Music Commons^™

Charles W. Bolen Faculty Recital: Babbitt, Trombone; October 22, 2025, Mark Babbitt, Lu Witzig

School of Music Programs

This is the twenty-fourth program of the 2025-2026 season.

Kemp Recital Hall

October 22, 2025

Wednesday Evening

7:30 p.m.

Guest Artist Recital: Nicolas, Piano; October 20, 2025, Riyad Nicolas

School of Music Programs

This is the twenty-third program of the 2025-2026 season.

Kemp Recital Hall

October 20, 2025

Monday Evening

7:30 p.m.

Escape The Studio: A Georgia Archives Month Escape Room, Special Collections

Gretsch Exhibitions by Georgia Southern University

Find your groove, Solve the clues, and piece together  that Great Gretsch history before time runs out.

Isu Wind Symphony: From The White House To Our House; October 19, 2025, Dr. Anthony C. Marinello Iii, Col. John R. Bourgeois, Wesley Anderson, Dr. Tim Fredstrom

School of Music Programs

This is the twenty-second program of the 2025-2026 season.

Center for the Performing Arts

October 19, 2025

Sunday Afternoon

3:00 p.m.

Senior Recital: Frattini, Percussion; October 18, 2025, Jon Frattini

School of Music Programs

This is the twenty-third program of the 2025-2026 season.

Kemp Recital Hall

October 18, 2025

Saturday Evening

6:00 p.m.

2025-2026 Performance Forum - October 17, 2025, Ian Lewis, Rishi Gurnani, Virgilio Vazquez, Laura Gonzalez, Nia Morgan, Roey Dushi, Verse Tomac, Rebeca Sierra, Aj Meyer, Karen Trujillo, Nicholas Weathers, Joseph Muhl, Jacob Lomboy, Mia Cotton, Daniel Cruz, Juanita Jaimes, Derek Lund, Ingryd Herrera, Juan Diaz Quijano, Santiago Moreno, Omar Mata, Kade Gordon, Devin Foster

Performance Forum

No abstract provided.

Learning How To Practice Takes Practice, Micah Killion, Robert Duke

John J. Cali School of Music Scholarship and Creative Works

Effective music learning depends on effective music practice. Although time spent with teachers is an important component of young musicians’ development, time spent alone practicing is perhaps even more consequential. Researchers and teachers have offered many prescriptions about effective music practice, yet observations of young musicians’ actual practice reveal that their behavior in the practice room is often quite unlike what teachers envision. The most important aspects of effective practice are the thinking, perceiving, and decision-making that serve to organize how musicians spend their time. We discuss how to help students focus their attention in ways that lead to the …

Round The Tárrega Bend, Julian Bream

Soundboard Scholar

In this previously unpublished talk from 2004, delivered two years after his retirement from public performance, Julian Bream traces his own career in relation to the evolution of the modern guitar, recounting his early encounters with nineteenth-century guitars, the introduction of nylon strings to replace gut, innovations in guitar construction, and a transformative meeting with Andrés Segovia. But at the heart of the talk is his approach to sound. Bream discusses the essential elements of his tone production, including his right-hand position with its characteristic “three-quarter Tárrega bend” of the wrist, and his strong preference for the rest stroke. He …

A Phenomenological Study Of Secondary Music Teachers And Their Experiences With Class Schedules In Central Virginia, Aliza Marie Nogueras

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

There is currently a lack of recognition for the unique influence of class schedules on music educators’ lived experiences in public-schools. This study examines how middle and high music class schedules play a role in music teacher’s curriculum development and overall well-being. Class schedules created without regard to musical instruction may create significant challenges for music teachers, reducing instructional time, disjointing curricula, and causing inconsistencies in delivering high-quality music education. Focusing on music teachers in Central Virginia, this hermeneutic phenomenological study highlights the specific lived experiences of public-school music educators. The central research questions explore how class schedules shape instructional …

New Beginnings: Lindenwood Wind Ensemble (October 16, 2025), Lindenwood University

Student Music Performance Programs

Event program for the New Beginnings: Lindenwood University Wind Ensemble (October 16, 2025).

Alumni Guest Artist Recital: Fairchild, Horn; October 16, 2025, Cassidy Fairchild, Liam Ufkes

School of Music Programs

This is the twentieth program of the 2025-2026 season.

Kemp Recital Hall

October 16, 2025

Thursday Evening

7:30 p.m.

Autism Spectrum Disorder In The Music Classroom: An Undergraduate Curriculum, Hannah Warren

Masters Theses

The purpose of this applied research curriculum project is to prepare preservice music teachers to teach music to students with autism. It is vital to provide preservice music teachers with experience and knowledge about teaching music to students on the autism spectrum to better serve this population in schools. The setting of this study was college undergraduate music programs. The sample included 30 in-service K-12 music teachers. Qualitative questionnaires and quantitative surveys were collected via Google Forms. Quantitative data was analyzed for means of central tendency including mean, median, and mode. Quantitative data was displayed using Pearson product-moment correlation graph …

Choral Collage Concert, (October 14, 2025), Lindenwood University

Student Music Performance Programs

Event program for the Choral Collage Concert, (October 14, 2025), Lindenwood University.

