Arts & Culture – ��ר��

Dr. Pete Candler Lectures in Earnhardt Speaker Series

Ken Keuffel — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 12:34:41 +0000

“T�� truth of the South at the present time is a far more mixed reality than the travel-brochure or country radio version would suggest. It is a region whose remarkably sustained creativity is, if we are honest, a fruit of centuries of adversity, both in the form of slavery . . . and the less obvious spiritual conditions that habituated numbness to and willful ignorance of that history have produced in generations of white Southerners.”

So writes Pete Candler, a former professor of theology and current essayist, photographer, and podcaster with deep Atlanta roots.

Candler is the recent author of The Road to Unforgetting: Detours in the American South 1997-2022. He was welcomed on March 27 as the second lecturer in the Eugene I. Earnhardt Speaker Series, created in honor of Gene Earnhardt, a Professor Emeritus of History at Pfeiffer who was known for bringing historically important – and sometimes controversial – figures to the University’s campus where he taught for 30 years. Dedicated to helping students explore contrasting perspectives and engage in academic discourse examining cultural issues, Earnhardt believed that universities offer spaces to discuss complex and culturally divisive issues.

Pfeiffer president Scott Bullard believes that Gene Earnhardt would have loved Candler’s work. “Through photography and his speech, Candler encouraged our students to explore every inch of the American South, as well as the entire country, asking themselves hard questions about the cost of our modern lives, conveniences, and, ultimately, our forgetfulness. Moreover, in an era wherein local school boards and even state governments are considering censoring the list of books that children can read in public and even in private schools, Candler wants us to continue to ask ourselves difficult questions: questions like, for example, in what ways are we responsible for remembering and re-narrating both the positive and negative stories within our national and regional histories?” he said.

In a compelling presentation in Merner Gymnasium entitled “T�� Promise of American Guilt,” Candler asked similar questions of about 400 students, faculty and other supporters of Pfeiffer. He even issued a few challenges: “T�� recognition of guilt can actually be a liberating kind of experience if you confront it honestly because it means that you have the opportunity to replace your idols with something true,” Candler said. “And that’s always a good and healing thing for human beings.”

Candler made this last remark in an interview following the lecture. The address grew out of his work as a writer, photographer, and filmmaker for a website called , the material of which revealed itself to Candler and Dr. John Hayes, an Associate Professor of History at Augusta University, as they traveled together over many years down the South’s backroads.

By “idols,” Candler referred to those in American history that reflect “our tendency as human beings and as Americans to retreat to those kinds of stories where we feel comfortable.”

“We tend to prefer constructed histories that favor our self-image,” he added. “We love those versions of ourselves more than the truth.”

By contrast, Candler’s work in A Deeper South strives for “an honest and unflinching memory,” even of things that make us uncomfortable. It recognizes that our gravest danger is “a willful amnesia” and “a culture of selective memory.” Candler noted that academic exploration of our history must never come to be viewed as “beyond reproach, beyond challenge, and beyond interrogation.”

Candler specializes in challenging the Southern “Lost Cause” narrative, which “claims a sense of moral purity in the Confederate cause.” Although he sees the moral culpability of the South “as a particularly concentrated instance of national guilt,” he’s also quick to point out the moral culpability of the whole nation — as when, for example, during the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, in 1913, aging veterans from both the Union and the Confederacy shook hands over a barbecue and “kind of buried the hatchet.” Black troops on the Union side were not invited to the gathering; Union and Confederate veterans had “buried the hatchet” on the unspoken agreement that this was a white man’s country.

So, how do we move forward? Leaning on both his academic research and experiences during his travels, Candler offers at least two suggestions. The first is to heed the words in The White Man’s Guilt, James Baldwin’s essay from 1965, in which he wrote that people “who imagine that history flatters them are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing, of changing themselves, or the world.”

The second suggestion comes from novelist Wendell Berry, who urges white Americans “to finally be home with our real selves in the real world and to get down to a couple centuries of honest work.”

“Knowing Candler and Berry, and the deep authentic places from which their work arises, whether you agree with their claims or not, it is the work of the university – and it was the joy of Gene Earnhardt – to bring those perspectives before our students,” Bullard said.

A Student-led Publication with Staying Power

Ken Keuffel — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 12:33:52 +0000

Emily Ruppe ’24, a junior at ��ר��, has always viewed writing as a serious hobby. Beginning in early childhood and throughout her high school years, she filled spiral notebooks and Google docs with writings on all manner of subjects. Yet because she never aspired to write for a living, she didn’t consider pursuing ways to publish her pieces.

