YORK GRADUATE MUSIC STUDENTS
Keynote Speaker
Philip Ewell is a professor of music theory at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He is also on the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center. His research specialties include race studies in music theory, Russian music theory, Russian opera, modal theory and history, twentieth-century music theory, hip-hop and popular music.
As a public music theorist, his scholarship has been featured in Adam Neely’s YouTube channel, the BBC, Die Zeit, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Times (London), and WQXR’s Aria Code, among other outlets. His monograph, On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming For Everyone will appear in the University of Michigan Press’s Music and Social Justice series in Spring 2023.
Featured Guests
Maya Stitski holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University and is the Archive Projects Coordinator/Research Assistant at the Northside Hip Hop Archive. She holds a Masters degree from the London School of Economics in Gender and Social Policy and a BAHon from Queen’s University in Political Studies. Her forthcoming book titled “Moving the Academy to Hip Hop Music: Repurposing Canadian Universities with Black Radical Tradition” (UBC Press) addresses how black Canada is a contested historical site that informs learning practices and links these to radical classroom spaces that are founded on black activism.
Registered Psychotherapist & Neurologic Music Therapist Melissa Tan is a Canadian based Music Therapist (MTA) and part of the College of Registered Psychotherapist of Ontario. She is the in house Neurologic Music Therapist (NMT-F) at Abaton Integrative Medicine in Oakville, Ontario working with clients with autism, early development, and, neurorehabilitation, and dementia. Melissa is also a Part-Time Professor in the Creative Arts Therapies Department at Concordia University, Montréal. Melissa's educational background includes a MA in Music Therapy from the University of Roehampton in London, UK and a Bachelor of Music in Classical Piano from McGill University. Currently she is a PhD candidate conducting research in the Music and Health Sciences Research Collaboratory at the University of Toronto. Her current research interests include the use of music-based interventions with adults with major depressive disorder.
Amy Hillis pursues opportunities to build community relationships using music inside and outside the traditional concert hall. She has "a rich, warm sound and has mastered the violin with such ease, that it is impossible to ignore her passion in performance" (Ludwig Van Montréal). Originally from Regina, Saskatchewan, Amy collaborates with performers and composers around the world to explore new approaches to western classical and contemporary music. As a soloist, she has commissioned new Canadian works by Fjola Evans, Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière, Laurence Jobidon, Vincent Ho, Andrew Staniland, Jocelyn Morlock, Nicole Lizée, Carmen Braden, Randolph Peters and Jordan Pal. She is winner of the Pan-Canadian Recital Tour, the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition, an artistic residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the McGill Concerto Competition, and the Sylva Gelber Foundation Music Award. Amy is Assistant Professor of Music at York University and the Helen Carswell Chair of Community-Engaged Research in the Arts.
Jonathan Kay is a transcultural musician, and is currently a PhD student in the department of East-West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco under the mentorship of Dr. Debashish Banerji. In search of non-western ways of musical knowing, Jonathan moved to Kolkata, India, and for 10 years traditionally studied North Indian Raga music, innovating its expression on the saxophone and learning the rare Indian instrument the boro esraj. He has also traveled to Kyoto to learn Japanese shakuhachi music. His research is exploring the intersection between Eastern wisdom traditions grounded in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, and poststructuralist philosophy/psychology based on the work of Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari. As a practitioner in arts-based research, Jonathan is exploring musico-philosophical horizons between thought and sound, and his original music is based upon hetero-cultural and transnomadic experimentation through contemplative models of improvisation.
Presenters/Performers
Composer, sound designer, musician and instrument maker John Gzowski worked on over 200 theatre, dance and film productions as composer, sound designer, live foley artist, musician and as musical director. He has played banjo for opera in Banff, studied Carnatic classical music in India and played oud and guitar in jazz and folk festivals across Canada and Europe. His theatre work has won him 6 Dora’s, from 18 nominations for companies like Stratford, Shaw Festival, Luminato, National Arts Centre, the Mirvishes, MTC, the Arts Club, Canstage, Soulpepper, Dancemakers, Red Sky, Tarragon, Factory Theatre and YPT. Gzowski has played on numerous CD’s, with recent releases with Patricia O'Callghan, Tasa, and Autorickshaw as well as a Juno nomination with Maza Meze. He has run Canada’s first microtonal group, touring Canada playing the works of Harry Partch, composed and performed with several new music groups and worked as co-artistic director of the Music Gallery.
Patrick O’Reilly is a composer/guitarist and a community-driven fixture in the Toronto creative music scene. His open-minded approach embraces both beauty and brashness; he operates the W/DRWN record label and the Toronto Tape Music Center. He is also the co-curator of the Furniture Music and Ornate Presents concert/workshop series.
