News from the AMRC

The Susan L. Porter Memorial Fellowship is an award that provides scholarship support for a student doing exceptional research that supports the mission of CU Boulder's American Music Research Center (AMRC). The 2023-24 recipient of this award is O’Neil Jones, a DMA student in choral conducting and literature. Originally from...

For most music students in the 21st century, the idea of silent films seems strangely far-away. One new CU Boulder class seeks to change that. The class, a DMA seminar titled Scoring Silent Film, explores the history of silent films while the students also score the films themselves. Professor of...

The AMRC invites CU Boulder student musicians, both undergraduate and graduate, to apply for the new bi-annual Alex Craig and Christina Lynn-Craig Living Music Award. This award celebrates the works of late composer Alex Craig, and is set to be granted for the first time this spring.

Two CU Boulder PhD students work on the Pueblo "Soundscapes of the People" project alongside AMRC Director Dr. Susan Thomas, Dr. Austin Okigbo and Dr. Xóchitl Chávez from the University of California, Riverside. Both of these students are studying ethnomusicology and have been working on the project since summer 2021.

The AMRC collections are housed in Rare and Distinctive Collections in Norlin Library. Two graduate students, Johnette Martin and Jessica Quah, work in these collections, helping archivist Jessie de la Cruz organize and inventory them. As of now, the AMRC has 297 collections in the library.

The American Music Research Center (AMRC) George Lynn Memorial Award celebrates the legacy of former College of Music choral conductor George Lynn, allowing CU students to dive into Lynn’s compositional work and pull out pieces that really speak to them. Nathan George, a sophomore music education major, was inspired by...

The career of Kedrick Armstrong—graduate orchestral conducting student and AMRC Porter Fellow—is quickly gaining momentum, including conducting the CU Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Irene Britton Smith’s “Sinfonietta.” Learn more and, in this brief video , meet Armstrong and hear him share his discovery of Smith's work.

By Laurie J. Sampsel Did you know that Colorado has not one, but two state songs? “Where the Columbines Grow” became the first in 1915, while “Rocky Mountain High” was named the second in 2007. Both have been criticized—primarily due to their lyrics—but each has strengths that deserve a deeper...

The American Music Research Center (AMRC) at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Music is hosting a lecture, “Yoga as White Public Space,” by ethnomusicologist Dr. Rumya Putcha (University of Georgia) on Wednesday, 2 March 2022 at 5:00 p.m. (details below). Yoga is a mainstay of the global exercise...

By Charles Wofford Between 1900 and 1929, when Sid Grauman ran silent films with live orchestral accompaniment in his Hollywood “movie palaces,” he probably never imagined that the thousands of orchestral scores used by his musicians would be recognized as important Americana in their own right. A century later—with a...