“I assumed my writing would stay trapped where nobody could read it,” said Ruppe, who is double-majoring in Psychology and in Counseling and Human Services. “When students think of writing, they often think, ‘Oh, I have a history essay or a lab report to write up.’ There are not too many places to express your creativity and things that make you vulnerable.”

Ruppe’s view of the literary universe and her role in it has changed dramatically, thanks to — Pfeiffer’s literary journal — which has featured two of her pieces, each an example of creative nonfiction. In Ode to Laika, which ran during Ruppe’s sophomore year, she illuminates her take on who died aboard Sputnik 2 in 1958.

Graveyards, published when Ruppe was a freshman, proposes that the grave of her late mother “is just a piece of stone” and that “her spirit is with me all the time.” Ruppe said that writing Graveyards helped her “come to terms with not feeling obligated to visit my mother’s grave and put flowers down and follow all the social cues.”

The Phoenix, a print publication that comes out once a year each spring, includes fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, artwork, and photography. Founded in 1958, it is the principal creation of the longest-running student-led organization at Pfeiffer. That it provides Ruppe and many other students (and non-Pfeiffer contributors from as far away as Ireland and India) with an outlet for their non-academic work certainly helps explain why it’s been going strong for 64 years. But many other factors account for the publication’s staying power.

Dr. Edward Royston, an Assistant Professor of English at Pfeiffer, serves as the faculty advisor for The Phoenix. His students and others continually gravitate to the publication because it is something over which “they can take full ownership,” he said. Student staffers make all editorial decisions, from determining the content of The Phoenix after considering blind submissions to shaping how the magazine’s cover and layout will look.

“At the end of a year working on it, the students have created a tangible product that they can put in their hands and show off to family members and friends,” he said. “Especially in our day and age, when it’s fashionable to question the utility of studying or majoring in English, the ability to create an actual object that you can give to people to flip through really gives the students a sense of pride and a sense of meaning to their accomplishments.”

Putting together a magazine requires a lot of know-how — so much, in fact, that the staff of The Phoenix learns it not as part of an extracurricular activity but during a for-credit course that meets three hours each week. The course covers many technical skills, including how to use Submittable.com to manage submissions and how to use Wix.com to manage the publication’s website. Students also master software programs such as Canvas, which is used to create posters and other promotional materials, and InDesign, which is used to create the magazine itself.

Louisa Parrish ’23, the Editor-in-Chief of The Phoenix, wants to land a job in publishing after she graduates next spring, and she recently made her debut as a novelist (see related story in this edition of The Falcon Connection). In addition to having mastered the nuts and bolts of publishing a magazine, she’s developed in many other ways that will benefit her in the workplace: “I’ve learned how to get projects done on time, and I now know how to work successfully with other people, how to navigate when an issue comes up, and how to promote things.”

Each student who takes the Phoenix course is required to take on what Royston described as “some kind of project that will help promote or grow or build out the journal in some way.”

The projects run the gamut. Recently, for example, several new sections have been added to what the Phoenix’s website offers, each designed to appeal to different interests. In a section called “T�� Music Note,” there’s an appreciation of David Bowie’s music that includes a Spotify selection of his work. There are also reviews of coffee (in “T�� Coffee Bean with Hannah Dean”); reviews of upscale dining establishments by Alayna Eure (“Alayna Eats”); and a section that considers the artistic side of athletes (“Art of Athletes”).

The Phoenix is also bullish on having students organize and present such events as writers’ workshops, launch parties and play readings. Cortney Queen ’23, who has published her poetry in The Phoenix, now serves as one of the publication’s editors. She has organized and participated in several Phoenix-sponsored poetry slams on Pfeiffer’s Misenheimer campus.

“It’s amazing how many things our organization does,” she said. “I’m so glad I became a member of it.”

Current English Major Now Published Author

Ken Keuffel — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 12:32:35 +0000

Many English majors entertain hopes of becoming a published author, but when Louisa Parrish ’23 of Denton, N.C. graduates from ��ר�� next spring, she will be able to say that her dream has become a reality. As she started her senior year, she completed the first installment in a planned series of fantasy novels.

