"Reibo,” a large orchestral work by Hilary Tann, the John Howard Payne Professor of Music, will be premiered May 15 by the Community Women's Orchestra in Oakland, Calif., conducted by Kathleen McGuire. The piece was commissioned for the orchestra’s 25th anniversary concert, which features four female composers and four female conductors. Tann's involvement with the women-in-music movement dates to the early 1980s, when she was editor of the Newsletter of the International League of Women Composers, a quarterly journal printed by Joyce Chabot at the Union College Printing Shop for many years. In the past 25 years, the 16-page newsletter has grown into the 60-page Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, and the women-in-music movement has made significant inroads into mainstream concert-making. In writing "Reibo," Tann reconnected with fellow campaigners to celebrate the presence of women performers, composers and conductors on the concert stage. The Oakland concert will be recorded for CD and includes works by Gwyneth Walker, Dame Ethel Smyth and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.
Andrew Rapoff, associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of bioengineering, assisted by anthropologists Scott McGraw of Ohio State University and David Daegling of the University of Florida, recently presented research titled "Torsion and Bending Resistance Provided by the Mesial Groove of Maxillary Canines in Cercopithecoid Monkeys" at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Albuquerque, N.M. Rapoff presented evidence that a relatively large groove that extends the length of the canine tooth of the upper jaw functions to alleviate the additional stress from the tooth twisting when it is simultaneously subjected to bending loads that arise during observed feeding and mating behaviors. This work was supported by NSF grants to Rapoff and his colleagues.
Kristin Fox, associate professor of chemistry, recently was featured on a WRBG (Ch. 6) report on the viability of using hair to help control the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Fox conducted an experiment in her lab showing how the process would work. Click here to see the video clip.