Denise Von Glahn Interview
Denise Von Glahn is the Curtis Mayes Orpheus Professor and Area Coordinator of Musicology, College of Music, Florida State University. Her scholarly interests include music and place, music and institutions, ecomusicology, gender studies, biography, and the works of Charles Ives. Her latest book is Circle of Winners: How the Guggenheim Foundation Composition Awards Shaped American Music Culture.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
The path to my current career is not unusual, except perhaps for its late start. I took twelve years between the completion of my master’s degree and the start of my doctoral degree to raise my sons, did lots of adjunct teaching at a local university, and performed as a collaborative chamber musician before deciding I needed to become the scholar I thought I could be. When I returned for my doctorate, I knew what I wanted to study: the spatial qualities of Charles Ives’s music that I had first experienced singing in a New York State School Music Association Festival Chorus when Gregg Smith chose Ives’s Psalm 67 for us to sing. It was an epiphanic moment for me; it changed my life. I wrote a dissertation titled “Reconciliations: Time, Space, and the American Place in the Music of Charles Ives” and have never stopped listening to and thinking about his soul-stirring music. Over the years I’ve given many papers and written book chapters and articles on his music and five decades later I am still discovering what he has to teach.
Can you please briefly describe the book?