Under the flashing lights of Providence clubs and at bustling campus orientation events, a community of Brown students thrive behind speakers instead of on the dance floor. Whether engaging a crowd, highlighting sounds from their home countries or finding fun in their passion for music, each student DJ at Brown approaches their art in a unique way.

Jones starts her appointment at SAIC in fall 2025

The Telegraph Quartet delivered a beautiful performance at the Grant Recital Hall Monday night, playing with measured passion and undeniable control. It was a colorful, yet erratic experience that left the audience slightly disoriented but appreciative of the composers’ technical mastery.

Brown University Associate Professor of Music Anthony Cheung was recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and The Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music in 2024

In this new body of work, Carter continues his investigation of systems of power in the US by utilizing the flag — across several mediums — as a conceptual lever to spur reflections on how the history and promise contained within its imagery corresponds to the realities of American culture and society.

Composer and Brown University Music & Multimedia Composition PhD candidate Inga Chinilina was awarded a 2024 Fromm Music Foundation Commission.
The Fromm Music Foundation was created by the late Paul Fromm in 1952. Since 1972, it has been located at Harvard University, where it has operated in partnership with the Harvard University Music Department. Over the course of its existence, the Fromm Foundation has commissioned over 400 new compositions and their performances. Congratulations, Inga!

Over the past three years, Brown’s Sayles Organ has undergone major restoration in an effort to maintain the musicality and integrity of the century-old instrument. The 1903 Hutchings-Votey pipe organ was gifted to Brown University by Lucian Sharpe, a member of the Class of 1893. Today, the 121-year-old instrument stars in 10 annual concert series, including the Halloween recital, Reunion Weekend and the E.J. Lownes Memorial Recital, according to Mark Steinbach, a distinguished senior lecturer in music and the University’s organist.

The award is for his piece "I Felt a Funeral in my Brain" which he completed in 2024.

While at Brown, I took Marc Perlman’s Music & Modern Culture class, which I found fascinating and extremely illuminating. I was just coming off a two-year world tour when I took Marc’s class. It was the perfect place to process all that I had done and to understand it contextually. It was particularly fascinating to study the concept of capital as it relates to popular music. For the first time, I understood what I had been through in three dimensions. The takeaways from that course still inform my job on a daily basis.

Over the weekend, the Brown Arts Institute hosted “The 21st Century Orchestra,” a three-day contemporary music festival highlighting innovative orchestral music... Associate Professors of Music Eric Nathan, Anthony Cheung and Wang Lu joined Rovan to curate the event. The festival looks “at how the orchestra can innovate but also create change in the years to come,” Nathan said

Musicology & Ethnomusicology PhD candidate Ruby Erickson earns honor from the Society for Ethnomusicology

Will Johnson Takes Part in Several Events in Fall 2024 at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Mohammad Geldi Geldi Nejad, aka "Oghlan Bakhshi," is a Brown University PhD candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology. He will be joined by Zyyada Jumayeva.

Voting will help determine whether Professor Rovan's interface, FRUDI, advances to the final stage of the Innovation@Brown award selection process

PhD candidate in Music & Multimedia Composition to compose new work for saxophone and viola in 2024-25

Assistant Professor of Music Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo was one of three musicians awarded $30,000 grants from the Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship Fund at the Rhode Island Foundation.

Musicians from the New York Classical Players provided expert insights and performed Brown students’ original works as part of a Seminar in Composition course.

Take in the sounds and histories of Peru.

Genevieve Allotey-Pappoe begins her appointment at Brown on July 1, 2024.

PhD candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology Jake Blount is part of the new band New Dangerfield. The group's debut single is available at https://lnk.to/new-dangerfield, and they perform several concerts this spring and summer.

"New Dangerfield is the highly anticipated Black string band supergroup that brings together Afrofuturist fiddler Jake Blount with composer, songwriter, and old-time banjo player Kaia Kater, bluegrass banjo iconoclast Tray Wellington, and powerfully versatile bassist Nelson Williams."

We are happy to share the news that two members of our department -- Srinivas Reddy and Hamsa Shanmugam were awarded Fulbright fellowships for 2024-25

Byrd McDaniel, PhD '19 Musicology & Ethnomusicology and current Assistant Director of Student Development in the Graduate School, is the author of the new book "Spectacular Listening: Music and Disability in the Digital Age" published by Oxford University Press.

In a review of Mark Steinbach's recently published Aeolus recording of Olivier Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur, critic Stephen Greenbank writes that Steinbach "captures the drama, intensity and raw power... offers a wealth of lofty insights and a tremendous variety of colour and shadings to this maginificent score."

Cellist Tyler J. Borden is the recipient of the first New Music Performance Grant @ Brown

Composer and Associate Professor of Music Wang Lu featured in Brown's Impact Magazine

Jazz at Lincoln Center presents Marcus Grant's "Nina Simone & Abby Lincoln: How it Feels to be Free" on February 8, 2024.

University Organist Mark Steinbach's latest recording is a performance of Olivier Messiaen's La Nativité du Seigneur.

A story about PhD candidate Devanney Haruta's Piano (de)composition project. “I think there’s something beautiful about a very simple idea that gains complexity over time,” Haruta said. “The idea to put something outside, that in itself isn’t a very complex idea, but then the complexities emerge from watching and observing and playing and interacting,” she said.

Starting with the question of what happens when a piano is placed outside, now she has more questions about how a piano is made. She has questions about the environmental impact of pianos and how materials are used. She has questions about the attachments people form with their instruments and why a piano outside elicits such an emotional reaction from so many people.

