Alumni News
Charles M. Atkinson (Ph.D. 1975) On Wednesday, 8 December 2021, the University of Würzburg, Germany, conferred upon Charles M. Atkinson the degree of Doctor honoris causa. In his laudatio for the award ceremony, Professor Andreas Haug stated that in conferring the honorary doctorate the university “honors one of the world’s leading representatives of research in medieval music, whose work on the history of music and music theory of the Middle Ages is unanimously regarded by experts as groundbreaking, a scholar whose standard-setting scholarly oeuvre has made a lasting contribution to the reputation that historical music research enjoys in our discipline to this day, despite all the changes in research paradigms, methods, and fashions.” Atkinson retired from The Ohio State University in 2017, where he was Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of Music and University Distinguished Professor. Since his retirement he has been living and working in Würzburg, where he is a member of the editorial staff for the project Corpus monodicum: the monophonic music of the Latin Middle Ages.
Jamie Blake (Ph.D. 2022) successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, “Architects of Russian America: Transnational Musical Networks in the Early Twentieth Century” (advised by Annegret Fauser).
Ally Dunavant (B.Mus. 2021) released her debut EP, Kaleidoscopes, under the stage name Ally London, on July 1, 2022. She wrote all 7 songs during her time at UNC, and she recorded it just after her graduation in 2021 with a band at Farmhouse Recording Studio in her home state of Tennessee. You can stream it on all major streaming services. She has just begun her second year of graduate study at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Ryan Ebright (Ph.D. 2014) received one of the 2021 Kurt Weill Prizes from the Kurt Weill Foundation for his article “Doctor Atomic or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sound Design,” published in Cambridge Opera Journal in 2019. The judges were complimentary about Ebright’s work, saying, “This article opens up new pathways of understanding and reinvigorating the way we think about a much-discussed genre. It is already making a splash for helping define a new arena of study: sound design in opera.”
Elias Gross (M.A. 2022) completed his Master of Arts degree with his thesis “‘All for One and One for All’: The Feminist Musical Labor of Aunt Molly Jackson” (advised by Jocelyn Neal). He also played viola on the award-winning album “Pretty Little Cabin: A Quarantine EP” by Lexington, KY musician Vanessa Davis.
Hunter Hoyle (B.Mus. 2022) is currently a first-year Ph.D. student in Music Theory and Cognition at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.
Mike Levine (Ph.D. 2022) successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, “Lo encontré en el paquete: Reparto Music, Media Piracy, and Cultural Exchange in Cuba’s Offline Internet” (advised by David Garcia), and has been selected as an AMS summer intern, and will be an assistant professor at Wichita State University starting in the fall. Click here to learn more. Levine also won a LASA Award in February for his paper titled, “‘Exchanging Cuba for 1 Million YouTube Views’: Piracy, Virality, and ‘Patria y Vida.’”
Jonathan Nussman (B.Mus. 2006, M.M. Boston Conservatory), completed a Doctoral Degree in Contemporary Music Performance from University of California-San Diego, conferred in 2020. Jonathan lives with his wife Meg in San Diego where he teaches voice and performs works from the 20th and 21st centuries.
Jennifer Walker (Ph.D. 2019) published a monograph titled “Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third-Republic Paris.” Described as a “tour de force of music and cultural history of the fin-de-siècle,” this monograph was published by Oxford University Press as part of the prestigious American Musicological Society Studies in Music Series.
UNC Bands Alumni Association In November 2022, we celebrated the one year anniversary of the UNC Bands Alumni Association. The Association was founded to provide alumni of UNC Bands the opportunity to connect, give, and serve. Highlights from year one include hosting the first alumni social, providing an expanded slate of activities on homecoming weekend, and helping to raise nearly $25,000 for band student scholarships. The nearly 800 members have shown incredible commitment to the student experience and their generosity to UNC Bands is unwavering. You can learn more about the Association at
www.uncbaa.org.