalis was when JCQ transitioned to TV production as Music Supervisor and Executive in Charge of Music for Haim Saban’s entertainment company, Saban Brands LLC, producing music and championing music rights for all of Saban’s TV properties (The Power Rangers, Paul Frank Industries, Julius Jr., Digimon, Glitter Force, etc.). The unique role culminated in opportunities to produce acclaimed recording artists such as Sheryl Crow and Blush to perform pop songs featured on the Julius Jr. Show/Netflix and Glitter Force/Netflix respectively. 

Successfully fulfilling diverse music paradigms throughout multiple decades has been the pillar for JCQ’s expansive career. Recognized as a seasoned all-purpose music specialist, JCQ remains in the forefront while creating, producing and exploring new ventures…

Looking ahead…”One of the greatest things about creating music today is the ability to record without limitations while nurturing an artistic voice! Often through collaboration, the results can easily surpass one’s vision and for me, that’s the gift! To follow the creative steps with a distribution strategy one can control independently is equally remarkable. The collaborators, whether in business or creative, are essential as new ways to circulate works are developed internationally. I’m excited about the chapters ahead, let the music binging begin!” 

– Jonathan Widman

Leslie C. Gay

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ADDRESS
University of Tennessee
College of Music
236 Natalie L. Haslam Music Center
Knoxville, TN 37996-4040
Phone
865-974-7525

Leslie C. Gay Jr.

Associate Professor of Musicology

Leslie C. Gay Jr., Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee, holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. He has published articles and reviews on American music and culture in the journals Ethnomusicology, American Music, and World of Music. His research also appears in Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media (2021) and Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader (Routledge, 2005, edited by Jennifer C. Post). With his collaborator, René Lysloff, he conceptualized, co-edited, and contributed to Music and Technoculture (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), which examines emerging and dynamic relationships among music, culture, and technology.

Gay has published research on indie rock musicians in New York City and music publishing in the 19th-century United States. Currently, he is completing a book on the reception of African American music in Denmark. He began this continuing historical and ethnographic research with a Fulbright Scholar grant in 2002, at which time he also served on the faculty of Aarhus University (Aarhus, Denmark).

His additional teaching and research interests include ethnography, sound studies, and ecomusicology.  At University of Tennessee, Gay founded and served as inaugural director of the Balinese gamelan, a semar peguligan ensemble. He’s also active within the College of Arts and Science interdisciplinary programs of Africana Studies and Global Studies.

Leslie Gay is a member of the editorial board of the journal Jazz Perspectives. He remains active in the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the International Council for Traditional Music. He has been a participant in the NEH Summer Research Program (1994) and the Fulbright Specialist Program (2011).

Education

PhD, Ethnomusicology – Columbia University (1991)
MPhil, Ethnomusicology – Columbia University (1989)
MM, Music Theory – University of North Texas (1980)
BM, Music Theory – University of North Texas (1976)

Research & Creative Endeavors

Books

  • Rhythmic Nation: African American Music and Danish Identity. In progress.
    • This book engages broader dialogues within ethnomusicology concerning music’s significance as tied to global flows of people, ideas, technologies, and commodification practices, especially explorations of how global music features in the construction and maintenance of contemporary, local cultural identities. My research focuses on an important case of such a “localization” of Black music within the Northern European country of Denmark. I address Denmark’s incorporation of African American jazz and other diasporic musics as Danish, under their concept of rytmisk musik as driven by a group of public intellectuals known as the cultural radicals. To frame this research, I draw on the work of Paul Gilroy (1993) and his notion of diasporic culture, which I find to be seminal and corrective in acknowledging the multifarious contributions of Black cultures to regions traditionally understood as “European” in a sense that conveys whiteness.  I demonstrate how the Danish cultural radicals effectively bracketed Black and popular musics within the broad aesthetic-political category of rytmisk musik.  Further, I underscore the importance of African American music as a key component of Danish modernity, at the time of its emergence after World War I, through the present day. Overall, I argue that the continued pervasiveness of multiple African diasporic forms in Denmark today subvert overly simplified approaches to race, nationality, and received notions of European modernity.

 

  • Music and Technoculture. Coedited by Leslie C. Gay Jr. and René T.A. Lysloff. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
    • Inspired by the concept of technoculture, this book locates technology squarely in the middle of expressive culture, musical creativity, and local practice. The constituent essays range from the Victorian parlor to the 21st-century shopping mall, and are concerned with how technology culturally informs and infuses aspects of everyday life and musical experience.  The book argues that this merger does not necessarily result in a “cultural grayout,” but instead often produces exciting new possibilities.  Further, the volume offers evidence of musical practices and ways of knowing music that are informed and significantly transformed by new technologies, yet remain profoundly local in style and meaning.
  • See https://www.weslpress.org/9780819565143/music-and-technoculture/

 

Representative Articles and Essays

 