(IngramSpark), Parrish’s first book, went on sale in August 2022 under the pen name of Lucia Jex-Blake, just as the current semester at Pfeiffer was beginning. It emerged after Parrish learned that she qualified for a grant from that could finance the book’s production. Make-A-Wish funding enabled her to pay for an editor and the graphic designer who created the book’s cover. Parrish has been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis; Make-A-Wish grants wishes for children with “critical conditions” such as hers, not necessarily terminal ones.

Parrish, who is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Phoenix, Pfeiffer’s literary journal, aspires to live off the money she makes from writing novels.

“T�� Artifacts project was a nice way to jumpstart my career,” she said. “I could get my first book behind me and start marketing my work while I’m finishing up my senior year at Pfeiffer.” That marketing has included a late-summer book signing at the Barnes & Noble store in The Arboretum Shopping Center of Charlotte, N.C.

Artifacts transports us to a world of faeries and wizards in which Geena Bellows, after eluding capture by wizards who’ve had her on the run for much of her life, gains asylum in the faerie land of Apatite. Geena learns that Apatite’s inhabitants knew her late mother. Along with unraveling her mother’s Apatite connection, Geena comes to hope that the many mysteries in her life will be revealed.

Artifacts exemplifies a genre called fantasy dystopia, which “is like the way you would think of an infection,” Parrish said. “It’s this one thing that needs to be taken care of, or else it’s going to be a problem.”

Parrish said she’s been reading fantasy dystopias “forever.”

“It’s what I know, it’s what I’m familiar with,” she said. “So, I figured that at least for my first series, I would go with what I know.”

Dr. Ashley Schoppe, an Assistant Professor of English at Pfeiffer, expressed support for this strategy, saying that Artifacts “immediately immerses the reader, a feat which is even more remarkable considering this is Parrish’s first novel.” “Apatite, the world of the faeries, is realistically drawn, and it is a delight to explore,” she added. “T�� conflict between the faeries and the wizards that forms the central plot of the novel is a fast-paced nail-biter, and the ending leaves you wanting more. I’m looking forward to reading the sequel.”

Pfeiffer’s Music Program to Benefit from Generous Gift

Ken Keuffel — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 20:22:33 +0000

During her time at Pfeiffer College, Cindy Reedy Serbin ’75 double-majored in mathematics and music education, having found in the latter numerous ways to develop her gifts as an organist, a chorister, and a choral director. So, when she learned last fall that Pfeiffer would reinstate the music education major at the beginning of the 2022-23 academic year, she was thrilled.

Serbin was also motivated to take the kind of action that can significantly advance the program’s revival. She has made a $100,000 gift that will fund improvements to lighting and acoustics in Henry Pfeiffer Chapel, the University’s principal performance venue, and help underwrite a musical revue on campus.

To further elevate the program, she is earmarking funds for the first ��ר�� Serbin Choral Festival, which will be held in the fall of 2023. It is anticipated that this event will bring about 100 choristers from high school ensembles across the Carolinas to Pfeiffer for two days of rehearsing and performing under the direction of a leading clinician; the goal is to interest them in attending the University and singing in its choirs if they do, an important first step on the way to becoming a music major. Like the choirs of most small universities and colleges, Pfeiffer’s ensembles also welcome non-music majors.

“T�� festival will be a great recruiting tool for us,” said Joe Judge ’87, Pfeiffer’s Director of Vocal and Choral Music. “It will get potential students and their parents to campus, and it will get Pfeiffer reestablished within the choral community of the Carolinas.”

Judge also plugged the planned lighting and acoustic improvements as ways to make Pfeiffer’s performance venue more attractive to potential music majors. LEDs will replace the chapel’s existing lighting, lasting longer and washing more of the stage than the current lights do. They will also provide some “color options” that aren’t available now.

Acoustical panels will be placed on the walls between the chapel’s windows, giving greater focus to a sound that Judge described as currently too “bouncy.”

“We’re doing more with amplification, videos, and recorded music,” he said. “T�� chapel’s current acoustics make those sounds very difficult to hear well because there’s so much reverberation in the room.”

Judge stressed that the acoustical panels will not drastically change what most people consider to be wonderful acoustics in the chapel. “T�� idea is to keep up with the times, if you will,” he said. “T��y will make it better for the events that happen in the room beyond what the Music Department does.”

After graduating from Pfeiffer, Serbin earned a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She married one of her professors, the late Steven Serbin, and worked for many years in Knoxville as a computer analyst.