A sought-after collaborator, he contributes to a diverse range of projects that have all added to the rich musical landscape of his own work. He can be heard most often on tour with art-pop band Language Arts, at Toronto's Tranzac Club with creative music ensemble Never Was, in Kensington Market with epic-afro-funk trio Wapama, and improvising with ad-hoc groups in basements and DIY spaces throughout the GTA.
His new album The Remembrancer: Justin Haynes Plays the Compositions of Patrick O’Reilly is available now. The album features Patrick’s compositions performed and recorded by the late Justin Haynes in what would prove to be one of his final collaborations.
Anna Blackburn is an MA student in ethnomusicology at York University. Her research focuses on popular music studies, as well as postwar music and radio integration in New Orleans. As a native of Monroe, Louisiana, Anna graduated summa cum laude from the University of Louisiana Monroe in 2022 with a BM in piano pedagogy and a minor in French language. While pursuing her BM, Anna was inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi Honors Society and a three-time recipient of the Outstanding Music Student award from ULM’s school of visual and performing arts. In addition to university training, Anna is a Musikgarten certified and licensed teacher specializing in early childhood and special needs music education. From 2020 to 2021, Anna served as Monroe district president of the Music Teachers National Association and organized various piano rallies, festivals, and youth camps. She has been a private piano and music theory teacher for over four years and is currently Monroe district co-president of the Louisiana Federation of Music Clubs.
Diane Kolin is a PhD student in musicology in York University, Toronto, Canada. Her diverse research interests include Critical Disability Studies, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Liszt, and her dissertation focuses on professional musicians, composers, and music specialists with disabilities. Between her duties as editor in chief of the Journal of the French Beethoven Society - Association Beethoven France et Francophonie, Diane frequently writes about Liszt and Beethoven in peer reviewed journals. She also participates in summer conferences that center on both composers and offer her the unique opportunity to explore important sites of musical history. The study of Beethoven’s deafness and Diane’s personal history led to her research in disability and music. Her collaborations with disabled musicians in the professional musical world allow her to expose new ideas on making music more accessible to a broader audience. Diane is also a voice teacher and a singer who advocates for more accessibility in orchestras, choirs, and music education.
Modern jazz vocalist Meghan Gilhespy is an innovative voice from the diverse Vancouver jazz scene. Currently based in Halifax, Meghan is a lecturer at St. Francis Xavier University and Nova Scotia Community College. As the first woman in Canada to pursue a DMA in Jazz, her research at the University of Toronto examines the cultural politics of experimental jazz vocalization.
In addition to a long history of conventional jazz performance, including her own published album Vive Le Tour, Meghan has done studio work for Netflix, which has expanded her skills as an experimental vocal improviser. Her performance and pedagogical work continue to push boundaries and raise marginalized voices, contributing to an inclusive and equitable Canadian artistic sphere.
Bethany Brinson is currently a first-year Ph.D. student in musicology at the Eastman School of Music. She graduated from Indiana University in 2022 with a B.M. in piano performance, a B.A. in mathematics (with highest distinction), and a minor in French. Her research interests include improvisation studies, French art song, neurodiversity in musical production, and women composer-performers in the Baroque era. As a performer, she has always seen music-making as a uniquely potent form of communication, nurtured by her myriad collaborations with singers, instrumentalists, and composers, as well as her involvement in ballet productions and live music for silent films. Motivated by the transformative power of music, she is pursuing an active career in teaching, writing, performing, composing, and collaborating. Outside of all things music, Bethany enjoys drawing, cooking, learning languages, blogging, birds, and spending time outdoors.
Praised for her “huge musicality, depth of interpretation, and technical expertise” (Manhattan International Music Competition), cellist Emma Schmiedecke has established herself as a vibrant interpreter of both the classical and contemporary cello repertoire. She is cellist and co-founder of Duo Caprice, is a core member of OrchestraOne NYC, and has been a visiting artist at The Banff Centre, the Centre d’Arts Orford, the Toronto Summer Music Festival, Domaine Forget de Charlevoix Chamber Music Festival, and the Fresh Inc. New Music Festival, among others. Emma attends the University of Toronto School of Music as a doctoral candidate in Cello Performance and is a teaching assistant for the Department of Strings and the Contemporary Music Ensemble. She also holds degrees from the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Music, the Bard College Conservatory, and Bard College.
