The music history department at Lawrence seeks to encourage students to think critically about music and its relationship to the world in which it is created and received through the exploration of changing styles, practices, and meanings in social, historical, and theoretical contexts.
The music history curriculum includes two main types of courses: an initial two-term sequence provides a survey of Western art music from medieval times to the present, as well as an introduction to bibliographic skills and research techniques; upper-level courses offer opportunities to explore individual topics in greater depth and to prepare more extensive research projects. The department offers a diverse range of courses in terms of both content and approach. Recent offerings in musicology and ethnomusicology include courses devoted to specific composers, genres, periods, places, and themes. Students can also participate in independent study, tutorial, and honors projects dealing with a musicological topic.
Lawrence alumni have continued on to prestigious graduate programs and to successful careers in both musicology and ethnomusicology.
Although Lawrence does not offer a music history major, students can take advantage of the possibility of a student-designed major that incorporates or emphasizes music history classes.
Please click here to view descriptions of Music History courses.
Degree Information
Faculty
- Sara Ceballos
Assistant Professor of Music
Sara Gross Ceballos received her Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a B.A. in music from Colby College. Her dissertation “Keyboard Portraits: Performing Character in the Eighteenth Century” explores how keyboard works functioned as portraits—of subjects of character pieces, of patron-performers, or of composers—through the aural, kinesthetic and visual dimensions of performance. This research was supported by a Dissertation Year Fellowship and Research Mentorship Year Fellowship from UCLA. She has received several awards for her research, including the Herman and Celia Wise Prize for her chapter on “François Couperin and the Idea of Caractère” and the Professor Ciro Zoppo award for her archival research and lecture recital on the music of French fortepianist and composer Anne Louise Brillon de Jouy. She is a past winner of the Ingolf Dahl competition for the best graduate student paper at a joint meeting of Pacific Southwest and Northern California chapters of the American Musicological Society with her paper “Scarlatti and the Spanish Body: Cultural Influence in the Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.”
Some of her other interests include manifestations of divine love in the seventeenth-century villancico and postcolonial studies, a field in which she won second place in a paper competition sponsored by the University of California Transnational and Transcolonial Study Group with a paper focused on musical allusion in the work of Algerian author Assia Djebar. In addition, she is an avid pianist and amateur harpsichordist.
Contact by e-mail: sara.g.ceballos@lawrence.edu
- James DeCorsey
Associate Professor of Music
James DeCorsey, horn, joined the faculty of the Lawrence Conservatory in 1990. A native of California, he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Stanford University, and later became the first horn player to receive a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Yale University. Among Mr. DeCorsey's many teachers and mentors, Wendell Hoss, A. David Krehbiel, Anthony Halstead, Paul Ingraham, Arnold Jacobs, and Carmine Caruso have been particularly influential.
Professor DeCorsey has performed throughout the Americas and Europe as soloist, recitalist, orchestral player, chamber musician, freelance hornist, and recording artist, with internationally recognized ensembles and conductors. A sampling includes the San Francisco Symphony, English Chamber Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Royal Opera, American Symphony, Orpheus, and Musica Sacra, under maestros Georg Solti, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Simon Rattle, Norman del Mar, Gunther Herbig, and Rafael FrŸbeck de Burgos. His eclectic background also includes concert work with popular artists Frank Sinatra, Henry Mancini, Roberta Flack, and numerous Broadway shows, as well as commercial recordings for radio and television.
While living in Great Britain (1976-80), Mr. DeCorsey learned a great deal about horn design and manufacture, working closely with horn makers Robert Paxman and Richard Merewether. Through performances with noted British hornists Anthony Halstead and Michael Thompson, he gained a special appreciation for the British tradition as handed down from Dennis Brain and Alan Civil. He also cultivated an interest in the natural horn and in historical performance practice, through contact with Halstead and Horace Fitzpatrick.
Professor DeCorsey pursues an active career as teacher, clinician, adjudicator, and performer on both modern and historical horns. Since coming to Lawrence, he has been heard as principal horn with the Green Bay Symphony, Pamiro Opera, Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, Green Lake Festival, on Wisconsin Public Radio, and with the Lawrence Brass, Lawrence Wind Quintet, and the Lawrence Chamber Players. His teaching interests include horn, music history, chamber music, brass techniques, and Freshman Studies.
