Executive Committee
Beverley Diamond is the Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology and Director of the MMAP Research Centre at Memorial University. She previously taught at Queen's and York Universities. She has published extensively on aspects of First Nations and Inuit music cultures, on Canadian music historiography, and on music as it relates to sociocultural identity.
Kati Szego is an Associate Professor in the School of Music. Her interest in cultural border-crossing led her to study the colonial history of music and dance education at the Kamehameha Schools, an institution for Native Hawaiians in Honolulu. Since then, her work has focused on Hawai‘i and she continues to combine ethnographic and phenomenological approaches with archival research. Current work on Hawaiian falsetto singing and yodelling is subsumed by her larger interests in hybridity and discourses on vocal production. Kati is also in the process of reconstructing and interpreting an opera libretto by Queen Lili‘uokalani, Hawai‘i's last monarch.
Martin Lovelace is Associate Professor in the Folklore Department. His earlier work dealt with Christmas mumming; personal narrative, especially life history and autobiography; the literature of English rural life and work; and folk healing using charms. He has written on various aspects of Newfoundland folk tradition and is currently most interested in folktale and ballad.
Peter Narváez is a blues musician and folklorist. He received two nominations (MIA, ECMA) in 2003 as "Blues Artist of the Year" for his recent CD, Some Good Blues. His latest anthology, entitled Of Corpse: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture, was published in 2003 by Utah State University Press. He is also the producer of the MMaP CD Folklore of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Christina Smith performs, records, teaches, and researches and publishes on the traditional dance music of Newfoundland and Labrador. She tours internationally as a duo with singer/guitarist Jean Hewson, and with Frank Maher and the Mahers Bahers. Both groups have released award-winning CDs on the Canadian Folk label Borealis. Smith actively passes the tradition along by working with young musicians in the Suzuki program and the Shallaway youth choir, in school fiddle programs around the province, and at music camps and workshops. She is currently researching Newfoundland dance music and working on a Newfoundland traditional fiddle method.
Andrea Rose is a violinist and professor of music education at Memorial University. She is also an Artistic Director of the biennial Festival 500 Sharing the Voices and Co-Director of The Phenomenon of Singing International Symposia. She is the recipient of several awards for excellence in university teaching including the 3M National Teaching Fellowship and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (MUN). Her current research interests focus on arts and cultural education, critical/creative pedagogy in teacher education, online-based teaching and learning in music, and dialogue-based education and leadership. She is well known nationally and internationally as a clinician, adjudicator and conference presenter.
Anita Best is well known as a singer, broadcaster, teacher, and researcher. Originally from the Placentia Bay area, she has performed on many albums, perhaps the best-known of which are her solo album, Crosshanded, and The Color of Amber (with Pamela Morgan). She was host and writer of the CBC's "Ball of Yarns" in 1992 and creator of Newfoundland Voices, a summer concert series.
Neil Rosenberg is a musician and author of Bluegrass, A History (1985/2005), as well as Transforming Tradition (1993). MUNFLA's first archivist and its director from 1976 to 1990, he has also published extensively on aspects of Newfoundland music and on other Canadian music topics, including Don Messer. He recently co-authored The Music of Bill Monroe (2007) with Charles K. Wolfe.
Tom Gordon A musicologist and pianist, Gordon is most frequently heard as a Lieder accompanist. Gordon's musicological publications include studies on Stravinsky, Gabriel Fauré and the French avant-garde of the early twentieth century. With soprano Jane Leibel, he has recorded the repertoire of nineteenth-century opera diva Georgina Stirling for a forthcoming CD titled Newfoundland is Calling. He is currently studying music manuscripts in the Moravian missions along the Labrador coast.
