Berwick Hall
University of Oregon
All events (with the exception of the James Gilchrist and Jocelyn Freeman recital on Saturday evening at 7:30pm) are free and open to the public.
Thursday, January 7
Song recital featuring University of Oregon and University of Washington students (6:00pm)
Friday, January 8
Registration (9:00–9:30am)
Welcome and opening remarks (9:30–9:45am)
Beyond Voice and Piano (10:00–11:30am)
Nathan Juarez (University of Oregon)
Beyond the Piano: Expanding Contemporary Art Song Through Voice and Percussion
Drew Swatosh (Portland, Oregon)
Dead Fires Anthology for Solo Unaccompanied/Self-Accompanied Voice
Dana Zenobi (Butler University), Megan Boutin (East Texas A&M University), and Matthew Herman (Western Kentucky University)
Contrasting Colors: Newly Composed Song Cycles for Soprano and Trombone
Lunch break (11:30am–1:30pm)
Words and Music: Prosody, Intelligibility, and Close Reading (1:30–3:00pm)
Carlo Caballero (University of Colorado Boulder)
Simultaneity, Deformation, and Play: Turnover’s Artful Prosody
Caitlin Glastonbury (Baltimore, Maryland)
One Unlit Shell: The Text of Katherine Balch’s Estrangement
Christopher Parton (Princeton, University)
Teaching the “Close Reading” of Song in the Age of AI
Coffee break (3:00–3:30pm)
Masterclass, James Gilchrist (3:30–5:30pm)
James Gilchrist began his professional life as a doctor before turning to a full-time music career in 1996. He has since established a reputation as one of Britain’s leading tenors, performing worldwide with distinguished conductors including Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Roger Norrington, Bernard Labadie, Harry Christophers, Harry Bicket, Masaaki Suzuki and Richard Hickox.
A master of English music, Gilchrist has performed Britten’s Church Parables in St. Petersburg, London and at the Aldeburgh Festival, Nocturne with Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, War Requiem with the San Francisco Symphony and the National Youth Orchestra of Germany. He has appeared as Rev. Adams in Britten’s Peter Grimes, most recently in Deborah Warner’s acclaimed production at the Opéra de Paris, Teatro Real, Opera di Roma and Covent Garden. Equally at home in Baroque repertoire, the Bach passions feature prominently in his schedule.
As an established recitalist, Gilchrist continues to expand his work, especially through his long-time collaboration with pianist Anna Tilbrook. Their latest recording, Go, Lovely Rose: Songs of Roger Quilter, was released in 2024. Gilchrist’s impressive discography also includes Britten’s Albert Herring (title role) and Winter Words, Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel and On Wenlock Edge and critically acclaimed recordings of Schubert’s song cycles.
Dinner break (5:30–7:30pm)
Keynote address, Susan Youens (7:30pm)
Memory and the Old Man: “Um Mitternacht” by Goethe, Zelter, and Britten
Susan Youens is one of the world’s leading scholars of German song, with particular expertise in the music of Franz Schubert and Hugo Wolf. She is the author of eight books, including Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise, Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs, Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles, and Heine and the Lied, as well as more than fifty scholarly articles.
Youens has received four fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, along with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She has lectured widely in the United States and abroad and has taught at institutions and festivals including the Steans Institute at Ravinia, the Oxford Lieder Festival, the Vancouver International Song Institute, and the Britten-Pears Institute at Aldeburgh.
A longtime member of the American Musicological Society, Youens has served in numerous leadership roles and was named an Honorary Member of the Society in 2012. She has also collaborated in lectures, lecture-recitals, and masterclasses with leading song interpreters including Graham Johnson, Roger Vignoles, Malcolm Martineau, and Margo Garrett. She is Professor Emerita of Music at the University of Notre Dame, where she has received the Joyce Award for Outstanding Teaching.
