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.