Plenary Address

Denise Von Glahn
Professor of Musicology and Director, Center for Music of the Americas, Florida State University

Two Keys, One Photograph, and What Wasn't There: The Unlikely Origins of Three Books

Denise Von Glahn is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at The Florida State University, College of Music.  Her articles and essays have appeared in scholarly journals and collections dedicated to music and culture.  She is a recognized expert on the music of Charles Ives.  Her first book, The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape investigated the ways the nation’s iconographic places inspired composers and helped shape America’s morphing sense of identity.  It won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 2004.  A second book, Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices, co-authored with Michael Broyles, won the 2009 Irving Lowens Book Award for distinguished scholarship in American music from the Society for American Music.  It challenged the popular narrative of when, where, and how musical modernism emerged in the United States.  Her current project, “Skilful Listeners”: American Women Composers and Nature explores the ways a number of composers have responded to changing conceptions of the natural environment.  It explores music’s relationship to the American nature-writing tradition, intersections with the emergence of eco-feminism, and how this sounding art form can advocate for change.  It is under contract with Indiana University Press.