Blair

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