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Professors receive Guggenheim Fellowships

Published April 19, 2004; Category: ARTS & SCIENCES

Music and studio art faculty members will use funds in work

Two Dartmouth faculty members, Larry Polansky, Associate Professor of Music, and Susan Jane Walp, Lecturer in Studio Art, have been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The awards were announced April 8 by the Guggenheim Foundation.

The Guggenheim Fellowships reward notable professional achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. The 2004 fellowship winners include 185 artists, scholars and scientists selected from more than 3,200 applicants for awards totaling more than $6.9 million.

Larry Polansky

Larry Polansky is a composer for electronic, computer and acoustic instruments as well as an active theorist, guitarist, editor, scholar and computer programmer. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics and music in 1976 and went on to earn his masters in composition in 1978 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He co-authored the computer music language HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language) with Phil Burk, a computer programmer and designer who specializes in interactive and experimental music systems, and David Rosenboom, an experimental music pioneer; and he has co-authored some of the widely used Soundhack program. He has published numerous records and CDs, including 2001's Lonesome Road (The Crawford Variations) and 2002's Four Voice Canons #2-18, as well as three solo CDs on San Francisco's Artifact label.

Polansky teaches composition, theory and electronic music at Dartmouth, where he is also part of the faculty of the graduate program in Electro-Acoustic Music. He has been active in interdisciplinary work at Dartmouth, co-teaching with David Ehrlich in Film Studies, Dan Rockmore in Mathematics, and Jack Wilson in Studio Art. From 1998 to 2003 he chaired the department of music. He is the author of many articles on computer music, American music, and theory. He is co-founder of the Leonardo Music Journal (1990) and has served on the board of directors of Perspectives of New Music and many other journals and organizations. His books include a recent critical edition of The Music of American Folksong by Ruth Crawford Seeger (with Judith Tick).

Susan Walp

Susan Walp creates intimate still life paintings. In future work, she plans to also pursue figure compositions, and some of the Guggenheim money will support hiring models.

Walp received her bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke College, and went on to study at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, the Skowhegan (Maine) School of Painting and Sculpture, and the MFA Program at Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Walp is represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York City. Other solo exhibitions include the Victoria Munroe Fine Art, Boston; the Hackett Freedman Gallery, San Francisco; the Fischbach Gallery, New York City; and the ISA Gallery, Montecastello di Vibio, Italy. She has won numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She moved to Vermont from New York City in 1985. In 1998, she started at Dartmouth as a Visiting Assistant Professor. She says that colleagues and students in Dartmouth's Studio Art Department have enriched both her rural life and her studio practice.

By JAMES DONNELLY

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