Blair

Vanderbilt’s partnership with the recently opened National Museum of African American Music promises the potential of community-building discussions involving music, race, history and storytelling. Read More

Last November, alumnus Gene Back’s growing list of accomplishments caught the attention of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. The organization, which promotes the art of motion pictures on both sides of the Atlantic, selected him as a Breakthrough Talent. Read More

Photo by Joe Howell by John Pitcher It’s the end of an era at Blair. Mark Wait, the Martha Rivers Ingram Dean and professor of music, retired June 30. Blair was a relatively small institution when Wait took the helm in 1993. It had 19 full-time faculty who taught and… Read More

Kirsten Agresta Copely, adjunct associate professor of harp, released Around The Sun, an all-original new age harp album in January. It takes listeners on a journey through a 365-day cycle from “Daybreak” to “Winter’s Bone” with introspective melodies and ambient soundscapes. This marks her third solo album and first as… Read More

Undergraduate competition winners Max Randal, a rising senior piano performance major and computer science minor, was named the Tennessee Music Teachers Association Young Artist Collegiate Competition state winner in November 2019. Kaila Geisinger, a rising senior harp performance major, took second prize representing the Southeastern Region in the Advanced Division… Read More

Senior Sarah Clements sings—accompanied by sophomore Calendula Cheng at the keyboards—during the dress rehearsal for January’s concert A Humming Under My Feet. Photo by Joe Howell Many women encounter glass ceilings during their careers. For women composers, those ceilings are seemingly laminated and bulletproof. That’s especially true for women who… Read More

The opera The Ghosts of Gatsby, by Joshua McGuire, left, andEvan Mack, was staged in October at the Blair School. Photo by David Pike Many of history’s greatest musical collaborators have pursued a creative approach perhaps best described as “you wash, I’ll dry.” Mozart was more than happy to… Read More

The Young Composer Showcase spotlights young jazz composers, giving students an opportunity to have an original composition recognized and performed at an International level. Read More

A complete list of new university faculty for the 2016-17 academic year Blair School of Music Nelson Tyler Nelson, associate professor of voice B.M., University of Utah, 2004 M.M., University of Utah, 2006 D.M., Florida State University, 2009 Nelson is one of America’s most promising young tenors. Read More

Moreadith Whiting Keegan Fellows Embark on Year of Travel New graduates Kathryn Moreadith and Rob Whiting are spending a year traveling the world as recipients of the university’s Michael B. Keegan Traveling Fellowship. Moreadith graduated in May from the Blair School of Music with majors in composition/theory and East Asian… Read More

Odigie When singer-songwriter Denitia Odigie walked on stage at the POP Montreal International Music Festival, strummed her Ibanez acoustic guitar and began to sing, she became an international favorite, earning the title “Find of the Fest.” The gifted Odigie, BA’04, has impressed a growing number of fans and critics, inspiring… Read More

Music has been shown to offer distraction from pain for the seriously ill, as well as reduce stress and increase social interaction for patients and their families. Music in the Clinic (M.I.C.) is a volunteer program at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center that connects patients with this healing power of music. At… Read More

The “Second Stringers,” the Blair School of Music’s newest student string band, debuted on the on March 28 with the Mike Snyder Band. Matt Combs, adjunct instructor of fiddle and head of the fiddle program at Blair, directs the group. Pictured here from left to right are Rachel Baiman, Eva… Read More

A member of the Vanderbilt women’s swimming team, Austin Langley juggles swim practice and studies in both music and pre- veterinary medicine. Austin Langley is one busy young woman. The rising junior, who calls Burlington, N.C., home, is a musical arts major at the Blair School of Music with a… Read More

 www.istockphoto.com Musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and use both the left and right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person. Previous studies of creativity… Read More

Georgia Stitt, BMus’94, with 4-year-old America's Got Talent contestant Kaitlyn Maher. In show business, the saying goes, it’s not what you know but whom you know. In the case of Georgia Stitt, award-winning composer and vocal coach on America’s Got Talent, it’s both. A Tennessee native, Stitt received her bachelor’s… Read More

Toward the end of high school in Margate, Fla., a small strip of suburbia just north of Fort Lauderdale, Daniel Bernard Roumain managed to land two internships that prefigured his future musical career crossbreeding hip-hop and classical music. For a couple of summers in the late 1980s, he worked… Read More

Gayle Shay joined the Blair School of Music faculty in 1998 with a directive from Dean Mark Wait to make opera an important part of the vocal program. In her role as associate professor of voice and director of the Vanderbilt Opera Theatre, Shay has helped to do just that. Read More