Between Sound And Theology: Timbral Performativity In Brazilian Religious Musicking, Marcell Silva Steuernagel

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article explores the performativity of timbre, summarizing key perspectives from the English-language scholarship on the topic and setting them in conversation with Latin American perspectives on timbre. In addition, it examines a performance of “500 Graus” (500 degrees), a song performed by Brazilian Pentecostal artists Cassiane and Shirley Carvalhaes, to demonstrate how the performativity of timbre unfolds within a particular expression of Latin American religious musicking. In doing so, it investigates the phenomenon of timbre between music and sound studies, and theology and church music studies, providing insights relevant to the study of timbre and the study of religious …

Timbre — A Transcendent Paradox?, Eugenia Siegel Conte

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Timbre, as ethnomusicologist Cornelia Fales writes, is “paradoxical” precisely because it is one of the most exacting processes in which the human body may sense and comprehend the source of a sound even as that comprehended sound is impossible to describe outside of metaphor or comparison. As one of the more recognizable qualities of sound but the most difficult to describe, timbre allows us to consider physical/emotional (affective) experiences of sound as a key aspect of faith and meditation. In this article, I examine physical-affective intersections of faith and meditation that often are key to praxes of worship, and show …

Singing A Wide Heart: Timbre And Sung Prayer In Senegal’S Layène Community, Margaret L. Rowley

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Layène sung prayer (called sikkar) is embedded within the religious practices of the Layène community, a minority Sufi order in Dakar, Senegal. This article explores the functions of Layène sung prayer, focusing especially on its loud, vibrational timbre. Both men and women vocalists in call-and-response sing loudly, using wide vibrato and electronic amplification to ensure that the sikkar reaches the inhabitants—both human and non-human—in the surrounding community. This article demonstrates that the distinctive timbre of Layène sung prayer serves the spiritual functions of binding the community together in spiritual and social cohesion, increasing individual and collective generosity, and demarcating …

Live Wires: The Angelus Temple And The Timbre Of Power, Catherine Provenzano

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article is a media history and contemporary case study of The Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923. My analysis of the Angelus insists upon the centrality of a hyperaudible paradigm of worship that uses media to maximize the legibility of a Christian message, and, more than this, imagines that media itself as a living soul in need of redemption. Many contemporary megachurches employ savvy applications of sound and sound transmission as instruments of belonging as well as action, and these rely on high-budget investments in church infrastructure, software and personnel. I argue that …

Performing "Manly" Worship Music: Gender And Timbre At Mars Hill Church, Maren Haynes Marchesini

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Ten years ago, Mars Hill boasted fifteen campuses and 15,000 members. Amid mounting allegations of abuse and mismanagement leveled against founding pastor Mark Driscoll, the church famously collapsed, closing its doors at the end of 2014. Driscoll had built Mars Hill’s core brand around his opposition to the perceived feminization of the Christian mainstream, and appointing himself the “leader of a heterosexual male backlash” in the church and broader culture. While Driscoll’s muscular Christianity stands in a wide historical stream, Mars Hill long led the charge in establishing a youth-oriented, hipster brand of hypermasculine Calvinism. And while rhetoric and theology …

A Sunlit Ambience: How Reverb Pedals Influence The Contemporary Worship Music Imagination, Dylan Crosson

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

With the recent proliferation of scholarship on the musical elements of Contemporary Worship Music (CWM) in addition to ethnographies exploring the tradition’s inner machinations, readers now enjoy unprecedented levels of insight into the actions of human actors and their music. But what of CWM’s non-human actors? Could the instruments and musical equipment used by CWM practitioners, for example, impact evangelical piety? In this article, I entertain this question by arguing that the materiality of reverb pedals—devices used by guitarists to add artificial reverberation to their sound—influences how evangelicals conceptualize elements of their faith by introducing new imagery or enriching pre-existing …

From The Heaviest, Dirtiest Depths To The Washy Ambient Clouds: Guitar Timbre In/As Schismogenesis In North American Christianity, Joshua K. Busman, Nathan Myrick

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This essay argues that within the socio-cultural context of North American Christianity, the timbral qualities of electric guitar, with its long lineage as a site of cultural values conflict and identity negotiation, serves a theological function in the emerging and cohering sonority of digital worship. Using as comparative case studies the timbral qualities of delay and ambience as promoted and sold by Worship Tutorials as representing normative sonic values for these Christians, on the one hand, and the dialectic and schismatic deployment of distortion by the band My Epic on the other, we suggest that these timbral qualities become important …