Brendan McConville, associate professor of music theory, was selected as a Fulbright Scholar for the academic year 2015–2016. He received one of only two Teaching/Research or Teaching awards to Italy from all disciplines. As part of the Fulbright award his research and teaching activities will take place in Italy during the spring and summer in 2016. A goal of this award will be compose a new work for voice, piano, and multimedia. He will also conduct research on the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio and capture sounds from the Italian countryside in locations where D’Annunzio penned his famous poem, “La Pioggia nel Pineto” (The Rain in the Pine Forest). The recorded sounds will then be integrated into the fabric of a new multi-movement setting of “La Pioggia.” He will also be teaching a seminar called “Recent American Compositional Trends and Analysis” at the Conservatorio Luisa D’Annunzio in Pescara, Italy.
McConville recently published “The Kindergarten Approach to Arranging Music: Using Technology to Stimulate Creativity” in the College Music Symposium: Instructional Technologies and Methodologies. The Symposium is the premier journal of the College Music Society, and the article proposes the use of Mitchel Resnick’s (MIT Media Lab) “creative thinking spiral” and cloud computing in teaching music arranging and orchestration. As a presenter, he was recently invited to present his research in technology and music instruction at two national conferences: the Association for Technology in Music Instruction and the College Music Society National Conference in St. Louis and the National Conference of Society for Music Theory/American Musicological Society in Milwaukee.