Contact by e-mail: james.h.decorsey@lawrence.edu
- Sonja Downing
Assistant Professor of Music
Sonja Lynn Downing received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds her Master of Music degree in Flute Performance from UCSB, and a B.A. in Music from Swarthmore College. Her research interests include Balinese gamelan music, traditional music pedagogy, and the intersection of gender and performance. Her dissertation explores socio-musical and pedagogical changes due to the recent emergence of all-girls and mixed gender children’s traditional gamelan music ensembles in Bali, Indonesia. This research was supported by a Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award and a grant from the Pacific Rim Research Program.
Ms. Downing has received two awards from sections of the Society for Ethnomusicology for her presentation “Embodied Learning of Music and Gender in Balinese Children’s Gamelans,” which she gave at the 2006 annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology. These are the Marcia Herndon Award from the Gender and Sexualities Taskforce, and the Wong-Tolbert student paper prize from the Section on the Status of Women.
Ms. Downing has performed in the U.S. and in Bali with the American-based Gamelan Sekar Jaya, and has been a guest musician with one of the premier performing ensembles of Bali, Gamelan Çudamani. Her husband I Dewa Ketut Alit Adnyana is a founding and touring member of Çudamani, and teaches in its several educational programs for children.
Contact by e-mail: sonja.l.downing@lawrence.edu
- Bonnie Koestner
Associate Professor of Music
Bonnie Koestner has served as pianist, vocal coach, chorus master and assistant conductor in over two hundred productions for opera companies throughout the United States. Most recently she was Chorus Master and Head of Music Staff for Florida Grand Opera in Miami. For the San Francisco Opera she prepared the American premieres of Tippett's King Priam and Reimann's Ghost Sonata, along with more traditional repertoire. Other companies include Baltimore, Atlanta, Palm Beach, Utah, Lake George, Sacramento, Sarasota, Des Moines Metro, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Shreveport. While at Nevada Opera she developed the Nevada Opera Studio, a highly successful education and outreach program that brings opera to approximately 20,000 students per year. Ms. Koestner was also the head opera coach for sixteen years at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She was Chorus Master and coach for Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York from 1997-2011, and will join the music staff of Central City Opera in Colorado for the summer of 2012.
Ms. Koestner is a graduate of Lawrence University and holds an M. M. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has also studied at L'Università per Stranieri in Perugia, Italy.
Contact by e-mail: bonnie.koestner@lawrence.edu
- Julie McQuinn, chair
Assistant Professor of Music
Julie McQuinn earned a B.M. in voice performance and a B.A. in mathematics from Oberlin College, an M.M. in voice performance from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and a Ph.D. in musicology from Northwestern University. Her dissertation, for which she received an AMS 50 Fellowship from the American Musicological Society, explores the forces behind perceptions of gender and sexuality in Parisian society at the turn of the twentieth century, and their connection to the creation and reception of a handful of strikingly original and ultimately subversive operas.
Her research and teaching interests also include music and gender, fairy tale musics, and the use of borrowed music in film. She contributed a chapter on eroticism in Debussy’s music to The Cambridge Companion to Debussy and her article on the use of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings as film music will appear in the journal, American Music, in 2010.
Ms. McQuinn has presented papers at a number of conferences, including the International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, the International Conference on Music Since 1900, the American Musicological Society annual meeting, the Royal Music Association annual conference, and the Music and the Moving Image conference. She has also given several pre-concert lectures for the Civic Orchestra of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Ms. McQuinn received Lawrence’s 2007 Young Teacher Award.
Contact by e-mail: julie.mcquinn@lawrence.edu
- Matthew Michelic
Associate Professor of Music
Matthew Michelic enjoys a diverse musical career as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral player and teacher. Mr. Michelic has been praised in the Denver Post as possesing "an extraordinarily rich viola sound", and the Milwaukee Sentinel viewed his performance of Hindemith's Trauermusik as a "touching, masterful interpretation". He has concertized throughout the United States and internationally as a member of the Kenwood, Da Vinci and Delos Quartets, and he has appeared in concert with such artists as Robert McDonald, Jeffrey Solow, the Amelia Piano Trio and the Fine Arts Quartet. Mr. Michelic has recorded on the Orion and CRI labels, has been a featured recitalist on WFMT radio in Chicago, and appears regularly on live chamber music broadcasts of Wisconsin Public Radio as a recitalist and as a member of the Lawrence Chamber Players. He has appeared as recitalist for meetings of the International Viola Congress, the Chicago Viola Society and the International Double Reed Society.
