Michael Bishop

Na Young Choi

Na-Young Choi is a first year student in the Critical and Comparative Studies. She is from South Korea. She received her BA and MA degrees from Korean National University of Arts, where she mainly studied musicology and minored arts history. Her primary interest is historiography, the juncture between history and anthropology. And she likes to reflect on how modern cultural history has been constructed in relation to concepts of nation, race, ethnicity, class etc. and how history could be written, especially in Korean and "postmodern" contexts.

More specifically, her research interests specifically include traditional Korean folk performances (particularly those which have been forgotten), neo-traditional culture and its globalization, cultural imperialism in Asian popular culture, and Korean diasporic culture in China and Russia. Ultimately, she hopes to rewrite about people, who, although have led modern history and culture in many ways, have also been excluded. In her spare time, she really enjoys Japanese animation, architecture, and fine arts.

Julia Cook

David Cosper


David Cosper is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical & Comparative Studies. His dissertation (in progress) is an attempt to bring theories of performance and interpretation from various disciplines—literary criticism, speech act theory, performance studies, philosophy of language, et al.—to bear on acts of musical performance and phonographic process in ways that resonate with real performing and listening experiences. The project involves close readings of records by artists as distinct from one another as Nigel Kennedy, Jaki Byard, and The Roots.

In addition to his teaching in the Music and English departments, David performs regularly as a bassist in regional jazz, bluegrass, and experimental bands. At other times, he and his dog (Jaki) wrestle, smoke cigars, and chase groundhogs together.

Sarah Culpeper


Sarah Culpeper is a second year student in the Critical and Comparative Studies program. Her interests include female singer-songwriters and vocalists, the representation of female musicians in the media, histories of American popular music, the popular music industry, and prestige values in twentieth century American music across genres. Theory-wise, she is drawn to feminist criticism, mass culture critiques, literary theory, sociological approaches to music and taste (Pierre Bourdieu), and recent scholarship dealing with popular music analysis. She has written on Joan Baez and the idea of vocal "purity," on Joni Mitchell and the "confessional" song, and on other diverse topics including Christian rock, Woody Allen's use of music, irony in the work of Maurice Ravel, and the history of recording.

Before attending UVa, Sarah completed a Master's in Musicology at McGill University in Montreal, where she studied with David Brackett, Lloyd Whitesell and Steven Huebner. While at McGill, she taught discussion sections in music history for music majors and worked as a teaching assistant for courses in music appreciation and popular music. During her time in Montreal, she also served as Assistant to the Artistic Director for two international contemporary art music festivals: MusiMars in 2004 and Montreal Nouvelles Musiques in 2005.

Born in Toronto, Canada, Sarah grew up in Ottawa, where her formative musical experiences included piano lessons, ballet dance, and too many years of choral singing. She received an unofficial education in music history and culture through her father's diverse record collection which included Brahms' symphonies, The Byrds, Renaissance dance music, classical Indian music, Miles Davis, and French Canadian fiddle tunes.

Jeffrey Decker

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher


Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, a Ph.D. candidate, is a member of the first class of Ph.D. students in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music. The recipient of a 2007-2008 American Association of University Women American Dissertation Fellowship, Shana is completing her dissertation, "Vocality, Listening, and Intimacy: Gender Transgression in Popular Music, 1990-2005" this year. Her project explores the gender performances, genre crossing, and reception of the singers Jeff Buckley, Meshell NdegéOcello, Björk, and Antony Hegarty. She has presented this work at several national and international conferences, including SEM, IASPM, FTM, and EMP. Her work on Jeff Buckley appears in the collection Oh Boy!: Masculinities and Popular Music (Routledge, 2007). This article won the Zora Neale Hurston Award and Prize for the best graduate student paper on women or gender at the University of Virginia, 2005-2006. Her paper "Meshell NdegéOcello and Black Female Masculinity" won the IASPM US award for best graduate student paper at the national conference in Charlottesville in October 2004. In 2006, Shana was one of 7 Ph.D. candidates at the University to receive the Award for Excellence in Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and in summer 2007 was the grateful recipient of a UVA Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Acceleration Fellowship. In April 2007 she organized and hosted a Vocality Symposium for scholars to discuss modes of analyzing the singing voice and learn about studio production.