Along the way, music remained a serious interest. Among other things, Serbin has played handbells, sung in choirs and musicals, led a church’s children’s choir, and served as a substitute organist at several churches. Pfeiffer doubtless sparked all this activity: Serbin, whose music ed concentration was organ, would play that instrument each Sunday at Wesley Chapel United Methodist Church near campus, in addition to starting a children’s choir. She also sang with multiple choirs at Pfeiffer, touring often in the United States and Europe. She made many friendships: “Being together on a bus for hours will do that for you.”

Asked whether her gift will give music and music education at Pfeiffer a shot in the arm, she said: “I certainly hope so. I got so much out of it when I was there. I would like future students to get the same kind of experience.”

Wind & Percussion Ensemble to Premiere Fiery Work

Ken Keuffel — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 12:05:00 +0000

Dr. Joseph Earp, Assistant Professor of Music at ��ר��, believes that music can conjure images of the alarm bells, heat, crackles, explosions, mayhem, and firefighting of the biggest blaze. So, he composed Five Alarm Fire for Percussion Ensemble, which the ��ר�� Wind & Percussion Ensemble will premiere April 26 under his direction at the Stanly County Agri-Civic Center in Albemarle, N.C.

Earp, a prolific , described lots of fiery features in his latest work.

“T��re are alarm bells happening in passages for ,” he said. “Brass drums and tenor drums are making big booming sounds that make you feel like you’re in the middle of a ferocious fire. It’s chaos, but it’s organized chaos because the firefighters know what they’re doing.”

Earp also played up the energetic, multilayered nature of Five Alarm Fire.

“It doesn’t really slow down; it stays up-tempo the entire time,” he said. “T��re’s a lot going on but there’s not so much going on that the listener is going to be lost. Hopefully, they’ll be sucked into it.”

Like an actual five-alarm fire, Earp’s composition calls for “all hands on deck.” Many of the Wind & Percussion Ensemble’s 21 musicians are learning to play percussion instruments during weekly rehearsals of the piece, including Evan Addison ’22, whose principal instrument is trumpet.

Addison, an Environmental Science major who hails from Southport, N.C., is playing the marching bass drum part in Five Alarm Fire, and he played tom drums during the Wind & Percussion Ensemble’s performance last fall of , another Earp piece for percussion ensemble.

“It is cool to be on a percussion instrument after being a wind player for so many years,” said Addison, who began playing trumpet in the sixth grade.

“To me, Five Alarm Fire does a great job of capturing excitement, suspense, and drama, in addition to conveying more subtle, peaceful passages. Dr. Earp does a great job of bringing out feelings and emotions in pieces he’s conducting.”

Want to go?

What: Under Joseph Earp’s direction, the ��ר�� Wind & Percussion Ensemble will present its spring band concert. The program will feature the world premiere of Earp’s Five Alarm Fire for Percussion Ensemble.

Also featured will be Pavel Chesnokov’s , Earp’s arrangement of Claude T. Smith’s , Brian Balmages’ , and Randall Standridge’s . The program will include , from Ralph Vaughn-Williams’ “Folk Song” Suite.

When: 7 p.m. April 26

Where: Stanly County Agri-Civic Center, 26032 Newt Rd # B in Albemarle

Cost: Free and open to the public

Vocal Ensemble to Perform Praise-filled Program for Eastertide

Ken Keuffel — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 12:00:00 +0000

A clever play on words underpins the thematic concept of the next concert by the ��ר�� Singers.

The program, which Joe Judge ’87 will lead April 24 in Henry Pfeiffer Chapel, is titled “A Canon of Praise.” The Eastertide performance, which will take place in the 50-day period of celebration between Easter Sunday and Pentecost, reflects the fact that the word canon has two musical definitions.

A canon is a “based on the principle of strict imitation,” in which an initial melody is imitated in one or more parts. Think “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or the late Natalie Sleeth’s , a three-part oft-performed gem that will highlight the singers’ “Canon” program. Sleeth’s Canon has been for its “exquisite rhythmic and melodic charm” and for being fun to learn.

A canon is also defined as a collection of musical pieces. Judge, Pfeiffer’s Director of Vocal and Choral Music, calls the collection for the April 24 concert “pieces of praise.”

“It is primarily sacred music,” he said. “It tells a sacred story.”

Said story will be grounded in very eclectic fare, ranging from the 16th century to contemporary times. The contemporary offerings will include , Elaine Hagenberg’s sonically rich, heavenly setting of texts by Brian Newhouse. Songs was dedicated to the choral community “in the hope of healing during times of silence and distance.”

