Call for Nominations and Annual Meeting Report

[Chris Segall]

Call for Nominations

The Russian Music Theory Interest Group will elect a new chair in November 2019. The chair will serve for a three-year term—January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2022—and will therefore preside over the 2020, 2021, and 2022 annual meetings. Chair duties include:

• Facilitate planning the annual meeting at SMT
• Chair the annual meeting at SMT
• Attend, or delegate a representative to, the Interest Group Chairs breakfast meeting on the Sunday morning of SMT
• Submit written reports for the spring and fall SMT newsletters
• Provide an annual written report to the SMT Vice President, including an attendance count (with gender breakdown) of the annual meeting
• Oversee management of the website and membership list

If you are interested in standing for election, or if you would like to nominate someone else, please send me a private email at sega...@ucmail.uc.edu by Monday, November 18. I will seek approval from any nominees before placing them on the ballot. Once a ballot has been assembled, the election will be held via email. All members of the interest group are invited to participate.

Note that interest groups do not maintain official membership rosters. Anyone signed up to receive this message is considered a member for the purposes of the election.

Humanities Commons

Blake Ritchie (Rutgers University) has created a new interest group website at Humanities Commons: rmtig.hcommons.org. Registration is free. The website will allow members of our group to upload research, maintain discussion, collaborate on documents (such as bibliographies), and share files (syllabi, lesson plans, translations, etc.). We will officially migrate from Google Groups to Humanities Commons after the election. In the meantime, you are welcome to sign up and join our Humanities Commons group.

A sincere thanks to Blake for developing this site!

Annual Meeting

We held our annual meeting on Saturday, November 9, 2019, at the SMT conference in Columbus, Ohio, with 29 attendees (17 male, 12 female).

Four presenters spoke on research in progress. Sasha Drozzina (Louisiana State University) drew on Valentina Kholopova's expression parameters in an analysis of Sofia Gubaidulina's Sieben Worte. Knar Abrahamyan (Yale University) untangled the "noetic" terminology that informs Yuri Kholopov's identification of dissonant central elements in contemporary music. Ellen Bakulina (University of North Texas) examined resonances between Leo Mazel' and Viktor Zukkerman, on the one hand, with more recent English-language scholarship by Lerdahl and Jackendoff, William Caplin, William Rothstein, and Carl Schachter. Jeff Yunek (Kennesaw State University) investigated Sergey Taneyev's hierarchical unification of local key structures.

Translations and analyses for the four presentations are available at: is.gd/SMTRus2019

Thanks to the four presenters for sharing their work, and to all who contributed to the discussion. My personal feeling is that the format of our meeting perfectly encapsulated the goals of the interest group, that is, to bring together groups of scholars with an interest in Russian music, with knowledge of Russian theory, and with the ability to read Russian. I would advocate for more meetings in this format in the future. Having said that, I also acknowledge that one benefit of our interest group meetings is their flexibility, and it remains relatively easy to vary the meeting format from year to year.

I has been a pleasure serving the group as chair for the past three years. I'll look forward to offering my assistance and participation in the interest group as we move forward, beginning with the transition to a new chair.

Sincerely,

Chris Segall