Before coming to UVA, Shana earned a Bachelor of Musical Arts with high honors in viola performance and English literature from the University of Michigan. She has designed and taught the courses "Classical Music in Modern American Culture," "Gender and Sexuality in Popular Music," "Introduction to Music Research," and "Musicianship," and has taught "Women's Lives in Myth and Reality," "The Mind of the Artist," classical music appreciation, and jazz history for the Music Department and Studies in Women and Gender at UVA. In addition to her studies, she has served as an academic advisor to first-year college students for 6 years and is the captain of the Music Department's grad student, faculty, and staff intramural softball team, The Old Cabell Whackers (3rd place in the league, Fall 2005!). If not injured in the upcoming games, she plans to continue playing the viola in the Baroque Orchestra and someday work ethnographically on chamber music performance.

Maria Guarino

Aurie Hsu

Wendy Hsu

Web: Wendy Hsu's Website

Hello. I'm a fourth-year student in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music Program. I have a background in Music, Religious Studies, and East Asian Studies. My research interests are Asian American identities and contemporary popular music and culture. Theoretically, I'm informed primarily by critical scholarship on technology, transnationalism, and identity intersectionality of race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, and class. Methodologically, I'm drawn to critical ethnography and close (text) readings. My dissertation project is a multi-sited ethnography on the social and musical lives of Asian American musicians in indie rock. I've published articles on Yoko Ono, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Bollywood film music. Beside reading and writing, I perform in improvised noise trio Pinko Communoids and organize local experimental music events as a HzCollective member.

Juraj Kojs

Web: Juraj Kojs's Website

Juraj Kojs was born (in 1976) and raised in Slovakia. He is a composer, pianist, and educator. He has studied composition with Beth Wiemann, Kristine Burns, Orlando Jacinto Garcia, Fredrick Kaufman, Matthew Burtner, and Judith Shatin. His studies in piano began in Slovakia and continued in the US with Alena Komorasova, Peter Cerman, Baycka Voronietsky, Phillip Silver, Kemal Gekic, and Jose Lopez. Mr. Kojs is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Composition and Music Technologies at the University of Virginia. His dissertation advisor is Judith Shatin.

Kojs' compositions were recently featured at the International Computer Music Conference 2006 (New Orleans, USA), Sonoimagenes 2006 (Buenos Aires, Argentina), New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference 2006 (Paris, France), Gaudeamus International Music Week 2005 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), and Society of Composers Inc. National Conference 2005 (Greensboro, USA). In 2006, Kojs' composition 'Revelations' was awarded the first place prize at Eastman Electroacoustic Composition and Performance Competition. Additionally, his piece 'In Secret' received an honorable mention at the Digital Art Award in Tokyo, Japan.

Interest in discovering new acoustic worlds and involving technology in composition processes is reflected in Kojs' music. Juraj Kojs is a member of MIAMI: Medialogy Interactive Acoustics and Multimodal Interfaces group that specializes in interactive audio-visual performance and research. In the winter 2006, MIAMI performed and gave a talk at Sonic Arts Research Center in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

University of Virginia awarded Juraj Kojs a Dissertation Year Fellowship for the academic year 2006-2007 and the Award for Excellence 2007 in Scholarship in the Humanities & Social Sciences. The funding has enabled him to advance in working on his dissertation, which discusses how virtual instruments by means of physical modeling synthesis facilitate a continuum between physical and virtual realities in music.

While at the University of Maine, Florida International University, and University of Virginia, Kojs has assisted with teaching and taught a number of undergraduate courses. Additionally, as a visiting lecturer in interactive performance and computer sound related classes, Kojs joined the faculty of Medialogy Department at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark during the academic year 2004-2005.