The 16th-century material comes courtesy of Richard Farrant’s Hide not Thou Thy Face from Us. This boasts a Lenten mood in which “we confess our sins and pray, ‘Don’t turn away from us, God,’” Judge said.

The concert will also feature several eternally popular pieces, ranging from the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s opera Nabucco to John Ness Beck’s arrangement of “Amazing Grace.” The latter consists of unison singing accompanied by a piano part that takes an improbable bluesy turn.

Judge said he’s designed “A Canon of Praise” with the aim of listeners taking in its full sweep.

“I want there to be a sense of a musical narrative,” he said.

Want to go?

What: Under Joe Judge’s direction, the ��ר�� Singers will present “A Canon of Praise”

When: 7 p.m. April 24

Where: Henry Pfeiffer Chapel on ��ר��’s Misenheimer, N.C. campus

Cost: Free and open to the public

“Cornerstones & Crossroads” Honors Past and Heralds Future

Ken Keuffel — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 15:06:00 +0000

In 1998, Joshua Cross earned a B.A. degree in 2D Art from Southeast Missouri State University. This credential, along with an MFA degree in painting from Kansas State University, would help him land work at ��ר��, where he’s an Associate Professor of Art. Along the way, he also developed a love of history and considered teaching that subject in high school.

Cross’ art-history background informs “Cornerstones & Crossroads,” a mural that he recently created and installed last September in Pfeiffer’s Center for Health Sciences in downtown Albemarle, N.C.

The center is the home of Pfeiffer’s recently introduced Master of Science in Physician Assistant Studies (MS-PAS) and Master of Science in Occupational Therapy (MSOT) programs.

The mural, a wall wrap of digitized images spanning a three-story window-enclosed stairwell, can be viewed by pedestrians heading east on Albemarle’s Main Street. The design creates a multi-level collage that includes historic figures and local community leaders to tell the story of rural medicine in Stanly County and the history of the physician assistant and occupational therapy professions.

The mural reflects facts, places, stories and names. “That’s all the stuff that we don’t usually think about with making art, and it’s all the stuff I enjoy knowing,” Cross said.

Among other things, the mural’s first floor depicts the first hospitals in Stanly County, and it introduces key figures including Dr. Francis Kron (1798-1883), an early Stanly County physician, and Pearl Ada Morris, a nurse from Stanly County who won the U.S. Army Bronze Star during World War II.

The second floor recognizes several figures of importance to the physician assistant profession, including Dr. Eugene Stead, Jr. (1908-2005), who is credited as the founder of the profession after developing the first PA curriculum at Duke University. An image of Anne Louise Keeney (1933-2017) is also on the mural’s second floor. Keeney is the namesake of the Anne Louise Keeney Chair of Physician Assistant Studies, which is held by the director of the MS-PAS program.

The third floor features William Dunton, Jr. (1868-1966), the founder of the American Occupational Therapy Association, and it recognizes female reconstruction aides for their work in the development of occupational therapy during World War I.

“Cornerstones & Crossroads” also features silhouettes of iconic imagery from Stanly County and from Pfeiffer’s campus in Misenheimer, N.C., where the MS-PAS and MSOT programs were conceived. The Pfeiffer images include the stairs of Goode Hall and the statue of Emily C. Prudden (1832-1917), who founded the first of several schools in western North Carolina, including Oberlin Home and School, which eventually became Pfeiffer College.

Cross said he spent at least 150 hours on creating “Cornerstones & Crossroads,” with about half of that time devoted to research he described as a large scavenger hunt. He credited several experts for their assistance, including Megan Sullivan, the Museum Manager of the Stanly County History Center; Dr. Elizabeth Fain, the Director of MSOT; and Dr. Brenda Diaz, the former director of MS-PAS.

“It is our hope that the mural for this space will serve as a testament to the rich history of Stanly County and ��ר��, and that it will honor our partnership, our collective past, and our vibrant future,” said Dr. Scott Bullard, ��ר�� President. “Pfeiffer is pleased to be an economic driver for our communities, and we are honored to train physician assistants and occupational therapists who will meet critical market need and impact significant healthcare disparities in our region. ‘Cornerstones & Crossroads’ is a fantastic reflection of where we have been, and where we plan to go.”

Exterior signage for “Cornerstones and Crossroads” is scheduled for installation at the Center for Health Sciences, near the stairwell location, and will outline the symbolism of key mural elements for visitors.

