Lawrence University News

As Lawrence students finish Term II exams, they’ll soon scatter across the country and the globe for a well-earned spring break. As for senior Joe Connor, juniors Ilan Blanck and Matt Blair and 2015 Lawrence graduate Dan Reifsteck — collectively known as Slipstream — they are hitting the road for their band’s first tour, a five-stop trip around the Midwest.

Slipstream, a quartet that operates in a space somewhere near the convergence of contemporary classical, modern jazz and modern rock, warmed up for its tour with an on-campus performance last week in the Memorial Chapel.

They’ll make their first stop in Oshkosh for a Thursday, March 17 performance followed by stops in Milwaukee (3/18); Des Moines, Iowa (3/21); Lincoln, Neb. (3/23); and St. Paul, Minn. (3/25).

“It’s nice to play anywhere at Lawrence and share our music with all of our friends and professors,” said Reifsteck, “but it’s a whole other thing to take it outside of the school and try to share it with a whole new audience that we haven’t even met before.”

The group, which features Blanck on electric guitar, Connor on saxophone, Blair on piano and Reifsteck on percussion, has been playing together since January 2015. Their genesis was the result of a piece they’ll be playing on tour, “Hout,” a 1991 piece written by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen that is arranged for tenor saxophone, electric guitar, piano and marimba.

“At some point, someone was like, ‘We should play this,’” Blanck said. “It all kind of converged.”

Suddenly the four friends, who had previously played together in various combinations, had a common project. Fast forward 14 months and Slipstream has just released its first EP, “Northland,” with the help of collaborator Jason Koth, a sophomore at Lawrence.

“Northland” features pieces written for the group by Lawrence alumni JP Merz (2014) “for i believed in the existence of…”, Patrick Marschke (2013) “le/af” and Chris Misch-Bloxdorf (2013) “Blinded by Silver Lines,” which the quarter performed at last month’s Convocation.

The band honed those tracks during a two-day open rehearsal stint with Grammy Award-winning ensemble eighth blackbird last month at the Chicago Museum for Contemporary Art — a surreal experience, according to Blanck.

“They really pushed us in a lot of interesting ways, pushed us to kind of go for extremes in the music and encouraged us to push each other,” said Blanck.

The title track, “Northland,” takes its name from the street in Appleton. Slipstream was looking for an improvisational piece to lead into Marschke’s composition; “Northland” came on the first try.

“We probably sat with the tape rolling for a minute straight,” Reifsteck said. “There’s just a minute of silence where none of us was able to figure out how to start. But then eventually Ilan started, then Matt started to join in, then I started to join in and then Joe joined in. Right after we finished recording that take, we all looked up and we were like, ‘Ok, we don’t need to improvise again. That’s the take.’”

That kind of musical chemistry isn’t by coincidence.

“In music school, you’re playing so much music with so many different people and you usually have so little time to put things together,” Blanck said. “I feel grateful that we’ve had time to work on similar music and really get to know it and get to know each other.”

About Lawrence University
Founded in 1847, Lawrence University uniquely integrates a college of liberal arts and sciences with a nationally recognized conservatory of music, both devoted exclusively to undergraduate education. It was selected for inclusion in the book “Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About College” and Fiske’s Guide to Colleges 2016. Engaged learning, the development of multiple interests and community outreach are central to the Lawrence experience. Lawrence draws its 1,500 students from nearly every state and more than 50 countries.

Four members of the Lawrence University faculty have been granted tenure appointments by the college’s Board of Trustees.

Based on recommendations by the faculty Committee on Tenure, Promotion, Reappointment and Equal Employment Opportunity, and President Mark Burstein, tenure was granted to Sara Ceballos, Sonja Downing, Judith Humphries and Stephen Sieck. Each was promoted to rank of associate professor.

“The four persons who have been awarded tenure are outstanding members of our faculty,” said David Burrows, provost and dean of the faculty. “Each has contributed to our programs in distinctive, excellent ways and we are confident they will continue to do so for many years to come. Each is destined to become a leader among the faculty and to provide inspiration to generations of our students.”

Ceballos, a musicologist whose scholarship focuses on 17th- and 18th-century keyboard music, joined the conservatory of music faculty in 2008. She teaches classes as diverse as “The German Lied and National Identity,” “Music and Colonialism in the Age of Exploration” and “Music and Power Under the Sun King.”

She has been the recipient of awards for her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of California, and the Southwest and Northwest chapters of the American Musicological Society.

At Lawrence’s 2015 commencement, Ceballos was honored with the college’s Young Teacher Award in recognition of demonstrated excellence in the classroom and the promise of continued growth.

Ceballos, who plays piano, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Colby College with a bachelor’s degree in music. She also earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. in musicology at UCLA.