Elizabeth Lindau


Elizabeth Lindau is fourth-year graduate student in the CCS program. Her dissertation explores intersections between rock music and the avant-garde, specifically in the work of Yoko Ono, the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, and Sonic Youth. She presented her work on the performance and reception of Hildegard of Bingen's chants in the Womyn's choral movement at Feminist Theory in Music 9 and the 2006 meeting of the South Central Graduate Music Consortium. Liz holds Bachelor's degrees in Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is active as a keyboard performer and teacher in Charlottesville. She plays basso continuo for the UVa Baroque Orchestra, and, along with colleague Peter Tschirhardt, performed J.S. Bach's Concerto for Two Harpsichords in C major in May 2007. An avid collector of books and vinyl records, she enjoys scouring garage sales, used bookstores, and library sales in hopes of encountering original Blue Notes, first pressings of Elvis albums, and that elusive first edition of García-Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Loren Ludwig


Loren Ludwig comes from a long line of non-musicians. He plays new music on old instruments and odd music on new instruments, battling daily with the perils of anachronism. He often loses. Loren has performed as a soloist and chamber musician across the US and Europe, appearing with such groups as the Smithsonian Chamber Players, the New York Consort of Viols, Catacoustic, the Oberlin Baroque Ensemble, the Galileo Project, and many others. He studied viola da gamba and performance practice at Oberlin Conservatory and attended the Royal Conservatory of The Hague on a Fulbright fellowship. Recently, Loren has focused his musical energies on improvisation and composition, working with electric and acoustic violas da gamba, laptop, and numerous collaborators. He is a fourth-year in the University of Virginia's Critical and Comparative Studies in Music Ph.D. program, where he studies hip-hop and the musical culture of 17th-century England.

Kevin Parks

Website: Kevin Parks' Website

Kevin Parks originally hails from New York. He is a graduate of the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, CUNY and received his M.A. degree from Dartmouth College. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Composition and Music Technologies at The University of Virginia.

After working briefly at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy. NY, Kevin moved to Seoul, Korea for many years. There, he taught computer music at the Seoul Institute of the Arts and collaborated with the Sadari Movement Research Group.

Some areas of interest include: computer music and computer music performance, musique concrète, tuning and timbre, American experimental music, popular musics, and Korean musics, and improvisation.

If you would like to know more about Kevin, take him to lunch, or give him large sums of money, he can be reached at the above e-mail address.

Geoffrey Philabaumd

Allison Robbins

Website: Allison Robbins' Website

Allison is a PhD student in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music. She received her undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where she majored in music and minored in Asian Studies. At the University of Virginia, she has taught classes on the American musical, music of the Western canon, and basic keyboard skills and served as a teaching assistant for History of Jazz and American Roots Music. She has presented papers at the annual conferences of Society for American Music, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Allison is currently writing a dissertation on American film musicals of the 1930s. In her spare time, she enjoys walking her dog and playing piano.

Troy Rogers


Troy Rogers is a composer/sound artist/instrument designer whose output includes music for soloists, chamber ensembles, orchestra, dance, theater, digital media, and homemade music robots. While completing his master's degree in Intermedia Music Technology at the University of Oregon, he spent time as a composer/researcher at Simon Fraser University's Sonic Research Studio exploring acoustic ecology and soundscape composition, and more recently at the University of Oregon Department of Computer and Information Sciences' Cognitive Modeling and Eye Tracking Laboratory creating audio/visual art controlled by eye movements. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia, pursuing a degree in Composition and Computing Technologies.

Nick Rubin


Nick Rubin is a PhD candidate in Critical and Comparative Studies of Music. He grew up in Winston-Salem, and attended the University of Pennsylania (BA 1991) and the University of Vermont (MA 1995) before coming to UVA.

Nick's work takes place at the intersection of popular music, ethnography, and media studies, and his dissertation work with Fred Maus centers on college rock radio.

As a graduate instructor, Nick has taught the History of Rock & Roll, and the introduction to music theory. Nick has also served as a TA for the department's survey courses on Western classical music and Jazz. In 2003, Nick received the Music Department's Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award.

Nick serves on the UVA Committee for radio station WTJU. As DJ Poubelle, he shares hosting duties for "Radio Freedonia," which you can hear Wednesday nights at 11 pm.

In his spare time, Nick likes to hang with friends and spend time outside. Nick enjoys making and hearing good music, and making and eating good food. He is a Libra.

Lanier Sammons


Lanier entered the program in Composition and Computer Technologies in 2007. His compositional foci include audience interactivity, improvisation, the intersection of popular and classical musics, and the exploration of non-standard venues.