1968 Campus Event Becomes Milestone Moment

Ken Keuffel — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 16:06:53 +0000

Dr. Margaret Earley Whitt ’68 taught English for 27 years at the (DU) until 2009, when she retired as a full professor. Years before, on the evening of April 4, 1968, just weeks before she earned a B.A. degree in history, she became swept up in an unusual confluence of events that would significantly shape her distinguished career in writing and teaching.

James Robertson “Bob” Jones (1930-1989) — then the Grand Dragon of the North Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan — came to Pfeiffer’s campus in Misenheimer, N.C. to speak, and Whitt covered the talk as the editor for The Pfeiffer News.

“You could see right through the flaws in Jones’ thinking,” Whitt said. “Still, I found it incredibly instructive that he was there, and I thank the late Gene Earnhardt, a history professor at Pfeiffer, for inviting him. Gene believed in exposing students to guest speakers with a range of views; you would never see something similar today on most college campuses.”

Whitt and her classmates would experience more than just a talk by a controversial figure on that evening. Just after Jones’ talk, Thad Woodard ’68, one of Whitt’s classmates, rushed into the room to convey the tragic news that Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated. He asked Jones to comment.

Whitt recalls that Jones mustered a patronizing comment about King and that the few African American students who were present left the room. The remaining students, all white, simply sat.

Whitt, who now lives in Gerton, N.C., would file what she called a “superficial” editorial about Jones’ visit in The Pfeiffer News. And, in the years that followed, she would ask herself some hard questions: Why did she and the other white students remain seated at Jones’ talk? Why hadn’t any of them left?

“I see how our passivity was the result of having known only a segregated world,” she wrote many years later. “Segregated public schools, churches, camps, libraries, entertainment centers, shopping areas, and neighborhoods molded me and most of my Southern classmates.”

Another, more meaningful response would emerge in the form of “Long Walk toward Justice,” a course Whitt taught at DU for several years beginning around 1998. It underscored her belief that “literature can help us feel history.”

The students who took “Long Walk” were required to read several books, including Bebe Moore Campbell’s and Melba Pattillo Beals’ . They read , Juan Williams’ companion book to the of the same name, and they watched DVDs of the series.

“T�� videos and pictures enabled my students to see the people and places we were talking about in class, which was a big plus,” Whitt said. “I had traveled to all the places we covered in the course, so I was also able to show students how they looked in the early 2000s through slideshows of photos I had taken.”

As her time at DU wound down, Whitt emerged as an historian of the Civil Rights Movement who championed fiction inspired by that period, having edited (2006, University of Georgia Press). The book became required reading for “Long Walk” during the last couple of years that the course was offered. It is still used in appropriate classroom syllabi in high schools and colleges across the country.

Short Stories is divided into five sections: “School Desegregation”; “Sit-ins”; “Marches & Demonstrations”; “Acts of Violence”; and “Retrospective.” Each of the sections begins with an introduction by Whitt that serves as a crash course in a different aspect of Civil Rights Movement history. In this way, Whitt reconnected to her Pfeiffer roots as a student of history.

Until then, she had been building on her gifts in English, which was her minor at Pfeiffer. She had published a on Gloria Naylor, several books on writing and grammar, and a to first-year English for DU’s freshmen.

Understanding Flannery O’Connor

She had also begun contributing to the voluminous scholarship on , about whom she wrote her doctoral dissertation. Whitt’s (1995, University of South Carolina Press) is just one of many works of literary criticism that Whitt began writing on O’Connor in the 1980s.

Whitt first read O’Connor’s short stories and novels in 1974 and became hooked on fiction she found “violent, grotesque, and horribly funny, with a twist.” She set about illuminating how its heady blend of southern-ness and Roman Catholicism “enabled O’Connor to deliver orthodox Christian themes through the code of southern etiquette.”

“I can still read one of her stories and not be sure that I exactly understand where it’s going,” Whitt said. “Do you come out at the end with some easy understanding of Orthodox Christianity? No, you do not. But for O’Connor, the fact that Jesus Christ died on the cross and was resurrected is not just something that you can believe or not believe; it’s something that you have to believe. She was never one way or the other.”

Whitt may have retired from DU, but Whitt the writer and teacher continues to remain quite active. She still leads tours* of important Civil Rights Movement sites for groups, and she continues to write history articles about aspects of the movement.

