We are delighted to announce the newly selected participants in FAB-Musiconis for this year’s working sessions in Paris (2-15 January 2018) and New York (13-27 April 2018).
Columbia Graduate Student Participants for 2017-18
Eamonn Bell is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Music Theory, writing a dissertation on the influence of the computer on music research since the 1960s, as digital computers became widely adopted by universities worldwide. He has worked on digital humanities projects involving medieval sources, including transcriptions of a corpus of troubadour and trouvère melodies; applying natural language processing techniques to discover instances of text reuse in Latin-language music theory treatises; and using the Python programming language to show how supervised machine learning can be used to automatically extract handwritten annotations from scanned images of musical scores.
Claire Dillon is a first-year PhD student in Art History and Archeology. Her research, under Avinoam Shalem, focuses on the exchange of art objects across the medieval Mediterranean, and the cultural intersections represented by these visual materials. She has an MPhil in Medieval Language, Literature, and Culture from Trinity College Dublin and graduated from Northwestern University in 2014 with a BA in Art History and Italian. She has transcribed Old English homilies for online publication, created digital photography exhibitions and curricula guides, and assisted with photogrammetry initiatives.
Mike Ford is a second-year Historical Musicology PhD student, studying the interaction among humans and computers during the creative process. He has an MA in Musicology from Rutgers University, with a thesis on the digitally-enabled borrowing of Renaissance material in two contemporary compositions; and a BMus in Performing Arts (Orchestral Conducting) from the University of Pretoria. His current research includes work on multi-instrumental improvisation as well as the improvisatory creation of digital instruments.
John Glasenapp is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Historical Musicology, writing his dissertation on the Beaupré antiphonary in the Walters Art Gallery under Susan Boynton with a focus on Cistercian chant, liturgy, identity, as well as women’s spirituality. He has degrees in music from DePaul University, in Philosophical Studies from Saint Meinrad School of Theology, and in Medieval Studies from Fordham University. He contributed the digital index of Columbia, RBML Plimpton MS 041 to the Cantus Index (a collaborative database) .
Russell O’Rourke is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Historical Musicology. He is working on a dissertation under the supervision of Giuseppe Gerbino on theories of representation and expression in late sixteenth-century Italian music, literature, and the visual arts. He taught Music Humanities in the Columbia Core Curriculum for two years, for which he received a Preceptor Teaching Award in 2017. Under the supervision of Susan Boynton, he has worked on multiple digital humanities projects, including a digitally encoded corpus of all the extant troubadour songs and a web exhibit about a chant manuscript held at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. In his spare time, Russell plays viola with the Columbia University Orchestra and sings early music from its original notation with friends.
Mark Saccomano is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Music Theory, writing his dissertation on the musical structures that affect our sense of space. He has degrees from University of California, Berkeley (BA in Linguistics, magna cum laude), University of California, Los Angeles (MA in Applied Linguistics), and California State University (BA in Music). He has held an internship at the Columbia Digital Humanities Center, taken workshops at Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research on GIS software, worked with MySql to design a structure for archival information, and developed exhibits with Omeka and other visualization tools.
Tori Schmitt is a second-year MA student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. She holds a BA in Art History with a Minor in Digital Humanities from the University of California, Los Angeles, with an undergraduate thesis on “3D Modeling as Gothic Reconstruction: An Investigation into the Parisian Church of the Jacobins.” She was an Undergraduate Research Assistant and 3D Modeler for the UCLA project Paris: Past and Present. She also worked on the UCLA Digital Humanities Capstone: Getty Provenance Metadata. At Columbia she is a graduate research assistant for Professor Stephen Murray’s Art Humanities website “Life of a Cathedral: Notre-Dame of Amiens.” In addition to participating in the 2016-17 session of the FAB Musiconis project, she also was also the primary project lead for the digital resources and website for an exhibition of the prints of Robert Nanteuil.
Mariana-Cecilia Velázquez is a seventh-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the Universidad de Puerto Rico and an MA in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University. Her interests include Iberian, Caribbean, and Mediterranean cultural production, travel narratives, chronicles, and piracy from fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and she is writing a dissertation entitled “Travelers, Traders, and Traitors: Writing and Mapping Piracy in England, Spain, and the Caribbean (1570-1620).” She participated in the 2016-17 session of the FAB Musiconis project. Her participation in this year’s session has been made possible in part by FORMINNOV, which is funding her translation of database terms into Spanish.
