Albin J. Zak III
Department Chair
Associate Professor

Albin Zak joins the University at Albany Music Department as its incoming Chair in the fall 2004 semester after seven years on the faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His scholarly interests include jazz, rock, and concert music of the twentieth century. He studied at the New England Conservatory, where he received a Bachelor of Music in Contemporary Improvisation and a Master's in Music in Composition. He earned the Ph.D. in Musicology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His publications include The Velvet Underground Companion (Schirmer Books) and Cutting Tracks, Making Records: The Poetics of Rock (University of California Press). Professor Zak is also a recording engineer, record producer, songwriter, singer, and guitarist. His records include In the Hurricane, Across the Brazos, By the Side of the Road, and An Average Day.

David M. Janower
Professor
Director of Choral Studies

David Griggs-Janower has been a faculty member since 1981. He holds the Master of Music and Doctor of Music degrees in Conducting from the Indiana University School of Music, where he studied with Dr. Julius Herford, Fiora Contino, and Margaret Hillis. He did undergraduate and masters work in music theory and music history at Cornell University.

In August 2003, he was named Outstanding Conductor of the Year by the New York State American Choral Directors Association. He also received two awards in the spring of 2002: The University at Albany established a new faculty award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity, and he was the first recipient. Several weeks later he was given the award of the same title from the State University of New York, chosen from among the faculty of all 64 campuses. Griggs-Janower was honored in 1999 with the Albany-Schenectady League of Arts Award for his outstanding contribution to the Capital Region community through the creation, presentation, and support of the arts.

Active in the professional organizations in his field, Griggs-Janower has served major roles in the American Choral Directors Association, on both national and state levels. He is a frequent contributor to The Choral Journal, writing on a diverse group of composers, including Bach, Bruckner, Mendelssohn, and American composers William Grant Still and George F. Bristow. Griggs-Janower has appeared as conductor or clinician at seven ACDA conventions and two NYSSMA (New York State School Music Association) summer conferences. With Albany Pro Musica, of which Griggs-Janower is Founding Conductor and Music Director, and with the University Chamber Singers, he has produced nine CDs and has led six concert tours to Europe. He has also served as Music Director of the Berkshire Bach Society, as the first conductor as well as a frequent guest conductor of the St. Cecilia Orchestra, and as guest conductor and director of choirs throughout the region. He has been on the faculties of Williams College, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Skidmore College, and on the staff of the Aspen Music Festival Choral Institute and Oregon Bach Festival.

Max Lifchitz
Professor

Max Lifchitz is active as a composer, performer, arts administrator, and educator. A graduate of The Juilliard School and Harvard University, he was invited to join the University at Albany faculty in 1986. Previously, he held teaching appointments at the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University. In addition to teaching a variety of music courses and general education offerings, Lifchitz has served as Chair of both the University's Music Department and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Department, where he holds a joint appointment. In the spring of 2005, he was honored with an Excellence in Research Award.

His creative endeavors have been supported by grants and fellowships from the ASCAP Foundation; the Ford Foundation; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; Meet the Composer, Inc.; The University of Michigan Society of Fellows; the CAPS Program of New York State; and the National Endowment for the Arts. As a pianist, Lifchitz was awarded the first prize in the 1976 Gaudeamus Competition for Performers of Contemporary Music held in Holland. His concert appearances throughout Latin America have been underwritten by the Fund for US Artists at International Festivals.

Lifchitz is the founder and artistic director of North/South Consonance, Inc., a non-profit 501(c)3 organization based in New York City devoted to the promotion and performance of music by composers from the Americas. Active since 1980, the North/South Consonance Ensemble has received grants from, among others, the Aaron Copland Fund, the Yvar Mikhashoff Fund for New Music, the Cary Trust, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. It has also received contributions from several corporations and numerous individual donors. North/South Consonance, Inc. sponsors an annual concert series in New York City featuring new chamber music from the Americas and has issued thirty-five compact discs on the North/South Recordings label.

Lifchitz is represented as composer, pianist, and conductor on several CD and LP albums issued by the Classic Masters, CRI, Finnadar, New World, North/South, Opus One, Philips, RCA Victor, and Vienna Modern Masters labels.

Reed J. Hoyt
Associate Professor

Reed Hoyt studied composition, theory, and piano with Brazilian composer Burle Marx and composition with Richard Hoffman, George Rochberg, and Richard Wernick. After graduating from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, he received the Ph.D. in Theory and Composition from the University of Pennsylvania, where his advisor was Eugene Narmour. He studied viola with Leonard Mogill and William Berman and conducting with Richard Wernick. He previously coordinated the theory programs at Olivet College and Tulane University, where he also served as the conductor of the orchestra and later as Acting Chair. His articles have been published in such journals as The Musical Quarterly, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, In Theory Only, and Indiana Theory Review. He is completing a book on Beethoven's symphonies.

Robert J. Gluck
Associate Professor
Director of Electronic Music Studio

Nancy Newman
Assistant Professor

Musicologist and multi-instrumentalist Nancy Newman joined our faculty in the fall 2005 semester after teaching appointments at Tufts and Wesleyan. Dr. Newman specializes in European and American musical practices since 1800 and has taught a diverse array of courses, including popular, world, and African­American musical traditions, art music since 1945, and the nineteenth-century public concert. Her primary focus is on nineteenth­century German immigrant musicians, and she has published articles on this topic in the Yearbook of German American Studies (1999) and the Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter (2003). Additional publications are forthcoming in Music in the USA: An Uncommon Reader, ed. Judith Tick (Oxford University Press) and the 2004 conference proceedings of the Music in Gotham project (CUNY Graduate Center). Dr. Newman has received fellowships and awards for her research from the American Antiquarian Society, the Music Library Association, American Musicological Society­New England, and the John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University. Her dissertation, "Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society and Transatlantic Musical Culture of the Mid­Nineteenth Century" is being revised for the University of Illinois Press series, Music in America.

