Candidates for Board of Trustees

Candidates for President
The president shall be the chief executive officer of the Society. It shall be the responsibility of the president to supervise and control all of the business and affairs of the Society; to carry out the policies established by the Board of Trustees; to call all meetings of the Board of Trustees; and to assume such powers and perform such other duties as may be assigned by the Board of Trustees and as are usually attendant upon that office.

Kay Norton is Associate Professor of Music History in Arizona State University's School of Music. Early in her career, she wrote about France's Société Nationale de Musique, twentieth-century American composer Normand Lockwood, and women choral conductors in the American collegiate environment. After 1994, she focused research attention on American sacred music. In the 2003 monograph, Baptist Offspring, Southern Midwife—Jesse Mercer's Cluster of Spiritual Songs, she examined an 1810 hymnal through contexts of gender, race, geography, and culture. She has expanded that initial research into several festschrift and journal articles. Norton's interdisciplinary interests led to the 2007 grant-funded installation, Dynamic Journey: Transformations of Slavery-era Spaces, Routes, and Sounds , the “road” version of which she has presented nationally (SAM 2008, Denver), and internationally (London, 2007). A cross-disciplinary article exemplifying her work on American music and health is forthcoming in 2010 from the Journal of Medical Humanities.

Since joining the Society in 1990, she has chaired the Interest Group on Gender and American Music (1994-2000), the Local Arrangements Committee for SAM 1998 (Kansas City), the conference Site Selection Committee (2000-2005), and the Program Committee for SAM 2009 (San Antonio). Her term as member-at-large of the Board of Trustees ran from 2005-2008. Currently she is a member of the Nominating Committee.

Katherine K. Preston is the David N. & Margaret C. Bottoms Professor of Music at the College of William & Mary, where she was chair of the Dept of Music (2000-7). She has been an active member of SAM since 1979 and has attended every national meeting since then, regularly reading papers and chairing sessions. She has been on the Editorial Board for both JSAM and AM, a member of the Board of Trustees, and served two terms as Secretary of the Society. She has also served on (or chaired) numerous committees, including several program committees, the Nominating, Lowens Awards, National Conferences, Conference Management, and Conference Handbook committees. Preston's principal area of interest is the history of music and musical culture in the United States during the nineteenth century, in particular musical theatre and orchestral music. Her books include Music for Hire, Opera on the Road, David Braham: The Mulligan Guard Ball‚ and Reilly and the 400, and a MUSA edition of George Bristow's Symphony No. 2 (“The Jullien”). She is currently writing Against the Grain: Prima Donna/Impresarios of English Opera Companies America, 1860-1900. In spring 2009 she was the Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair of American Studies at the University of Leiden (Netherlands) and is currently the William J. Bouwsma Fellow in Musicology at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

Candidates for Secretary
The secretary shall keep or cause to be kept the minutes of meetings of the Board of Trustees or the executive committee. The secretary shall be responsible for giving notices in accordance with these bylaws or as required by law; for serving as custodian of the corporate records and the corporate seal and seeing that the corporate seal is duly affixed to all legal documents, the execution of which on behalf of the Society is duly authorized; and, in general, performing all duties as may from time to time be assigned by the president or by the Board of Trustees.

Nancy Newman is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University at Albany–SUNY, having previously taught at Tufts, Wesleyan, and Clark University. She s pecializes in American and European musical practices since 1800, with an emphasis on the relationship between art music and popular culture. Her book, Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth–Century America is forthcoming in the series, Eastman Studies in Music. She has also published on the Germania in the Yearbook of German–American Studies (1999) and the ISAM Newsletter (2003). Nancy has published in Women and Music and given papers on Björk and Clara Schumann. She is currently working on an article concerning the Germania's interactions with female performers and audience members. Her article on the American film musical, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T , appears in Lowering the Boom: New Essays on the History, Theory and Practice of Film Sound (University of Illinois Press, 2008). She is an active performer of electro–acoustic music for piano and other keyboards, and recently premiered several works for toy piano.

Candidates for Members-at-Large

Scott DeVeaux is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, specializing in jazz and American music, with secondary interests in ethnomusicology (Africa), popular music, and music and war. His most recent book is a new textbook, Jazz (with critic Gary Giddins; Norton, 2009), soon to be published in a trade version.  He has also written The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (University of California, 1997), which has won the American Musicological Society's Kinkeldey Award for best book, The American Book Award, and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award; Jazz in America: Who's Listening? (1995), an interpretation of a massive survey by the NEH; and The Music of James Scott (with William H. Kenney, Smithsonian 1992). In addition, he has published in Musica Oggi (Milan), Current Musicology, Black Music Research Journal, and Musical Quarterly. His article, "Constructing the Jazz Tradition," won the Irving Lowens Award in 1992. He has also published in American Music and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. He is Series Editor of the Oxford Readers on American Musicians.

Of Joseph Horowitz 's eight books, Understanding Toscanini was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Wagner Nights won the SAM Lowens Award, and Classical Music in America and Artists in Exile were both named best books of the year by The Economist. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEH fellowships, a Columbia University arts journalism fellowship, and a Dvorak-related commendation from the Czech Parliament. He has taught at the New England Conservatory and the Eastman School, among other institutions. He is co-creator of a forthcoming conference at the University of Michigan exploring ways to connect the scholarly and symphonic communities – a goal he has long pursued as a producer of thematic concert festivals, with emphasis on the music of the Americas. He was CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1990s, and currently serves as Artistic Director of DC's Post-Classical Ensemble. His current clients include the New York Philharmonic and the Pittsburgh Symphony (which this July hosts a Dvorak NEH teacher training institute he will direct). The New York Times has called him “a force in classical music today, a prophet and an agitator.” He is listed in Marquis Who's Who in America . His website is www.josephhorowitz.com .

Victoria Lindsay Levine serves as Professor of Music at Colorado College, where she has taught ethnomusicology and Southwest Studies since 1988.  A specialist in Native North American musical cultures, she is the author, co-author, or editor of numerous publications, including an article and a book review in American Music , a chapter in the Cambridge History of American Music edited by David Nicholls, and volume 11 in the MUSA series ( Writing American Indian Music:  Historic Transcriptions, Notations, and Arrangements ).  Levine has also conducted research on Spanish New Mexican songs.  She founded Colorado College's world music ensemble program in 1993 and has performed with Gamelan Tunjung Sari  throughout the Front Range region of Colorado and in Bali.  She has received grants and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, Colorado College, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and other sources.

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr . is Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and specializes in African-American and American music, jazz, cultural studies, popular music, film studies, and historiography. Ramsey is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press, 2003), which was named outstanding book of the year by IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music). His current project, In Walked Bud: Earl “Bud " Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge, is a study of jazz pianist Bud Powell and is forthcoming from the University of California Press. His band Dr. Guy's MusiQologY has performed for audiences in South America, New York, Australia, the University of Pennsylvania, the Kimmel Center, and in Philadelphia venues such as Zanzibar Blue and Gloria's Seafood House.