Sorbonne-Affiliated Graduate Student Participants for 2017-18
Oumayma Aoun is a master’s student in Music and Musicology at the Higher Institute of Music in Tunis, where she also obtained her bachelor’s degree. She has held an internship at the Center for Arabic and Mediterranean Music, where she digitized the archives of Baron d’Erlanger. Her participation in FAB-Musiconis has been made possible through FORMINNOV.
Miguel Baptista is a first-year MA student in Musicology at Paris-Sorbonne University. He is a harpsichordist (Conservatory of Nancy) and composer (for few short films) and he is an independent music medieval manuscripts expert for collectors and auction houses. His current research project indexes and analyzes his personal collection of manuscripts from the ninth to sixteenth centuries. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Musicology from the University of Lorraine.
Raffaella Bortolini is a second-year PhD student in musicology at Paris-Sorbonne University. She has a Master of Arts in medieval music performance (shawm) from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and a Master of Music in historically informed performance (with a specialization in Baroque oboe) from the Hochschule für Musik, Freiburg im Breisgau. Bortolini co-founded Ensemble Seraphim, which specializes in medieval instrumental music. She participated in the 2016-17 session of the FAB Musiconis project.
Valérie Nunes – Le Page is a second-year MA student in musicology at Paris-Sorbonne University specializing in the performance practice of medieval music in the professional studies program. She is a certified teacher in a conservatory, a singer, and a choirmaster. Her research focuses on rhythmic changes in the French treatises of the late 13th century and the early 14th century. She participated in the 2016-17 session of the FAB Musiconis project.
Florentin Morel is a second-year MA student in musicology at Paris-Sorbonne University. His research focuses on the marimba in Europe in the twentieth century. He holds a Bachelor in Music and Musicology from Paris-Sorbonne University. His interests include music history and world music, particularly that of Latin America. He is also involved in the indexing work of the Musiconis database. Morel is a percussionist and composer who has collaborated with several choreographers. including a dancer and choreographer from the Paris Opera. He participated in the 2016-17 session of the FAB Musiconis project.
Aline Poirier teaches flute and Baroque flute at the Regional Conservatory in Rouen and the Departmental Conservatoire in Dieppe. She holds qualifications from the University of Rouen in Musicology, English, and Economics, as well as various teaching diplomas. Her interests include the connections between Medieval and Asian flute practices, as well as their circulation across the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages.
Georgios Theocharous read music in London, the United States and Germany, graduating with a BMus from City University, London; an MMus in Historical Musicology from Goldsmiths College, University of London; a DMA in Theory/Composition from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Meisterklasse in Composition from the Hoschchule für Musik und Theater Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Leipzig. His publications have appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Musik und Aesthetik and Lexikon des Orchesters. As of October 2017 he is pursuing a second doctorate at the Sorbonne under the tutelage of Professor Frédéric Billiet, focusing on Byzantine influences on the Torino Codex J.II.9.
Ershad Vaeztehrani is a second-year MA student in the UFR of Music and Musicology at Paris-Sorbonne University. He has a BA in Music Performance (Double Bass) from the Music Faculty of The Art University of Tehran. He is also studying the Historical Bass at the Conservatoire de Paris. Also a percussionist (Persian, Medieval and Baroque Percussions), he has collaborated with different ancient music ensembles and musicians such as Abya Yala, Les Voix Errantes, Seraphim ensemble, Robin Troman, Sebastien Marcq and Jean-Jacques Hérbin. He participated in the 2016-17 session of the FAB Musiconis project.
Edmundo Camacho is a Professor at the School of Music (Facultad de Música), as well as the School of Philosophy and Literature (Facultad de Filosofía y Letras) of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He holds a Master in Music Performance and bachelor’s degrees in Music and Communication Sciences from the UNAM. He is currently working on his doctoral thesis on the Harp in New Spain. Since 2015, he has been the associate editor of the Cuadernos de Iconografía Musical and since 2010, he has participated in research projects on musical iconography in New Spain. At present, he is participating in the Musical Iconography Workshop at the UNAM. His participation in FAB-Musiconis has been made possible through FORMINNOV.