Music Instructor Receives Accolades

A Cuesta Performing Arts instructor has been invited to participate in a prestigious out-of-state symposium later this month. In addition, she has accepted a call to be part of a research team at the largest academic music library in the world.

• Music instructor Jennifer Martin is on her way to the University of Texas at Austin, where she was invited by the College Band Directors National Association to be part of a discussion on “Think Tank for a New Era.” Considered the most scholarly of the organizations that wind band conductors belong to, CBDNA has paid all of Martin’s expenses – in addition to being personally selected by its president as the sole community college representative. (Other invitees are from Baylor University, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas.) The event’s purpose, says Martin, is “to consider new paradigms for the wind ensemble, its literature, its pedagogy, and its performance practice.” For more information on the CBDNA, which was first organized nearly 80 years ago, log on to www.cbdna.org.

• Martin will be journeying further east in February, 2006, when she will join a research team at Sibley Library (a part of the Eastman School of Music) in Rochester, New York. As the largest academic music library in the world, Sibley is now home to the scores, other performance material and professional papers of Martin’s mentor, the late Frederick Fennel. (Fennell was an internationally recognized conductor. He recorded many of the standards of the wind band repertoire and remains one of America’s most-recorded conductors.) As part of the team, Martin’s job will be to sort through 60 large boxes of material; make an annotated listing of the containers’ contents for the benefit of scholars in the field, and also have the opportunity to photocopy any of papers. “Dr. Fennell was the most important person in our profession from the l950s until his death,” says Martin. “Having said that, it’s an honor to be able to see all of this material, and have the ability to ‘bring some of it home’ to Cuesta.”