Distinguished Retirees

Allen Anderson

Since coming to UNC in 1996, Allen Anderson has been an unforgettable colleague, friend, and mentor to countless students and faculty. He served as head of the composition area for his entire time at UNC and was Chair of the Music Department from 2018 to 2020, steering the ship through the chaotic early stages of COVID-19.

Allen taught courses in composition, theory, analysis, and counterpoint, and helped spearhead new course initiatives such as Foundations in Music and Improvisation Without Borders. As a teacher, he exemplified an ideal mix of humor and compassion with high expectations and an unrelenting dedication to a deep understanding and mastery of the material. His students adored him and took every class of his that they could. Many of his students went on to have successful careers in music composition, film scoring, and academia.

Allen’s career as a composer of contemporary classical music was and continues to be highly distinguished. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hettleman Prize, a Koussevitsky Foundation commission, a Fromm Foundation commission, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and a litany of other prestigious awards and accomplishments.

An infectious creative force, Allen collaborated on artistic projects with nearly every other member of the faculty at some point. He composed music for the UNC orchestra, choir, opera, and a wide variety of other ensembles and performers—both faculty colleagues and students. Never one to tread water, in recent years he has become an accomplished performer of improvised electronic music.

Thankfully, Allen will be staying mostly in Chapel Hill for the time being, with plans to compose music, practice guitar, and improvise on his ever-expanding collection of analog synthesizers. We are looking forward to seeing him around the department at concerts and events and hearing what he comes up with in his new-found free time!

-Associate Professor Lee Weisert

Mark Evan Bonds

I first met Evan Bonds well before I became his colleague. I was visiting Chapel Hill as a prospective graduate student either in late 1992 or early 1993. One thing I remember clearly was what the graduate students at the time told me about him: that he was an excellent scholar, a fine teacher, and a genuinely kind person. It didn’t take me long to understand why he was so respected and admired.

I didn’t end up going to Carolina, and went to Michigan, which Carolina beat in final game of the 1993 NCAA men’s basketball championship game. I was eventually forgiven and was delighted to become Evan’s colleague in 2006. I always appreciated his thoughtfulness, his wisdom, and his support of my career of the past seventeen years, whether I was a new assistant professor or department chair.

A world-renowned scholar and educator, Evan has had an exceptionally productive and influential career. His research on eighteenth and nineteenth-century music has yielded pathbreaking publications that have changed our understanding of musical form and aesthetics.

Among his seven scholarly books—which have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish—are Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (1991), Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (2006), and Beethoven: A Very Short Introduction (2022). Evan’s legacy of teaching is equally monumental, with hundreds of students taking his courses over his thirty years at Carolina and even more learning from his popular textbooks, A History of Music in Western Culture and Listen to This, both of which have been published in multiple editions.

Evan’s exceptional career at Carolina may have come to an end, but his research and writing continue, and we can look forward yet more important scholarship coming out of his productive and well-earned retirement.

-Professor Mark Katz

Annegret Fauser

Annegret Fauser, Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Musicology, retired from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in June 2023. Professor Fauser’s internationally-lauded research, mostly focused on music and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, was a centerpiece of our musicology program for over two decades. But well beyond her research, Professor Fauser’s investment in her students, in her colleagues, and in service to the discipline of musicology was unbounded. As a scholar, mentor, advocate, editor, and leader, she left an indelible imprint on music studies both at UNC and across the whole scholarly field.

Holding degrees from Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, in Bonn, and Université de la Sorbonne-Paris IV, in Paris, Professor Fauser came to UNC in 2001 from City University, London. At UNC, she forged interdisciplinary relationships with the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, where she held an adjunct appointment. She brought a passion for seminar-style engagement with source materials into her undergraduate teaching, and designed several popular new courses that focused on cultural interpretation, including Introduction to Women in Music, Sounds of War and Revolution, and Introduction to Music and Dance, all of which expanded the reach of our department to a larger population of liberal arts students.

Professor Fauser’s five monographs, six edited collections, and countless articles are telling artifacts of her love of archival research, cultural interpretation, and the dissemination of her ideas that enriched the department throughout her time here. In 2017, she co-organized an international conference, Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma. And her monographs Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring (2017) and Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II (2017) were honored with book awards from ASCAP and the American Musicological Society.

Her scholarly contributions to our field have been rightly awarded many of the most prestigious honors in our discipline: in 2011, she received the Edward J. Dent Medal from the Royal Musical Association; and in 2022, she was acclaimed as an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society. But those of us who knew her well were keenly aware that she seemed most proud of the tireless work she did as a graduate advisor and mentor. From 2017 to 2020, she held the Harold J. Glass USAF Faculty Mentor/Graduate Fellow Distinguished Term Professorship, a recognition of her profound impact on several generations of graduate students, including advising 15 PhD dissertations. At just about every conference I attended with her, I watched her joyfully laud the work of current and former students, junior colleagues from our department, and old friends, all to leading scholars from around the world, building networks of connections, resources, and camaraderie that not only lifted all of us in her circles but also spread her pure enthusiasm for studying music.

Those of you who know Annegret will be struck by all that I did not have room to mention here—a four-year term as editor-in-chief for the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the impact of her graduate seminar on alterity, residencies in Vienna and at the National Humanities Center, international keynote lectures, and so much more. We profoundly miss her presence in the department but wish her all the best as she moves into her retirement adventures: indulging in her love of travel, her amazing talent in thread art and fine-art quilting, and, yes, more writing projects.

-Professor Jocelyn Neal