The College of Fine Arts and Department of Music are excited to announce that Dr. David Edmonds will be joining our faculty this fall as the new Director of Choral Studies. Dr. Edmonds joins UNM after serving as Director of Choral Activities at the University of Montana since 2012. Under his direction the UM Chamber Chorale was invited to perform for the 2015 NAfME NW and 2016 NW ACDA Conferences—both first-time invitations for the choir.
As an active member of the American Choral Directors Association, he has held multiple leadership roles through the organization, including Montana R&R Chair for Women’s Choirs and NWACDA R&R Chair for Student Activities. In 2018, he was appointed as the ACDA National R&R Chair for Student Activities. Before his work at the University of Montana, Dr. Edmonds obtained advanced degrees in conducting from the University of North Texas and Westminster Choir College and taught high school choral music for six years in Iowa and Texas.
His original choral works and arrangements have been commissioned and recorded by schools and arts organizations in the United States and Canada and are available through Alliance Music Publications, Inc., Colla Voce Music, and Morningstar Music Publishing.
Dr. José Luis Hurtado awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
Composer and pianist José Luis Hurtado, an associate professor in The University of New Mexico’s Department of Music in the College of Fine Arts, is one of the 2020 winners of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
You Can’t Tell It Like I Can: Black Women, Music, and the Struggle for Social Justice in America
This lecture/performance explores how black women have used music as a method of shaping the public rhetoric and sentiment surrounding the black civil rights struggle in America. Through a historical framework that moves through the height of the abolitionist movement, the Popular front during the 1930s and 1940s, the frontlines of the direct action campaigns of the 1960s, and the proliferation of the Black Power movement in the 1970s.
An Americanish Songbook: Linda Ronstadt’s “other” Country
This talk will consider performances and recordings by singer Linda Ronstadt to propose what I refer to as her Americanish musical songbook. The suffix “ish” here intends to accentuate the “somewhat” or “to some extent” of “American” that Ronstadt—Tucson born and raised—lived and sonically imagined through her extraordinary musical career.