Introducing the winners of the 2019 International Grant Competition for doctoral students

Flutist Hannah Darroch and Musicology student Alessandra Ignesti recently each won $11,000 to fund projects relating to their doctoral studies.

Congratulations to Hannah Darroch and Alessandra Ignesti, who have won their respective categories of the 2019 International Grant Competition for two very unique projects. Read more about their work and backgrounds below:

Hannah Darroch (Performance category)

New Zealand-born flutist Hannah Darroch is in her third year of a Doctor of Music. During her time at McGill she also concurrently completed the Global Leaders Program – a year-long program for 30 musicians worldwide that focuses on teaching artistry and social entrepreneurship – and was awarded their Hildegard Behrens Foundation Global Humanitarian Entrepreneur Prize as one of the top graduates of 2018. She holds a Master of Music from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she was a TA and member of their award-winning resident wind quintet.

As an orchestral musician Hannah has played professionally for over a decade under conductors including Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Sir James MacMillan, and alongside international artists ranging from Renée Fleming to Håkan Hardenberger. Hannah can be heard on a number of commercial recordings including the 2014 soundtrack to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and the premiere release of Frank Ticheli's Pulitzer-nominated Songs of Life and Love. Her career has also included positions as Radio NZ Concert's Digital Content and Program Producer, Chamber Music New Zealand's Marketing and Communications Executive, and recent consultancy work to develop a new mentorship program for the Wellington Youth Orchestra, and to redesign RNZ Concert’s publicity and partnerships strategy.

Hannah has recently been invited to teach guest classes and perform in locations across Canada, the United States, Chile, Australia, and New Zealand. In 2017 her research was chosen from hundreds of doctoral applicants across Canada to be featured on CBC’s Ideas. Hannah is also the recent winner of the Schulich School of Music's 2019-2020 Research Alive Student Prize, and a Graduate Mobility Award to attend a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

She said of the recent win: “It’s a real honour to win this competition. The funding will allow me to widen the scope of my dissertation and commission a new work for solo flute, which I’ll premiere during my final lecture-recital next year."

Photo credit: Bradley Garner Creative

Project Details:

Cultural convergences: Exploring the emulation of traditional Māori flutes in New Zealand’s contemporary classical music

The twentieth century was a period of great activity and experimentation for the modern flute. Composers became more interested than ever before in the flute's sonic potential, pushing new boundaries in terms of its timbral capabilities and the new-found ability to play several notes simultaneously. A series of “extended techniques” were first codified in Bruno Bartolozzi’s treatise New Sounds for Woodwinds in 1967, and other resources continued to be published in the decades that followed, including volumes by Thomas Howell (1974), Robert Dick (1975, 1989), and Pierre-Yves Artaud (1980). Notably, composers have used these techniques as a means of emulating the timbre of traditional flutes, looking back to the various bone, bamboo, and wood flutes of past centuries. My research examines links between contemporary flute techniques and the characteristics of traditional New Zealand Māori flutes – the kōauau, pūtorino, and nguru – and considers how their emulation in recent classical music relates to a solidification of cultural identity.

Kōauau (Wikimedia Commons)


Alessandra Ignesti (Research category)

Photo credit: Paolo Livieri
Alessandra Ignesti is a PhD candidate in musicology at McGill University, where she works under the supervision of Julie Cumming and Peter Schubert. Before coming to McGill, she studied musicology in Cremona (BA), and philosophy in Venice (MA) and Padua (PhD). Her main research interests include plainchant, theory of counterpoint, and Renaissance polyphony with a special focus on the musical life of the Republic of Venice.

Since 2014, Alessandra has collaborated as a research assistant on the Cantus Ultimus project, part of the SIMSSA project (Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis) directed by Professors Ichiro Fujinaga and Julie Cumming. She is also involved in the CRIM project (Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass) led by Richard Freedman (Haverford College) and David Fiala (CESR, Tours) that is devoted to the comparative analysis of a corpus of sixteenth-century imitation masses and their models. Recently, she has received a fellowship from the University of Göttingen, where she will be working on two plainchant manuscripts preserved at the municipal archive.

When asked about her reaction to winning the International Grant Competition, Alessandra said: "I always experience a kind of childlike wonder when it comes to winning something, so my reaction was, if I may say so, one of wide-eyed amazement. I was genuinely happy that other people found interesting something I am working on."

Project Details:

Ippolito Baccusi and the musical culture of northeastern Italy

Baccusi's first book of masses, Venice, 1570
Ippolito Baccusi was a musician active in the north-east of Italy between the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. Although almost unknown today, he was a renowned composer of his time and a respected teacher notable for his mastery of contrappunto alla mente. His personal acquaintance with Zarlino, Giaches de Wert, and Lodovico Zacconi, combined with his long and successful career as maestro di cappella, makes him a very interesting figure and a guide into the musical life of his time.

Not much is known about him, except that he was born in Mantua around the middle of the sixteenth century, was an Augustinian monk, and worked at San Marco as assistant choir director and later in Spilimbergo, Mantua, and Verona as maestro di cappella. His compositions include madrigals and various genres of sacred music, among which there are six books of imitation masses that await to be transcribed, studied, and performed. My dissertation will focus on the first three books (published in 1570, 1585, and 1589) and will aim to analyze his compositional style and use of musical borrowings. In addition, I will enjoy the thrill of archival research in the attempt to cast some light on his professional life in Mantua and in Verona, where he spent the last part of his life.


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