All News

The Kirkland Town Library (KTL) and Hamilton’s Burke Library are joint recipients of  a $2,500 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to fund a program  “America’s Music: A Film History of Our Popular Music from Blues to Bluegrass to Broadway.”

Saying goodbye to Hamilton and its people is hard enough for graduating seniors. But on top of having to separate themselves from the place they know and love, they are forced to accept the fact that Hamilton-level philosophizing simply doesn’t happen from 9-to-5 —at least, not on a daily basis. Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley found a way to keep graduates engaged with a new online class - Hamilton’s first.

Despite a weekend full of committee meetings, members of the Hamilton Board of Trustees still found many opportunities to engage one-on-one and collectively with students, faculty and staff during the Board's quarterly meeting March 1-2 in Clinton. Here are a few occasions of those occasions.

The Hamilton College Performing Arts Series and Kirkland Art Center join forces to present bluegrass legend The Seldom Scene on Friday, Nov. 2, at 8 p.m., in Wellin Hall, Schambach Center for Music and the Performing Arts.

Lydia Hamessley, professor of music, presented a talk titled “‘Music on Which the Story Might Ride’: Music in Paul Green’s The Lost Colony (1937)” at the international symposium, Roanoke Conundrum – Fact & Fiction. The symposium was held Oct. 6-10 in Manteo, N.C., to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the outdoor pageant The Lost Colony.

Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley presented a paper titled “Elizabethan Music in North Carolina: Paul Green’s Symphonic Drama, The Lost Colony (1937)” at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music held March 14-18 in Charlotte, N.C.  

The banjo can reveal much about socioeconomic class, slavery and music in the 19th century. Catherine Crone ’13 certainly sees the value in this often-neglected instrument. She will spend this summer researching the banjo in order to build an Internet resource about its past and its significance. Crone will be working under an Emerson Summer Grant with Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley to create their project, “A Study of Banjo Instruction Manuals from the 19th Century.”

Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley presented a paper titled “Music on Which the Story Might Ride: Paul Green’s Symphonic Drama, The Lost Colony” at the American Musicological Society – New State-St. Lawrence Chapter Meeting.

Legendary trumpeter Clark Terry once said that true musicianship can be achieved through imitation, assimilation and innovation. This summer, Tim Carman ’11 intends to tackle the “imitation” aspect; working with an Emerson grant and Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley, he will create a manual of the most important drum grooves for drummers to study.

Students from Lydia Hamessley's Music 154, Music of the World's Peoples, demonstrated Ewe drumming outside Commons on May 6. The students worked on the technique as a class project this semester. Ewe drumming refers to the drumming ensembles of the Ewe people of Ghana, Togo, and Benin.