Author Archives: Derek
Adventures in R
The path was humbling, the path was steep, the path was sometimes so obscure that I wasn’t sure I knew the way. But earlier this summer, my first scratch-built digital research project went live on the shinyapps.io hosting platform. Written almost entirely in the R markdown programming language, A Visual Guide to Some Nineteenth-Century ComposersContinue reading “Adventures in R”
Arthur P. Schmidt & Company: A Walking Tour of Boston
Is That You, Mr. Berlioz?
In my large lecture courses, I often introduce musical examples by displaying a portrait of the composer in question. For composers who lived up through the early nineteenth century, I show paintings. For the more recent composers, I show photographs. The oldest of these photographs are (unavoidably) grainy, black-and-white affairs. They are an excellent meansContinue reading “Is That You, Mr. Berlioz?”
Music History Anthologies
The University at Buffalo is the first institution at which I’ve encountered the undergraduate music history survey being delivered across only two semesters. Brandeis University offers a sequence of five courses, as I recall, but with the requirement that students take just three of them. The music history faculty here at UB have recently beenContinue reading “Music History Anthologies”
American Musicological Society, Boston 2019
I am very pleased to be presenting a paper entitled “Sounding the Interrogative: Cadential Attenuation as Syntactic Device in the Madrigals of Sigismondo d’India” on Friday, November 1, at the 85th annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. The session, to be chaired by my friend and colleague Joel Schwindt (Boston Conservatory), is entitled “RhetoricalContinue reading “American Musicological Society, Boston 2019”
Teaching and Learning Philosophy
While participating in Maggie O’Rourke’s recent “Designing Experiences” faculty academy at the UB Center for Educational Innovation, we were asked to dig out our teaching statements and transform them into “teaching and learning philosophies.” Mine still sounds a bit stuffy, but here’s what I came up with: My purpose as a teacher is to exposeContinue reading “Teaching and Learning Philosophy”
Conference on the Italian Madrigal
On the weekend of September 15–16, I will be traveling to Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, to give a presentation at the Third Annual Conference on the Italian Madrigal. My talk is entitled, “Hearing the Interrogative in the Polyphonic Madrigals of Sigismondo d’India: A Quantitative Analysis.” The talk is scheduled for a Saturday morningContinue reading “Conference on the Italian Madrigal”
Translation Across Time
On Saturday, April 30, I will be presenting a short talk at Boston University as part of Enter Textuality: Shifting Perspectives through Editorial Studies, the 2016 graduate student conference in editorial studies. The title of my talk is “Translation Across Time: A Case of Semantic Drift in the Musical Lexicon.” The conference is organized by the BU EditorialContinue reading “Translation Across Time”
Maximalism and the Nineteenth-Century Orchestral Style
”In a successful academic career, the dissertation is eventually going to be the worst piece of scholarship you’ve ever produced.” This classic piece of advice already feels right, in some respects, but I am nevertheless proud to report that I successfully defended my dissertation yesterday afternoon. Only some minor revisions now lie ahead. Here isContinue reading “Maximalism and the Nineteenth-Century Orchestral Style”