Saturday, January 9
Gender, Sexuality, and Reimagined Voices (9:00–10:30am)
Erin Guiliano ( University of North Carolina School of the Arts)
The Appropriation of the Spinning Wheel in Nineteenth-Century Song
Xiao-han Chu (University of Cincinnati)
Staging the Closet: Genre Topics, Intertextuality, and Queer Narrative in Wu Qing-feng’s “Ms. Pheromone”
James Jarrett (University of Michigan)
Dramatic, Thematic, and Interdiscursive: Three Levels of Semiosis in Songs by Ned Rorem
Coffee break (10:30–11:00am)
Recovering and Reimagining Repertoires (11:00–12:30pm)
Kevin Helppie (Western Oregon University)
Roses in a Silver Bowl and the Emergence of Popular Song in Finland
Grace Ho (University of Arizona)
Symbolism and Sincerity: A New Look at “How Do I Love Thee”
Lisa Neher (Portland, Oregon) and Dianne Davies (Portland, Oregon)
Reimagining Heroines of Myth and Great Literature
Lunch break (12:30—2:00pm)
Interpretation, Agency, and Listening (2:00–3:30pm)
Emily Truckenbrod (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)
Living in the Body: A Multimedia Presentation
Sarah Luebke (Bowling Green State University)
Voices of East and West: Peking Opera and Cross-Cultural Performance Practice in Chen Yi’s Meditation
Echo Lee Davidson (University of Pittsburgh)
Singing in Time: Song, Attention, and Resonant Design in Joe Reilly’s Sensory-Friendly Concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra
Coffee break (3:30–4:00pm)
Song, Nation, and Cultural Identity (4:00–5:30pm)
Pharel Jonathan SIliban (University of Kentucky)
Indonesian Art Song
Camila Osses (University of Central Arkansas), with Kimia Keshavarz Kelley (University of Central Arkansas)
Carmela Mackenna’s Songs
Michael Manganiello (Baltimore, Maryland), with Stephanie Baird (Baltimore, Maryland)
Voice of the Woman, Face of the World: Nationalism, Judaism, and Feminism in the Songs of Helen Medwedeff Greenberg
Catered dinner with conference participants (5:30–7:30pm)
featured recital with James Gilchrist and Jocelyn Freeman (7:30pm)
The award-winning Welsh collaborative pianist Jocelyn Freeman is lauded for her artistry, programming and powers of communication. Artist-in-Residence at the 2025 St. Davids Cathedral Festival, she is an advocate for diversity in a range of artistic endeavours and has curated extensive concert and recording projects to wide critical acclaim.
Her love of the Lied genre led her to establish SongEasel in 2018, a charity for Song in South East London. As its Founder-Director, she has pioneered new approaches to audience development and the wider welfare of the music ecosystem, which have gained international attention. She values her role as a mentor for early-career musicians, devising and delivering a series of collaborative and keynote talks and song masterclasses “Song & Society,” most recently in Salzburg by kind invitation of the Mozarteum University.
In 2023, Jocelyn was endorsed with a prestigious Associateship from the Royal Academy of Music for her contribution to the music industry, and in 2025, was awarded “Most Inspiring Collaborative Pianist & Song Curator” by SME News. She is a skilled communicator on the concert platform and in broadcasts, recordings, and social media, and has featured in several industry and lifestyle publications.
Sunday, January 10
Rethinking the 19th-Century Lied (10:00–11:30am)
Matthew Boyle (Oregon State University) and Paul Sherrill (University of Utah)
Franz Schubert’s “Des Baches Wiegenlied,” Musical Strategies of Comfort, and Virtual Musicking Structures
Cee Adamson (Seattle, Washington)
Other Versions of “Rastlose Liebe” and “Erlkönig”: Hearing Goethe Beyond Schubert
Emily Shyr (Ohio University)
Theories of the Earth, Metaphors of the Body: An Ecocritical Approach to the Sublime in Schubert’s Winterreise
Cascade Song Festival * January 7-10, 2027 