The UNT College of Music Council of Division Chairs selected Sam Miyashita, music theory/composition student, as the recipient of the 2018-2019 Presser Undergraduate Award. This is considered the most prestigious undergraduate award in music at UNT and has a continuous history of more than 60 years. It's recipient holds the title of "Presser Scholar."
STUDENT SUCCESS: Saxophonist, Landon Chang, has been selected as a Musicfest Northwest Gold medalist and will be performed the Villa Lobos Fantasia with the Spokane Symphony.
PhD student in Music in Performing Arts Health, Meghan Taylor, was selected to intern with the College Music Society
ALUMNA SUCCESS: Newly minted UNT CoM graduate, (DMA '19), Jacquelyn Lankford, has won the tenure track position as Assistant Professor of Trumpet at McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana.
NICHOLAS AND ANNA RICCO ETHICS SCHOLARSHIP COMPETITION: #UNTCoM freshman bassoonist, Sidney Maurice, has won second place in the Ricco Ethics Award Essay Competition. She is a music education major from Marietta, Georgia.
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: Chair of the Division of Music History, Theory, and Ethnomusicology, Benjamin Brand, presented a paper entitled “Plures devotissimas orationes: Prayers Read and Sung in Renaissance Venice,” at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Toronto. The paper was part of a session entitled, “The Music of Devotion in Books of Hours,” which he co-organized with Dr. Evan MacCarthy (West Virginia University).
FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: Assistant Professor of Music History, Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, presented at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual meeting in Denver. She chaired the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music's panel on "Multimodal Music," spoke on an interdisciplinary roundtable about digital humanities and the global eighteenth century, and gave a paper titled "An Inhabited Approach to Music in the Enlightenment."
DOWNBEAT SOLOIST AWARDS: Alumnus Stephanie Hansen (BM '18) received Outstanding Soloist and current student Kara Walton was named Outstanding Scat Soloist from Downbeat's 42nd Annual Music Awards. The UNT Jazz Singers are directed by Jennifer Barnes.
UNT College of Music student Kyle Myers won the Undergraduate College Outstanding Composition for "Red Herring" from Downbeat’s 42nd Annual Student Music Awards. Kyle's #UNT faculty mentor was Rich DeRosa.
STUDENT SUCCESS: Master of Music jazz pianist Michael Clement received the "Yamaha Award" at the American Jazz Pianist Competition in New York City, judged by Elio Villafranca, Jim McNeely, and Jeremy Siskind. The award covers production costs for a future album recording at Yamaha Artist Services.
Among other experiences and accolades, Williams is a member of the University of North Texas College of Music Advancement Board.
He will perform with the Army Concert Band in June on the West steps of the U.S. Capitol.
