HWS News
26 February 2024 • Arts HWS Hosts Annual Women in Music Conference
During Women’s History Month in March, scholars and performers will gather at HWS for a day of presentations on musical theory, history and criticism, with a keynote address and concert.
On Saturday, March 9, HWS will host the interdisciplinary Women in Music Conference to coincide with Women’s History Month celebrations on campus. Sponsored by the Central New York Humanities Corridor in collaboration with the Eastman School of Music and the Rochester Institute of Technology, the conference includes presentations on a range of topics from vocality and popular song to composition, pedagogy and performance, to haunting and hauntology.
Roger Moseley, author and music professor at Cornell University, will deliver the keynote address on the ways Japanese women have shaped the iconic music of digital game culture.
Pianist Kristin Ditlow, vocal coaching professor at the University of New Mexico and music director of the University of New Mexico Opera Theatre, will perform “Femmages: Five Centuries of Keyboard Music by Women Composers.”
Registration begins at 8 a.m. in the Gearan Center for the Performing Arts. Moseley’s talk will begin at 4:30 p.m. in the Gearan Center, Room 102. Ditlow’s concert will begin at 7:30 p.m., also in the Gearan Center, Room 102. The keynote & concert are open to the public and do not require registration to attend.
Moseley’s talk, “Japanese Women at Work and Play: Sonic (Re)creations from the Arcade to the PlayStation, 1982-1998,” reflects on the iconic music of digital game culture that emerged from Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, much of which was composed and programmed by women. Musicians such as Yuriko Keino, Kinuyo Yamashita, Satoe Terashima and Yuko Shimomura “transformed their field while working within tight technological and social constraints to make music that was amenable to play,” as Moseley explains in his abstract. “My talk will sketch out the conditions under which they composed for games such as Dig Dug, Xevious, Castlevania, Street Fighter II and Parasite Eve, drawing attention to the shifting aesthetic and technical standards that their music set and redefined.”
Moseley is Associate Professor of Music at Cornell University. His recent research focuses on intersections between keyboard music, digital games and the diverse ways both can be played. In 2017, his first book, Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo, received the American Musicological Society’s Otto Kinkeldey Award, which recognizes “a musicological book of exceptional merit by a scholar beyond the early stages of his or her career.” Moseley has published essays on topics including the music of Brahms, Chopin, Mozart, 18th-century keyboard improvisation, Guitar Hero and media archaeology. He is also active as a collaborative pianist on modern and historical instruments. Moseley is currently working on his second book, Romantic Artifacts: The Technological Disclosure of Nineteenth-Century Music, which subjects the songs of Schubert, the piano music of Chopin, and the orchestral music of Brahms to media-theoretical and music-analytical scrutiny.
Ditlow is Associate Professor of Vocal Coaching at the University of New Mexico and Music Director of the University of New Mexico Opera Theatre. As a pianist, conductor and vocal coach, she is enjoying a performance and teaching career throughout the U.S. and abroad. She has appeared in concert throughout North America, mainland China, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic. Her solo debut piano CD, Passages, has received national accolades and her performances have been hailed as “fiery, with great thrusts of energy” (Bethlehem Morning Call), with a “burnished color and sense of passion” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
Ditlow’s foundational training has been as a classical pianist, though she has branched out into conducting, artist teaching, arranging, improvising and composing. Her love of musical collaborations dovetails into her solo performances, and her virtuoso technique and musicianship inform her presence at the keyboard and on the podium. Ditlow holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Westminster Choir College and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Eastman School of Music, with further training at the Tanglewood Music Center, San Francisco Opera Center (Merola) and the Franz Schubert Institut.