Mr. Michelic has performed with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and the Aspen Festival Orchestra, and has been principal violist of the Waukesha Symphony and the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra. He currently serves as principal violist of the Green Bay Symphony and the Water City Chamber Orchestra. His solo appearances with orchestra include such major works as Harold in Italy, Flos Campi, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante and the Frank Martin Ballade.
Mr. Michelic holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Indiana University. He has studied at the Britten-Pears School in Aldeburgh, England and the Institute for Advanced Musical Studies in Montreux, Switzerland. His principal teachers include Bernard Zaslav and Mimi Zweig, and he has performed in the master classes of Paul Doktor, Bruno Giuranna and William Primrose. His chamber music coaches include members of the Cleveland, Fine Arts, Guarneri, Juilliard and Vermeer Quartets.
Mr. Michelic has served as an artist-in-residence at the Colorado College, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and the University of Delaware. His summer faculty appointments have included the Indiana University String Academy, the International School for Musical Arts in Ontario, the Green Lake Music Festival in Wisconsin and the CREDO Chamber Music Program in Oberlin, Ohio. He has presented master classes at schools of music across the United States and at the national conservatories of China (Beijing) and Vietnam (Hanoi).
Currently Mr. Michelic serves on the faculty of the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music, where his teaching activities include viola, chamber music coaching, orchestral literature for strings and an upper-level course focused on the history of the string quartet. The former students of Mr. Michelic now teach in public school, community school and university settings and perform in professional chamber and orchestral ensembles in both the United States and Europe.
Contact by e-mail: matthew.c.michelic@lawrence.edu
- Howard Niblock
Professor of Music
Howard Niblock, oboe, has been a member of the faculty since 1981. He received the Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan in 1972, majoring in Philosophy and English Literature; in 1973 he received the Master of Music degree from Michigan State University. His oboe teachers have included Daniel Stolper, Marc Fink, John Mack, Richard Killmer, and Harry Shulman.
Mr. Niblock has performed widely in Europe in cities such as Vienna, Munich, Paris, Rome, and Milan, among others. He has been a featured performer at conferences of the International Double Reed Society in 1979 and 1997, 1998, and 1999. In the United States, his chamber music performances include appearances with the Chamber Music Festival of Saugatuck, the Birch Creek Chamber Music Festival, and numerous guest appearances with the Lawrence Chamber Players. In all, he has performed over twenty different oboe concertos with ensembles in eight states, the District of Columbia, and three foreign countries.
Mr. Niblock has also established his reputation as a teacher; his former pupils have performed as members of many fine orchestras both in the United States and abroad. In 1980, he was guest lecturer at the Vienna Academy of Music. In addition to the oboe, Mr. Niblock has developed his interests in other diverse fields, most especially that of musical aesthetics, a study which unites his musical career with his earlier work in philosophy and literature. His publications include essays, articles, reviews, arrangements, and original compositions, and many have appeared in such journals as The Instrumentalist, The Double Reed, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, as well as in the New Grove Dictionary of Music in the United States.
Contact by e-mail: howard.niblock@lawrence.edu
- Mark Urness
Associate Professor of Music
Mark Urness is a versatile bassist, composer, and educator. His diverse performance experience encompasses orchestral, chamber, jazz, salsa, and solo playing. He has served as Principal Bassist for the Cedar Rapids Opera Theatre and for five seasons was Principal Bassist for the Cedar Rapids Symphony Orchestra. From 1999-2001 he freelanced in New York City, where he played with Adam Nussbaum, Lew Soloff, Eric Rasmussen, and Curtis Fowlkes, among others. He was awarded First Prize in the International Society of Bassists Jazz Competition, and performed with Bill Mays and Tim Froncek at the 2001 ISB Convention.
His compositions appear on several recordings, including the Bob Washut Trio's Songbook, Triptych's Play Here, and the University of Northern Iowa Jazz Band I's Northern Exposure. Recent recordings include Mafficked Simulacrum with the University of Iowa's jazz faculty group, oftEnsemble; a new album with the salsa band Orquesta Alto Maiz; and a project with Iowa City's eclectic jazz quartet, OddBar.
Prior to his appointment to the faculty of Lawrence University, Mr. Urness taught at the University of Iowa, Coe College, and the University of Northern Iowa. He received a Master of Music in double bass performance from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, a Bachelor of Arts in music from the University of Northern Iowa, and studied music and computer science at the University of Iowa.
Contact by e-mail: mark.urness@lawrence.edu
World Music
Discover world music in Ethnomusicology.