Matthew Tran-Adams is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at York University in Toronto studying ethnomusicology. As a former Lecturer at OISE/University of Toronto in Education and a secondary teacher/department head in the Toronto District School Board, Matthew specialized in developing equitable and anti-racist music curriculum. He is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre and has recently won first the North American Guild of Carillonneurs Arrangements and Transcriptions Competition. Matthew has studied the Irish language in various Gaeltachts and universities and performs on Irish harp, Irish flute and tin whistle.
Jackie Zhou is a fourth-year honours thesis student in the Music, Acoustics, Perception, and LEarning (MAPLE) Lab at McMaster University working on the Emotional Piano Project. She has a passion for both music and psychology. Her computational background inspired her undergraduate research in examining inconsistencies in music-related machine learning algorithms, analyzing computationally extracted features compared to score-based and perceptual features of well-known historic keyboard music.
Connor Wessel is a first-year PhD student based in McMaster University’s MAPLE lab. Hailing from England, he completed his undergraduate and master’s studies at the University of Plymouth. It was there where he developed a keen interest in auditory alarm design through his work with Professor Judy Edworthy. Over the last few years, his research has included urgency coding in alarm design, the working memory burden of alarms, and the design of digital bike bells. Presently, he is working alongside Professor Michael Schutz on researching how the addition of high, inharmonic frequencies to melodic alerts can improve their detectability. In his free time, he also enjoys playing the trumpet and piano, and singing tenor in choir.
Cameron Anderson is a PhD student at the Music, Acoustics, Perception and LEarning (MAPLE) Lab at McMaster University. His interdisciplinary research has focused on how changes in musical expression throughout history affect composers’ musical choices, as well as listeners’ perceptions of conveyed emotion. He has also contributed to work exploring how musical considerations can improve the design of auditory alarms in medical environments. Cam holds a Bachelor of Music (Music Cognition spec.) and a Master of Science in Psychology.
Max Delle Grazie is a second-year M.Sc student supervised by Dr. Michael Schutz. Max’s current work compares the changing use of cues in music over time. Although, his research is primarily focused on the perception of music from the 20th Century, drawing connections between expressive cues used in modernist music, speech, and dance. More recently, Max undertook a lead role in a project involving a collaboration with the Faculty of Music at Western University, combining approaches from music theory and music psychology to create a novel methodology for exploring how the role of modality in music has changed over time.
Charley Hausknost is an M.A. student in Musicology at the University of Toronto and holds a Bachelor of Music with Outstanding Achievement in Music History from McGill University. Her research explores the concept of vocal play across various genres including popular music, avant-garde experimentalism, and pedagogical exercises. She considers the types of experiences these vocalizations afford performers and listeners alike by blending scholarship with creative practice. Her work is supported by a Canada Graduate Scholarship-Master’s Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). During her undergrad, Charley was selected as a McCall MacBain International Fellow in 2019, and had an essay published in UCLA’s MUSE Undergraduate Musicology Journal in 2021.
Andres Elizondo Lopez is a first year PhD student at McMaster University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science for Psychology, Neuroscience, & Behaviour with a Music Cognition specialization in 2021 at McMaster University. He has always had a deep curiosity and appreciation of how we interpret musical qualities, as well as how we process auditory information from our environment. His project (Supervised by Dr. Michael Schutz) looks at how we can use musical instruments with their complicated acoustic structures to create auditory alarms that are more efficient and less intrusive in safety-critical environments.
Classical guitarist Jelica Mijanović has been invited to 30 international festivals in a dozen countries as a soloist, lecturer, or adjudicator. She is currently a guitar instructor at Mohawk
College and a first-year DMA in Performance student at the University of Toronto. Originally from Montenegro, she obtained MA in Music Pedagogy and MA in Music Performance in Switzerland, where she taught at several conservatories and a university before settling in Ontario in 2020. Jelica published two books, won 11 first prizes at international guitar competitions and received 20 scholarships.
Jelica is fluent in French, English, Italian, German, Spanish and Montenegrin.
Kristen Graves is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. Her Connaught-funded research focuses on the virtuosic sonic skills practiced by workers from the
municipal garbage dump in Oaxaca, Mexico. Kristen earned her Master’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from New York University in 2018, where she researched the effect of teaching songwriting skills in youth communities as a way to encourage self-empowerment and agency. She is also an internationally touring folk singer, and she helped build and is still closely involved with the non-profit organization Simply Smiles, which serves Indigenous children and families of the Americas.
Toronto-born Robert Diack is currently pursuing a MA degree at The University of Toronto where he is a teaching assistant. He received his undergraduate degree from the School of Jazz at The New School. His first album Lost Villages was released in April of 2018 and can be found on streaming services and Bandcamp. He also makes country music and is an active session musician.