Whitt’s writings on Flannery O’Connor have also increased substantially during her retirement years. In the July 20, 2020 edition of The New Yorker, for example, of four published letters Whitt has written to the publication responds to an article written by Paul Elie.

Whitt has a book review and an article in the 2021 edition of Flannery O’Connor Review, where she also serves on the editorial advisory board. She has also written multiple essays on O’Connor over the last several years.

“In the world of Flannery O’Connor scholarship, there are many of us who just have never left that world; I’m one of them,” she said. “And when it comes to Civil Rights history, I’m also very much in it for the long haul.’’

*Contact Whitt at margaret.whitt@du.edu if you’d like her to lead your group on a tour of important sites in the Civil Rights Movement. A discount will be offered to Pfeiffer alumni.

A New Cycle of Art Songs Emerges at Pfeiffer

campus — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 15:45:13 +0000

In the 19th century, several composers in the German-speaking world made their mark with the art song, a vocal genre in which poetry is set to music for a solo vocalist and piano. Franz Schubert (1797-1828) wrote over 650 art songs, setting a standard that has inspired everyone from Robert Schumann (1810-1856) to composers of our time, including Dr. Brent Lawrence ’13, a guitarist who teaches music at ��ר��.

recently wrote A Wordsworth Triptych: Three Songs for Baritone and Electric Guitar, with each song featuring a different poem by (1770-1850), a founding and central figure of English Romanticism. Joe Judge ’87, a baritone who serves as Pfeiffer’s Director of Vocal and Choral Music, and Lawrence have just made a recording of Triptych, which is available on and .

Triptych is the second song cycle composed by Lawrence, who majored in music at Pfeiffer. It finds inspiration in songs by Schubert and Schumann, but aims “for an aesthetic that is slightly more contemporary than that of those composers,” Lawrence said. The aesthetic eschews the piano, which Lawrence does not play, for the guitar, which he does, often in venues where jazz, blues, and folk are performed.

“I’m trying to meld two worlds: the troubadour singer-songwriter thing and the art song thing,” Lawrence said. “And, because Wordsworth was an English poet, I also found inspiration in song cycles written by English composers, especially Benjamin Britten’s .”

The poems in Triptych are (in order of appearance) ; ; and Lawrence sees them as “somewhat autobiographical” and, therefore, wanted “to arrange them in a chronological narrative and perhaps a progression through a thought process or reflection that Wordsworth was writing about.”

The song featuring “T��re was a Boy” recounts a boy’s closeness to nature, how he communes with its inhabitants, and the moment when he is taken from his mates. In the song featuring “A Night-Piece,” our perspective shifts to the night sky, with the boy, now a traveler, making his way through the night, first noticing the clouds and then how they part to reveal the moon and stars as they shine in the night sky. And in the final song, which features “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the traveler compares his lonely wandering around his boyhood home to the clouds passing above.

Judge was particularly taken with the final song, in which the poem, sometimes called “Daffodils,” paints a vivid picture of seeing, as if from a cloud, a large patch of daffodils dancing along the bank of a lake.

“I think Brent did a terrific job of setting the text musically, particularly in contrasting sections,” Judge said. “T�� guitar and the voice together present a musical picture of thousands of daffodils moving in the breeze, outdoing the waves on the lake.”

If all goes as planned, A Wordsworth Triptych will be the first of many pieces that Lawrence writes for Pfeiffer’s music faculty. Judge is certainly on board with that.

“I’m very proud of Brent and the work he has done,” he said. “I’ve had the pleasure to watch him grow and develop as a musician since his freshman year at Pfeiffer to his coming full circle, as one of our best faculty in the Music Department. So, needless to say, it was my honor and privilege to be asked to sing these pieces.”

Ken Keuffel, who authored this article, has served as Pfeiffer’s Assistant Director of Communications since December 2019. He welcomes story ideas from Pfeiffer’s faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends.

Pfeiffer Brings Back the Bands and Music Ed

campus — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:05:00 +0000

In late August, the new ��ר�� Wind & Percussion Ensemble began rehearsing each Monday evening for a concert on Nov. 2 in Henry Pfeiffer Chapel. The formation of the group is one of several steps that Dr. Joseph Earp, its director, is undertaking to reinstate the music education major at Pfeiffer beginning in the fall of 2022.

“Any program for music ed majors requires its students to perform in instrumental and choral ensembles,” Earp said. “So, the Wind & Percussion Ensemble is vital to the music ed program’s prospects for success, as are Pfeiffer’s choral ensembles, which are already thriving under the capable leadership of Joe Judge ’87. I want people to see that the bands at Pfeiffer are the real deal. We’re going to do something with this.”