The Brown University Department of Music remembers Lutz Rath.

Though it’s relatively new to Brown’s arts scene, the Black Music Lab — an in-development hub that works to amplify both artists on campus and beyond — has already managed to establish its presence on College Hill.

Currently housed within the Brown Arts Institute, the lab was founded in fall 2022 by Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, the project’s faculty director, and Charrisse Barron, an ethnomusicologist who has taught at Brown and is now an assistant professor of music at Harvard.

“We noticed or recognized that there were so many amazing programs happening on campus in terms of Black musical performance and study, but it was kind of dispersed,” Lumumba-Kasongo said. Forming the lab was a way to both amplify artistic projects occurring on campus and connect them to creative work being done in the greater Providence community, she added.

A newly published recording by Brown University Organist and Distinguished Senior Lecturer featuring music by Bach, Buxtehude, Heiller, Messiaen, Eric Nathan, and Wang Lu.

The New Music Performance Grant @ Brown seeks applicants from outside of Brown University. Featured composers this year are Nick Bentz and Inga Chinilina.

When does a musical instrument die? When it no longer produces sound? When it’s in poor playing condition? Or perhaps, simply, when there’s no one around to play it? Anyone who has walked past the Orwig Music Building on the Brown University campus this year may have found themselves pondering these queries after stumbling upon “Piano (de)composition,” a project by Class of 2016.5 alumna Devanney Haruta, who is now a doctoral student at Brown.

“Open again a turn of light,” written by Brown faculty members Eric Nathan and Sawako Nakayasu, will premiere on Saturday, Oct. 21, part of the inaugural public performance at The Lindemann Performing Arts Center.

Composer and Brown University Associate Professor of Music Eric Nathan is Appointed Artistic Director of Collage New Music, the longest-standing contemporary music ensemble in New England, as of the 2024-25 Concert Season. Nathan Replaces David Hoose Who Held the Position for 32 years.

Wang Lu, composer and Brown University Associate Professor of Music, earned a 2023-24 Toulmin Fellowship from the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University and National Sawdust.

Joins Brown University Department of Music for 2023-24 as Visiting Professor

PhD Candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology Ruby Erickson produced "Sounds from the Eleventh Star" with Cabo Verdean-American performer and scholar Candida Rose Baptista.

An update on Will Johnson's work this spring and summer

A band cobbled together before classes started freshman year has performed onstage in front of 3,000 people, opening for Blues Traveler. What’s next for Chance Emerson ’24 and his bandmates? First, homework.

Professors Saleem Ashkar, Wang Lu, and Eric Nathan collaborated in a three-concert series in Düsseldorf, Germany in June 2023

“I’ve always been interested in storytelling,” says composer and pianist Wang Lu. “We all crave stories.”

Wang’s latest composition, “The Nothing Man and Other Tales,” taps into this human hunger by recounting a series of stories she discovered in a children’s book that her daughter has been enjoying. Her musical treatment transforms these tales into adventures for adult ears.

Seattle Modern Orchestra will give the world premiere of Wang’s new piece at Town Hall on June 3 as part of its final concert of the season. Commissioned for SMO by the Barlow Foundation, “Nothing Man” marks the second collaboration between Wang and the Seattle-based chamber orchestra, which co-artistic directors Julia Tai and Jérémy Jolley founded in 2010 to perform music from the 20th and 21st centuries. SMO balances works by local and out-of-town composers.

Alexander Hardan, PhD candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology, earns prestigious fellowship from AMS

Wang Lu will set to work on three new, large-scale compositions.

Since late February, students passing by the Orwig Music Library have been greeted by a sight familiar to most musicians: a piano. But the instrument on display under the library’s pine trees is no ordinary piano — it’s a decomposing one. This outdoor piano display is the work of Devanney Haruta ’16 GS, who titled her project “Piano (de)composition.”

For Haruta, the project challenges the assumption that instruments only hold value in their traditional forms. She hopes that the piano will allow her to better understand the life cycle and construction of instruments, but she also encourages community members to engage with it in any creative capacity they wish.

Haruta, who is pursuing a PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology, first came across the discarded piano after the music department had decided to throw it out. She saw the project as an opportunity to give the instrument “a second chance at life.”

Maureen Loughran, Brown University PhD in Ethnomusicology '08, was named Director and Curator of Smithsonian Folkways effective March 27, 2023. Loughran, a career music producer, archivist and scholar, is currently the senior producer of American Routes, a nationally distributed public radio series featuring the diversity of vernacular musical traditions. Loughran becomes the fourth director and curator of Smithsonian Folkways since it was established in 1987.

Clifford Murphy, Brown University PhD in Ethnomusicology '08, has been named the director of the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, effective April 10. Murphy, a career academic and public servant, is currently the director of folk and traditional arts at the National Endowment for the Arts.

“As an educator, public servant and musician, Cliff has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to preserving and promoting the world’s rich cultural traditions,” said Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie G. Bunch III. “As director of the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Cliff will demonstrate the broad diversity of living traditions, how they have shaped us and what they mean for our future.”

Visitors are invited to play the piano respectfully. Ms. Haruta maintains a blog featuring bi-monthly updates on the piano, with photos and audio recordings.

Wang Lu’s “Surge,” given its world premiere at the top of the show, is the product of an initiative by the League of American Orchestras to commission new works from six composers — all women — that will be guaranteed performances from ensembles across the country.