Stephen Shearon
Stephen Shearon | |
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Professor of Musicology Stephen Shearon is professor of musicology and graduate program director in the School of Music. He teaches courses to both undergraduates and graduate students on the history of Western classical music, the history of American music, and research. He also is involved in curriculum development and development of the Philip C. Howard Music Library . Shearon seeks to understand music as a global phenomenon found in all human cultures at all socio-economic levels and believes that students studying music should have a foundation that helps them understand it in its global and cultural breadth. Within that purview his research interests center on sacred music: in particular, certain Christian sacred-music cultures. Currently he is studying the world of southern gospel convention singing, an amateur musical tradition based primarily in the southern United States. This tradition emphasizes the ability to read music using seven-shape notation, by which people sing, play, and lead newly written gospel songs by amateur songwriters. The tradition is supported by a broad network of churches and singing schools and is served by a handful of publishers in the tradition of James D. Vaughan and Stamps-Baxter. Since 2005 Shearon has presented papers on this subject to two Music of the South Symposia (Oxford, MS), two annual meetings of the Society for American Music , the Tennessee Music Educators Association , the International Country Music Conference , The Society for Ethnomusicology , the American Musicological Society , "'The Train Just Don't Stop Here Anymore': An Interdisciplinary Colloquium on the Soundscapes of Rural and Small-Town America" (Millikin University, Decatur, IL, 3-4 April 2009), and the "Farther Along" Conference , which he helped conceive and organize. Supported by a grant from the MTSU Faculty Research and Creative Activity Committee, he and videographer Dr. Mary Nichols (Department of Electronic Media Communication ) are completing a documentary about this important American musical tradition titled “I’ll Keep On Singing”: The Southern Gospel Convention Tradition. Portions of the documentary will be shown at the 2009 meeting of the Tennessee Folklore Society [link to http://tennesseefolklore.org/index.html] (Cookeville, October 31). The full premiere will take place at the National Gospel Singing Convention (Nashville, Arkansas, 13-14 November 2009). Shearon also is completing a modern edition of the Reminiscences of Aldine S. Kieffer, an important early figure in the tradition. In prior years Shearon's research interests included Italian and German vocal music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Western art music of the twentieth century, and American music of all types. He presented papers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy, and his publications included articles on both Neapolitan sacred music of the early eighteenth century and the southern American shape-note tradition. In 1998, he was one of fifteen scholars selected to participate in the NEH Summer Seminar on "Palace Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Rome" at the American Academy in Rome, and in 1997 served as president of the South-Central Chapter of the American Musicological Society, hosting their annual meeting at MTSU. Before coming to MTSU, Shearon was a visiting assistant professor at St. Andrews College in Laurinburg, North Carolina, and held temporary posts and graduate assistantships at North Carolina State University, the Duke University Chapel, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Shearon received his Bachelor of Music degree in music theory and composition from Northwestern University and completed the M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with studies on Johann Sebastian Bach's Leipzig choirs and sacred music in early eighteenth-century Naples, respectively. COURSES RECENTLY TAUGHT (2005-2008)
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