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The course work for my DMA at the University of North Carolina Greensboro is now complete, and I've taken the written comprehensive examinations in the past week. The oral comprehensive examinations will soon follow, after which I still have the dissertation to prepare. This will take the form of a lecture-recital comparing the concert art songs and popular songs of Vladimir Dukelsky, also known as Vernon Duke. It is my hope that I will be able to finish this by the end of the summer so that I can present the lecture-recital in September or October and graduate in December.
My last DMA recital took place Thursday, October 30, at 5:30 PM at the Recital Hall at the UNCG School of Music, and much of it consisted of music I have either arranged or transposed, transcribed and/or adapted. This music included five songs from Adriaen Valerius' Nederlandtsche Gedenck-Clanck in Dutch, which songs all stem from the time of the Dutch rebellion against the King of Spain. It also included five popular American songs by Vernon Duke that are all about life and love in New York City. Alongside Hugo Wolf's setting of Goethe's poem about the Pied Piper of Hamlin was an aria from an opera on the same subject, and the recital closed with my arrangement for voice, violin and piano of Saint-Saëns' song, Danse Macabre. Rounding the program out were a short song cycle by Alberto Ginastera, an Argentinean composer, entitled Las horas de una estancia (Times of Day on a Farm) and two arias from zarzuelas, a typically Spanish type of music theater.
A centerpiece of the recital was a production of Hindemith's Hin und Zurück (There and Back), done in my own English translation, which I produced and directed as the capstone to my Opera Production cognate and in which I sang one of the roles myself.
Fellow doctoral student Deborah Hollis, with whom I had performed Schubert's Winterreise for my second DMA recital last March, joined me in presenting a lecture-recital on this song cycle in the Rare Books Room of the Perkins Library at Duke University January 16, during which she played on a fortepiano not unlike the one Schubert might have played. We then performed the entire cycle in Nelson Music Room at the University on January 18.
On Good Friday, April 10, I will sing the tenor solos in Theodore du Bois' Seven Last Words of Christ at First United Methodist Church in Mocksville, NC.
Meanwhile, Melody continues to further her doctoral study at UNC Chapel Hill while teaching at Elon University and teaching a course for her own department at UNC. She hopes to finish her academic course work by the end of the Spring 2009 Semester so that she can take her comprehensive exams in the Fall 2009 Semester.
Our son, Peter, received his M.A. in History May 16, 2008 from UNCG, where he served as a teaching assistant in the History Department. He is presently in the middle of deciding where he will pursue his doctoral studies.
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