I am happy to announce that I have joined Arkansas Tech University’s Music Department as Visiting Lecturer of Music. It is rewarding to contribute to this stellar department where I am working alongside an amazing faculty to teach students how to understand and describe the contexts and creative processes involved in the composition of Western art music throughout its long history. I want to thank everyone who has stood behind me over the years as I set about laying the foundation for a new career in higher education. I have always enjoyed my music theoretical and compositional pursuits, not just for themselves, but with the added purpose of disseminating what I have learned and helping others carry out and articulate their own critical analyses or explore their own musical creativity. After a good many postdoctoral endeavors, I am overjoyed to have begun this leg of the journey.
Music Theorist and Composer Joins Arkansas Tech University's Faculty as Visiting Lecturer of Music
ZANE GILLESPIE
After six years as Minister of Music at Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church (UMC) in Holly Springs, MS, I was recently called to continue to work to address public engagement in music participation as Director of Music Ministries at First UMC in Water Valley, MS. I am a Composer, Theorist, and member of both The College Music Society as well as The Poe Studies Association (PSA). I am also an active pianist and vocalist, specializing primarily in church music. My paper entitled ““Mesmeric Revelation”: Art as Hypnosis” has been published by the international, peer-reviewed journal Humanities. In addition, another paper of mine entitled “A Model of Triadic Post-Tonality for a Neoconservative Postmodern String Quartet by Sky Macklay” has been submitted to the peer-reviewed Music Theory journal Perspectives of New Music. At the end of February 2015, I served as Chair for the session entitled “Aesthetics and Philosophy” at The Fourth International PSA Conference in New York City. On June 21, 2014, my Quartet for Alto Saxophone and Strings, a commission from concert saxophonist Walter Hoehn, was performed as part of Concert V of the Eighth Annual Belvedere Chamber Music Festival held at Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Memphis, TN. Characteristically neo-romantic (in the original sense of the word), my music earned me the Nancy Van de Vate Award for Composition three times from the University of Mississippi Department of Music. A native of Pontotoc, MS, I hold degrees from the University of Mississippi (BM; MM), and the University of Memphis (DMA) where I was the 2011 recipient of the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music's Smit Composition Award. I live in Memphis, TN.