CV

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Personal Information

Born January 11, 1940, in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Office address: Department of Music, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts 02155

Office telephone: 617.627.3564

E-mail: mdevoto@granite.tufts.edu

 

Education

Musical training before college: chiefly in elementary school and at the Longy School of Music; piano with Gregory Tucker; organ with William Allen Lindahl, Melville Smith, and Frank Taylor; solfège with Helen Sanderson Kaufmann.

B.A., Harvard College, 1961. Harmony with Daniel Pinkham and David G. Hughes; counterpoint and choral composition with Randall Thompson; history of music with Nino Pirrotta and John M. Ward; composition and studies in twentieth-century music with Walter Piston. Summer study in composition (Tanglewood) with Lukas Foss.

M.F.A., 1963, and Ph.D., 1967, Princeton University. Composition with Roger Sessions; analysis and fugue with Earl Kim; history of theory, acoustics, and special topics with Milton Babbitt. Dissertation, “Alban Berg’s Picture-Postcard Songs,” Edward T. Cone, advisor; privately printed, 1966.

Study in orchestral conducting at the Conductors Institute, University of South Carolina, summer 1989, with Harold Farberman, Daniel Lewis, and Donald Portnoy.

 

Academic Employment

Reed College, Instructor in Music, 1964-66; Assistant Professor, 1966-68.

Portland State College, Lecturer in Music, 1968.

University of New Hampshire, Assistant Professor of Music, 1968-74; Associate Professor of Music, 1974-78; Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities, 1978-81.

University of Michigan, Visiting Lecturer in Music, summer 1972.

Harvard University, Visiting Professor of Music, spring 1988.

Brown University, Visiting Professor of Music, fall 2002, for two months only.

Boston University, Visiting Adjunct Professor of Music, fall 2004.

Tufts University, Professor of Music, 1981-2000; Professor of Music, emeritus, since 2000.

Courses taught include: introduction to music for non-majors; introductory harmony; tonal counterpoint; canon and fugue; analysis; history of twentieth-century music; history of Renaissance and Baroque music; history of American music; history of Russian music; history of French music; literature of the art song; history of opera; music of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; Beethoven; orchestration; conducting; theory seminar; expository writing; humanities; director of the Tufts Symphony Orchestra.

 

Performance Skills

Piano
Organ
Conducting
Voice (deep bass)

Language skills

Latin
French, fair reading and speaking
Medieval French
German, fair reading and speaking
Italian and Spanish with a dictionary
A little Portuguese, Russian, biblical Hebrew, Yiddish