By “bands,” Earp also meant Freddie Falcon’s House Band, a pep band that has also begun rehearsing for its debut, which will take place during a Pfeiffer basketball game this winter. It will perform the University’s first fight song, for which Earp, also a prolific , is writing the music and lyrics.

Earp, a trombonist who holds a Doctor of Music Education from Liberty University, wants to sign up 10 music education majors at Pfeiffer for the 2022-23 academic year. In four years, if all goes as planned, that number would rise to about 25 or 30.

The Wind & Percussion Ensemble would increase from its current 13 members to between 35 and 50 members. Like Mila Rutter ’23, a junior environmental science major from Gold Hill, N.C., several of the group’s players will not major in music ed or music. Instead, they’ll continue to pursue music as a serious hobby, which would be consistent with a culture that encourages Pfeiffer students to participate in multiple extracurricular activities.

“I still want to play the trumpet, and I want to learn to play the drums,” said Rutter, who performed in the marching and jazz bands at East Rowan (N.C.) High School. “I do not plan to major in music, but I want to continue to play for as long as possible. So, the Wind & Percussion Ensemble has been great for me.”

Earp’s recruitment strategy will draw on his successful experiences during his pre-Pfeiffer days as a builder of instrumental music programs, first at Cox Mill High School in Concord, N.C. (2009-2017) and then at Limestone University in Gaffney, S.C. (2017-2021). He’ll plug the benefits of Pfeiffer’s culture as they relate to music ed: “One of the special things about Pfeiffer is that small school experience. When you walk into a band room, for instance, I’m going to know more than just your name. I’m going to ask how your classes are going, and I’m going to help motivate you to get things done for your classes.”

Earp is a first-generation college student, and his doctoral thesis was on first-generation college students’ lived experiences in an undergraduate music education program. So, he relates particularly well to prospective first-generation college students who are considering following in his music ed footsteps.

Earp will showcase his conductor skills as a guest assistant during rehearsals of high school bands he visits. This might mean coaching a band’s section or critiquing balances and other fine points of ensemble. In this way, prospective students will get a good sense of Earp as a teacher/conductor.

Earp wants to entice prospective students to Pfeiffer’s Misenheimer campus. One way of doing that is already happening: He’s recruiting ensemble members from the local community colleges and already has seven who have joined the group. Another way, which was also tried successfully during Earp’s time at Limestone, will be gathering the area’s better high school musicians in an honor band that rehearses and performs at Pfeiffer under a leading clinician.

“T�� likelihood that they’ll attend Pfeiffer dramatically increases if you can get them on campus,” he said.

Finally, Earp is working with other faculty and administrators on making the University’s music facilities more attractive to prospective music ed majors who visit its Misenheimer campus. One of the top priorities is enlarging the stage in Henry Pfeiffer Chapel, where the ensemble will perform, because it is too small for a concert band. Another priority is dampening the chapel’s too-lively acoustics with acoustical panels.

The new music education majors at Pfeiffer would be the first to graduate from the University since the spring of 2014, four years after the music ed major started being phased out (Pfeiffer’s Board of Trustees approved bringing back the music ed major at a meeting in June). They would leave the University as both generalists who are able to perform “any sort of job” in K-12 music and as specialists who have gravitated to one of three areas of music: instrumental, choral or elementary.

Earp is quite optimistic about the job opportunities for these graduates, noting that some areas in the region will need music teachers because new schools are being built to accommodate population growth. He also points out that there is always some turnover in teaching as well.

“T��re are a bunch of jobs out there and available,” he said. “I look forward to helping launch the careers of the next generation of Pfeiffer-trained music educators.”

Want to go?

What: Under Joseph Earp’s direction, the ��ר�� Wind & Percussion Ensemble will present its “Fall Concert.” The program will include the Pfeiffer premiere of Earp’s for percussion ensemble, featuring the entire ensemble as percussionists. Also featured will be Eric Whitacre’s Sing Gently (transcribed from choir for instrumental ensemble, by Verena Mosenbichler-Bryant), Randall Standridge’s , David R. Gillingham’s and Claude T. Smith’s .

When: 7 p.m. Nov. 2

Where: Henry Pfeiffer Chapel on ��ר��’s Misenheimer campus

Cost: Free and open to the public

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