Lanier comes to UVA from Macon, Georgia by way of New York, where he received his B.A. from Columbia University. In New York, he studied guitar with Arthur Kampela, wrote for Sequenza21.com, and played in a few bands. He also worked for Bang on a Can/Cantaloupe Music, the Sequitur Ensemble, and the Columbia Music Library.

When not musicking, Lanier enjoys following and playing baseball and soccer (both real and fantasy), reading psychology and neuroscience blogs, and spending time with his wife, Clara, and their dog, Molly.

Mary Simonson

Web: Mary Simonson's Website

Mary Simonson is a Presidential Fellow and fifth year Ph.D. student in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia. Originally from New Jersey, Mary has a B.A. in music and women's studies from Rutgers University. Mary's research interests include nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera and dance, feminist theory and women in performances, and issues of vocality and embodiment. She has presented papers on the Salome character in early twentieth century American culture, vocal and corporeal interactions among female characters in Auber's La Muette de Portici, and Anna Pavlova's appearance in Lois Weber's opera-film "The Dumb Girl of Portici"; her work on La Muette was awarded the AMS Capital Chapter's Lowens Award. Mary has taught courses including Basic Musical Skills, Entertainment Yesterday: Stage and Screen at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and Dance, Music, and Culture; she's also a co-founder of the South Central Graduate Music Consortium, a collaboration between students at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina ­ Chapel Hill, and Duke University Currently, Mary is writing a dissertation entitled Performance, Multimedia, and Creativity in Early Twentieth-Century American Musical Life, which employs turn of the century musical, cinematic, and dance productions to examine female creativity and prestige, and musical meaning more broadly. In her spare time, Mary enjoys exploring her own embodiment through Pilates, in dance classes, and while out running.

Yuri Spitsyn

Peter Swendsen

Web: Peter Swendsen's Website

Peter V. Swendsen was recently appointed Assistant Professor in the Technology in Music and Related Arts program at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he will begin teaching in the fall of '07. Swendsen spent 2006-07 working on a soundscape composition project while in residence as a Fulbright Fellow at the NoTAM Computer Music Studios in Oslo, Norway. His dissertation project at UVA is a large- scale composition for electroacoustic music, interactive dance, and extended/prepared piano. Swendsen's music has been called "highly skillful" by the San Francisco Bay Guardian and "marvelous" by the San Francisco Chronicle. He received his MFA from the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music and his BM from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. His music has been heard throughout the United States and recently in Canada, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Norway, India, Korea, Chile, Argentina, and as part of a CD release called "Resonance: Steel Pan in the 21st Century." Swendsen has studied composition with Gary Nelson, Richard Povall, Kristine Burns, Gail Wight, Maggi Payne, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Matthew Burtner and Judith Shatin, and is currently creating and performing with electroacoustic music, extended instrumental techniques, interactive environments, dance, installation, and video. He also serves as Assistant Editor for Journal SEAMUS. Swendsen is the co-artistic director of Prospect Dance Group and works extensively in collaboration with choreographers.

Peter Traub

Web: Peter Traub's Website

Peter Traub is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Composition and Computer Technologies. Peter received his Master's in Electro-Acoustic Music Composition from Dartmouth College in 1999. Following that, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he worked as a software engineer for five years. While gambling his daytime employment on internet startups, Peter spent nights composing at Stanford's CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics). His music and internet-based sound art works have been played and exhibited internationally. His current interests (and the likely direction of his dissertation) revolve around the use of computer networks in music creation and performance. He is also interested in exploring the relationship between sound, physical space, and virtual space. Peter currently contributes interviews and columns to the Networked_Music_Review blog.

Jonathan Zorn

Jonathan Zorn is a composer/sound artist/performer from Middletown, CT. He likes to make sounds using his voice, double bass, accordion, modular synthesizer, and computer. His compositions involve systems of interaction that exceed the control of any single participant, creating surprises for performers, audience, and composer. Jonathan holds a B.A. in philosophy, and an M.A. in music composition from Wesleyan University. He has studied with Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, Ron Kuivila, and Jon Barlow. Jonathan maintains several ongoing collaborative projects with artists and performers around the country including Rachel Thompson, David Kendall, Andrew Lafkas, Bryan Eubanks, and Katherine Young. To hear mp3s of past projects please visit http://rasbliutto.net/artists/jonathanzorn.html .