Two professors from Florida State University’s College of Music have won 2005-2006 Guggenheim Memorial Fellowships that will enable them to pursue research and complete special projects in their respective fields.
FSU holds a prominent place in this year’s distinguished Guggenheim contingent. Out of 186 new U.S. and Canadian Fellows, FSU ethnomusicologist Dale A. Olsen and electroacoustic composer Mark Wingate together comprise one-third of the recipients who were selected from among musicians at universities.
“The Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship is one of the most prestigious awards an individual can receive, and to have two music faculty members from the same university receive a Guggenheim in the same year is almost unheard of,” said College of Music Dean Jon R. Piersol.
Each year the competitive fellowships are awarded to advanced professionals in the United States, Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean to promote work in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and creative arts.
As FSU’s Distinguished Research Professor of Ethnomusicology and director of the Center for Music of the Americas, Olsen will use his fellowship for research in Vietnam and the completion of a book tentatively titled “Farewell to the Past! Popular and Pop/Rock Music, Memory Politics and Willed Amnesia in Vietnam.” As former director of FSU’s Vietnam International Summer Program, Olsen spent the summers of 2002 and 2004 in Vietnam. The Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship will enable him to spend summer 2005 and spring 2006 in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi.
Olsen earned his doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1973. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Santiago, Chile, he performed as principal flutist in the Philharmonic Orchestra of Chile in the late 1960s, and has conducted fieldwork throughout South America, Asia, Polynesia and elsewhere around the world. He has received funding for research and performance from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, Japan Foundation and FSU, and has authored more than 100 publications, including his most recent book, “The Chrysanthemum and the Song: Music, Memory, and Identity in the South American Japanese Diaspora,” published in December 2004. For more information about Olsen, see http://online.fsu.edu/webstars/stars/olsen.html.
Wingate’s Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship will enable him to write a new album-length collection of musical compositions, to be conceived in a digital recording studio specifically for multi-channel “surround sound.” His completed work will be recorded on DVD-Audio, a format that features multi-channel playback through multiple speakers.
An assistant professor of composition with a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin, Wingate also directs the FSU College of Music’s program in electroacoustic music, a combination of natural and digitally modified sounds. Prior to joining the FSU faculty, he co-founded and directed the Electronic Arts Studio at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey.
Wingate composed electronic music at the EMS studio in Stockholm as a Fulbright Scholar to Sweden in 1994, and received a travel grant to Caracas, Venezuela, from the National Endowment for the Arts, where he wrote theater music and was awarded an NEA Composer Fellowship in 1997. In 1999, he received the Prix de Rome in Music Composition from the American Academy in Rome. Wingate’s electroacoustic works have received worldwide acclaim and garnered top honors from international juried competitions.
The FSU College of Music is consistently ranked as one of the nation’s top five music programs among public universities. It was one of the first to offer the doctoral degree in music performance, and has produced such outstanding musicians as Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, the first woman composer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music, and Charles Rex, the former associate concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic.