Dear SEAMUS Members,
It is a great honor to serve as the society’s 10th president. Due to effective, progressive leadership, to accumulating institutional wisdom, and to vital engagement from our membership, we are well positioned to meet the future. The recent conference at the University of Oregon, impeccably organized by Jeffrey Stolet, Akiko Hatakeyama, and their team, gave voice to a great variety of musicking practices. Among the peaks of glorious, rarified listening experiences was a concert featuring works by this year’s SEAMUS Award winner, Scott Wyatt: congratulations and deepest thanks, Scott, for your dedication to our community and to Music.
Music from SEAMUS Volume 27, will be released later in the summer. Volume 28, featuring pieces selected at this year’s conference by audience vote, will be released in 2019. FYI, in addition to serving as Immediate Past President, Scott Miller will serve as Director of Recordings. Stay tuned for calls for other album projects, as well as the publication of several issues of the Journal SEAMUS.
Scott (M.) and the board have done a lot of work to advance diversity and inclusion, not least by creating the board-level position of Diversity Officer and recruiting Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner to it. While ensuring continuity, I will put energy into building upon their work. This year we will contact you to collect data, to form a clearer socio-demographic picture of our membership. A newly formed committee will develop actionable ways to better serve our current members as well as to welcome new ones — through (for example) mentorship, recognition, community-building, and financial support.
Ah! The 2019 SEAMUS Conference will take place at Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, March 21-23. Many, many thanks to our gracious future hosts Derek Hurst, Kari Juusela, and Jonathan Holland.
Finally, on a personal note, I would like to thank Scott Miller, the individual members of the board, and a host of SEAMUS folk elder and new, for welcoming me warmly to this role. I’m humbled, and honestly very excited about the mission. Please don’t hesitate to contact me at any time, for any reason, with any idea.
VTY, Ted
Ted Coffey makes acoustic and electronic chamber music, interactive installations, and songs. His work has been presented in concerts and festivals across North America, Europe and Asia, at such venues as Judson Church, The Knitting Factory, Roulette, Symphony Space, and Lincoln Center (NYC), The Lab, New Langton Arts, Zellerbach Hall, and The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Wolf Trap and The Kennedy Center (DC), the Korean National University of the Arts (Seoul), The Carre Theatre (Amsterdam), and ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). His writings on aesthetics and politics in the performing arts have been honored with significant awards from the Josephine De Kármán and Andrew C. Mellon Foundations. Coffey studied composition with Jon Appleton, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Paul Lansky, among others, receiving degrees in music from Dartmouth (AB), Mills College (MFA) and Princeton (MFA, PhD). Recordings of his work are available on the Ellipsis Arts, Everglade, Innova, Audition Records, SEAMUS, crackletimesfavor, and EcoSono labels. Coffey is currently a College Fellow and an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, where he teaches courses in composition, music technologies, music aesthetics, and pop.