Downing joined the conservatory of music faculty in 2008 as a postdoctoral fellow in ethnomusicology and was granted a tenure track appointment in 2011. Her research interests include traditional Balinese music, traditional music pedagogy and the intersection of gender and performance.

She was instrumental in the founding of Lawrence’s gamelan ensemble, Gamelan Cahaya Asri and has performed in the U.S. and in Bali with the American-based Gamelan Sekar Jaya.

Born in Switzerland, Downing earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Swarthmore College, a master of music in flute performance and a Ph.D. in music from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

A member of the Lawrence biology department, Humphries first joined the faculty in 2007 as a visiting assistant professor before being given a tenure-track appointment in 2010. Her scholarship focuses on invertebrate immunology, with a special interest in the immune system of snails and how they regulate their immune responses to parasites and other biological threats.

In addition to the biology department, Humphries contributes to topics in Lawrence’s neuroscience department.

Prior to Lawrence, Humphries taught at the Institute of Biological Sciences at the University of Wales and was a researcher in the pathobiological sciences department at UW-Madison.

A native of Northern Ireland, Humphries earned both a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences and a doctoral degree at Queens University in Belfast.

Sieck, who joined the conservatory of music faculty in 2010, directs Lawrence’s Viking Chorale and co-directs the Concert Choir and Cantala women’s choir, all of which have been invited in the past two years to perform at state or regional choral director association conferences.

His current research interests include inclusive pedagogy and effective teaching strategies for diction and for developing tenor voices. He also has published scholarly articles on Benjamin Britten and Aaron Copland. In 2014, he was recognized with Lawrence’s Young Teacher Award.

Prior to Lawrence, Sieck spent five years as the director of choral/vocal music at Emory & Henry College in Virginia. He serves as the music director at Neenah’s First Presbyterian Church and as President-Elect for the Wisconsin Choral Directors Association.

Sieck earned a bachelor of arts degree in music from the University of Chicago and master’s and doctoral degrees in choral conducting from the University of Illinois.

About Lawrence University
Founded in 1847, Lawrence University uniquely integrates a college of liberal arts and sciences with a nationally recognized conservatory of music, both devoted exclusively to undergraduate education. It was selected for inclusion in the book “Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About College” and Fiske’s Guide to Colleges 2016. Engaged learning, the development of multiple interests and community outreach are central to the Lawrence experience. Lawrence draws its 1,500 students from nearly every state and more than 50 countries.

Any musician will tell you playing music changes the way they think, but how exactly does music affect the perception of the human brain?

John Iversen, cognitive neuroscientist at the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California, San Diego, seeks answers to that question in his studies of rhythm perception and production in music and language, spanning behavioral and neuroscience approaches.

Iversen presents “Rhythms in Music, Language, and the Brain: Using Music to Study Neural Function” Wednesday, Feb. 24 at 7 p.m. in the Wriston Art Center auditorium as the penultimate speaker in Lawrence University’s Liberal Arts in the Century of the Brain series. A question-and-answer session will immediately follow the presentation, which is free and open to the public.

Music perception and production is a key tool for understanding complex brain processes, including those that may underlie language. A common theme running through Iversen’s research is the perception of rhythm, including how a listener’s native language influences that perception, how listeners synchronize with the beat in complex rhythms and the differences in performance when a rhythm is presented aurally versus visually.

He currently directs the SIMPHONY project at UCSD, a longitudinal study of the effect of music training on children’s brain and cognitive development. Other research endeavors include a study of Japanese and English-learning infants, showing that language learning shapes basic rhythm perception. He earned  national attention for a study demonstrating that Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, can synchronize with a musical beat, an ability that was previously thought to be uniquely human.

Iverson earned a  bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard University, graduate degrees in philosophy of science and in speech at Cambridge University and a Ph.D in speech and hearing science from MIT.

The Liberal Arts in the Century of the Brain series incorporates the interdisciplinary areas of neuroscience and cognitive science to create connections with other disciplines at Lawrence.

The closing speaker in the series will be:

• Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chauncey Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the department of philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. April 12. The author of five books and more than 100 published articles, Sinnott-Armstrong is a scholar of moral psychology and brain science, which his presentation will focus on, as well as uses of neuroscience in the legal system.

About Lawrence University
Founded in 1847, Lawrence University uniquely integrates a college of liberal arts and sciences with a nationally recognized conservatory of music, both devoted exclusively to undergraduate education. It was selected for inclusion in the book “Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About College” and Fiske’s Guide to Colleges 2016. Engaged learning, the development of multiple interests and community outreach are central to the Lawrence experience. Lawrence draws its 1,500 students from nearly every state and more than 50 countries.