  • “Shadows of Black and White: Materialities and Medialities in May Irwin’s ‘Frog Song.’” In Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media, edited by Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, 178-205. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
  • “Ensemble.” In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Music and Culture, edited by Janet Sturman, 807-812. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2019.
  • “Acting Up, Talking Tech: New York Rock Musicians and their Rhetoric of Technology.” In Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, edited by Jennifer C. Post, 209-22. New York: Routledge, 2006.
  • “Before the Deluge: The Technoculture of Song Sheet Publishing Viewed from Late 19th-Century Galveston.” American Music 17, no. 4 (1999): 396-421. Physical publication Summer 2000
  • “Hearing is Seeing: Listening for New York Rock Musicians.” The World of Music 41, no. 1 (1999): 9-17.
  • “Acting Up, Talking Tech: New York Rock Musicians and their Metaphors of Technology.” Ethnomusicology 42, no. 1 (1998): 81-98.
  • “Lullaby.” In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art. Thomas A. Green, 2:514-15. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997.
  • “Musical Instrument.” In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art. Ed. Thomas A. Green, 2:570-74. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1997.
  • “Rockin’ the Imagined Local: New York Rock in a Reterritorialized World.” In Popular Music — Style and Identity, edited by Will Straw, et al., 123-126. Montreal: Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions, 1995.

Nathan Madsen

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Website
https://madsenstudios.com/

Nate Madsen

Adjunct Instructor of Music and Audio for Video Games

Nathan Madsen has been involved in game audio since 2005 and has worked with many top tier brands including LEGO, Dragon Ball Z, Harry Potter, MechWarrior, Monopoly, Clue, The Game of Life, Titanfall, Great Wolf Lodge and Disney. He’s an experienced composer and sound designer who is well-versed with the technologies used to create and implement music, sound, and voice overs into interactive multi-media. Madsen is also an active performer and recording artist on saxophone and piano and has experience rearranging and producing covers of iconic video game scores. On top of his creative pursuits, he’s an active lecturer who’s given presentations at Oklahoma Baptist University, University of Northern Iowa, University of Northern Colorado, as well as has taught game audio courses for DeVry University’s Game, Simulation and Programming degree and is currently teaching Audio for Video Games within the UT College of Music.

Education

MM, Music Performance – Texas Christian University (2005)

BME, Music Education – Oklahoma Baptist University (2002)

Jon Clark

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Jonathan Clark

Adjunct Instructor of Short Form Music for Television

Jonathan Clark is a Telly award-winning composer, creating scores, branding campaigns, and themes for 100’s of shows over the last 25 years for Discovery, HGTV, Motor Animal Planet, A&E, OWN, HBO/TNT Latam, just to name a few. He has a bachelors in Communications from BYU, a Masters in Music Technology from IUPUI and has taught what he does at UTK for over five years. Jonathan is a native Knoxvillian and currently resides near Nashville with his wife, Jen. They are the parents of four and have two grandkids.

Education

MS, Music Technology – Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis
BA, Communications – Brigham Young University

Alissa Galyon

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Website
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alissa-galyon-bb7185aa/
Phone
865-974-8935

Alissa Galyon

Director of Marketing & Communications

Alissa Galyon discovered her love for higher education serving as a public relations and development intern for the Alumni Association at her alma mater, Murray State University (MSU). Sharing student and alumni success stories, driving fundraising scholarship campaigns, and serving as an advocate for higher education led her to beginning her career at good ol’ Rocky Top for several years serving as a marketing and communications specialist. In 2020, she became an alumna of UT Knoxville by earning her master’s degree through the College of Communication & Information.

In 2021, Galyon ventured outside of higher education to serve as a public affairs specialist for the Y-12 National Security Complex. In her role, she served as a communications lead for a multi-billion-dollar Department of Energy construction project, leading external affairs, executive communication, recruitment marketing, crisis communication and change management efforts. Over the years, Galyon has also provided freelancing marketing services and served as a marketing consultant to local and regional businesses and organizations, with a focus on enrollment growth and revenue generation.

In a very “Rocky Top, you’ll always be, home sweet home to me” move, Galyon returned to the University of Tennessee to serve in her current role as the director of marketing and communications for the Natale L. Haslam College of Music. In her role, she provides leadership and direction for all communications and marketing strategy, works closely with the College’s recruitment and advancement teams, leads executive communication efforts, and works to promote and enhance the College’s brand and reputation.  Serving in this role for Tennessee’s only College of Music is an opportunity that makes her excited to go to work every day.

When she’s not at work, you can find her at her local CrossFit gym, booping her pets’ noses, enjoying the amazing food Knoxville has to offer with her fellow foodie husband, or binging the latest NPR podcast.

Education

M.S. in Communication & Information – University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2020)
B.S. in Public Relations – Murray State University (2017)

Virginia Garner

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ADDRESS
University of Tennessee College of Music 117 Natalie L. Haslam Music Center Knoxville, TN 37996-4040

Virginia Garner

Director of Finance and Administration