Faculty News & Notes

Dr. Shannan Baker, postdoctoral fellow in Church Music and Digital Humanities, has been awarded the Vital Worship Teacher-Scholar grant from the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. The Calvin Institute for Christian Worship's Vital Worship grant program has helped enrich the worship of various communities for many years and is currently in its fifth year of awarding grants specifically to teacher-scholars who connect worship with other disciplines. With this grant, Dr. Baker will create a Contemporary Worship training program that will begin in January 2023 that is designed for Church Music students and other students interested in band-led worship. The workshops will address topics including music arrangement, theology, and technology of contemporary worship. In addition to the training workshops, multiple outside speakers will provide important insights based on their experience working with popular contemporary worship artists and local churches. This grant project works two-fold through training students and providing preliminary research for a book proposal. The final product of this grant project is a proposal for a textbook on contemporary worship. The grant is awarded in the sum of $20,000, which has been matched by an equipment proposal that was partially funded by a donor and approved by the Center for Christian Music Studies. With both proposals, this project will provide $42,000 in programming and equipment. Additionally, Dr. Baker is a member of a collaborative project on contemporary worship and the music industry that also recently received a grant in the amount of $20,000.

Dr. Kent Eshelman, professor of euphonium and tuba, appeared as the invited guest artist at the 37th annual Leonard Falcone International Euphonium and Tuba Festival hosted at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp in Michigan in August. He performed a solo recital and a concerto with band, presented a masterclass, and served as one of the competition adjudicators.

Dr. Eric Lai, professor of music theory, spent two months in the summer of 2022 conducting research on the music of Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-chung at his archive housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. The Sacher Foundation is a premier international research center for the music of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, with estates and collections from leading composers including Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, Elliott Carter, Witold Lutos'?awski, and Steve Reich. The trip was supported by funds from a Paul Sacher Foundation grant and Baylor's ONE-URC Award.

Dr. Lesley McAllister, professor of piano, will present two sessions at the Music Teachers National Association National Conference in March 2023 in Reno, NV. Her first presentation, titled, "Mindful Movement for the Well Musician: Prepare, Release, Prevent, and Optimize," will be part of the Wellness track of Pedagogy Saturday. Her second workshop, "Sing, Move, Breathe and Play: The Benefits of Mindful Movement for the Beginning Musician" will be part of the general conference.

Dr. Kimberly Monzón, assistant professor of voice, along with her research partners, presented "Bridging the Gap: Cross-disciplinary Conversations to Benefit the Singer" at the National Association of Teachers of Singing Texoma Regional Conference at West Texas A&M in Canyon, TX. This group will also be presenting at TMEA in February.

Alex Parker, director of jazz ensembles of The Wayne Fisher Jazz Program at Baylor University, will conduct the Texas Community College Band Directors Association All-State Jazz Ensemble at TMEA in February.

Patricia Shih, assistant professor of violin, and Dean Mortenson recently accepted an acoustically valuable reproduction of an old Italian violin from Dr. Joseph Nagyvary, a retired professor of biochemistry and biophysics at Texas A&M University. Nagyvary plans to donate a set of string quartet instruments to the School of Music because he wishes and hopes to see these instruments in the hands of Baylor students for many generations to come. "Over the past 40 years, I have had the opportunity to enjoy many outstanding performances at Baylor's School of Music, which I hold in high regard," said Nagyvary. The violin's appraised value is $15,000.