Dr. Newman's other areas of interest include film music and gender studies, and she has given conference papers on the composer­performer Clara Wieck Schumann as well as Bjork's contribution to Dancer in the Dark. An article on the 1950s musical, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, is slated for the anthology, Lowering the Boom: New Essays on the History, Theory and Practice of Film Sound. Her educational background includes degrees from the University of Chicago and Brown University, where she was a student of Rose Subotnik, a leading expert on the critical theorist Theodor Adorno. An active performer of electro­acoustic music for piano and other keyboards, Dr. Newman has been a member of several West African drumming and Indonesian gamelan ensembles. In fall 2005, she participated in the Extensible Toy Piano Festival.

Duncan J. Cumming
Assistant Professor

Duncan Cumming has performed concertos, recitals, and chamber music concerts in cities including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C., London, and Prague. He has played at the Kennedy Center, the Maine Center for the Performing Arts, Merkin Hall, Carnegie Hall, and the Wallenstein Palace. He has been a frequent guest on Maine Public Radio's Live at 11 program.

A native of Maine, Cumming graduated Phi Beta Kappa with highest honors from Bates College in 1993, where he studied with Frank Glazer. In 1994, he received a full scholarship from the European Mozart Foundation and participated in intense chamber music study and performance at the European Mozart Academy in Prague, Czech Republic, where his coaches included Peter Frankl, Steven Isserlis, and Phillipe Hirschhorn. From New England Conservatory, where he studied with Patricia Zander, he received his Master of Music degree in 1996. In May of 2003, he graduated with the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Boston University, where his principal teacher was Maria Clodes Jaguaribe.

Cumming was a member of the faculty at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, as a performer and teacher from 1994-2006. In 2002, he joined the faculty of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, where he continues to teach and perform as Assistant Director of the Young Artists Piano Program. He joins the faculty of the University at Albany in fall 2006. He frequently collaborates in double concerto, two-piano, and four-hand repertoire with Frank Glazer; in 1997, they performed all the solo works of Brahms, to great acclaim, in a series of concerts commemorating the centenary of the composer’s death. He has given master classes in his native New England as well as in the Midwest. Known for his innovative and carefully constructed programs, Cumming often presents informal commentary on the music to the audience. He is committed to contemporary music and has given many premier performances and made first recordings especially of chamber music. He performs frequently with his wife Hilary, violinist and head of applied music at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. They have two daughters, Lucy Rose and Mairi Skye.

Victoria von Arx
Assistant Professor

Victoria von Arx has served on the faculties of Syracuse University, the Metropolitan School for the Arts in Syracuse, the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York City, and the Adamant Music School in Vermont. Just prior to her arrival in the Albany area, she lived in Brighton, Michigan and served on the faculties of the Flint School of Performing Arts and the University of Michigan-Flint. She was also assistant Editor at MUSA (Music in the United States of America), a project of the American Musicological Society in cooperation with the Society for American Music, A-R Editions, and the University of Michigan, and dedicated to the publication of American music. von Arx received the B. Mus. Ed. from Viterbo College (LaCrosse, WI), a M. Mus. in Performance from Syracuse University, and M. Phil. Musicology from City University of New York. Her major teachers have included Frederick Marvin, Oxana Yablonskaya, Sascha Gorodnitzki, German Diez, and Menahem Pressler.

Don Byron
Visiting Associate Professor

Click links for bios.

Richard Albagli is the Director of the University Percussion Ensemble.

Ellen J. Burns is our Music Librarian. When not shelving books or cataloging CDs and scores, Dr. Burns is actively engaged in research and teaching.

Kevin Champagne is the Director of the University-Community Symphonic Band and the UAlbany Pep Band.

David Hosley is the Director of the University Jazz Ensemble.

Mezzo-soprano Frances Pallozzi Wittmann is our vocal instructor.

Brett Wery is the Director of the University-Community Symphony Orchestra.

Private instruction is offered by the following faculty:

Richard Albagli, percussion
Joel Brown, classical guitar
Don Byron, woodwinds
Hilary Cumming, violin
John Fragomeni, jazz guitar
David Hosley, brass
Frances Pallozzi Wittmann, voice
Nathaniel Parke, cello
Norman Thibodeau, flute

Nicholas Conway was born and raised in Albany, NY. He has been teaching Hip Hop Music and Culture, a course he and a colleague devised, since the fall of 2003 at both Trinity College and Yale University. He currently DJs at Noche Lounge in Albany and writes hip hop reviews for undergroundhiphop.com.

Musicologist Roberta Hall Slade teaches our Black American Music course.

Holland Hopson teaches our Music Video course.

Pianist Nathaniel J. Phipps teaches Jazz: America's Music.

Charles Vatalaro teaches courses in music technology and industry.

Piano accompanist Gordon Hibberd, a native of Ohio, received an undergraduate degree from the Eastman School of Music, going on to post-graduate study in New York City at the Manhattan School of Music.

Kent Shultz is our piano tuner.

Bernadette A. Socha is our Department Secretary. Prior to her appointment to the Music Department, Ms. Socha worked for two years in the Bursar's Office at the University. She earned a B.A. in Music Theory from the University in 2003 and an A.A.S. in Human Services from Schenectady County Community College in 1992. Ms. Socha is also our WEBMASTER.