Specialization: Program Directors

Thomas Vacanti

Professor

Tom Vacanti
Tom Vacanti
Matthew Westgate

Chair and Professor, Director of Wind Studies

Matthew Westgate sitting with hands clasped.
Conductor Matthew Westgate “leads with a combination of expressivity and crispness” (San Francisco Chronicle). His performances are praised as “dramatic, incisive, and passionate” (Audiophile Audition) and full of “verve and swagger” (MusicWeb International).
Matthew Westgate sitting with hands clasped.
Jeffrey W. Holmes

Professor, Director of Jazz & African American Music Studies, Composition, Conductor

Jeffrey W. Holmes.
Holmes plays keyboards with the Paul Winter Consort, leads the Jeff Holmes Big Band featuring his wife, vocalist Dawning Holmes, and plays lead trumpet with the New England Jazz Ensemble. Recent recordings as performer and/or composer/arranger include the Jeff Holmes Quartet release "Of One's Own," the New England Jazz Ensemble’s “Peter and The Wolf“, HGTS’s “…and then they played…” and projects by Paul Winter, colleague Felipe Salles, and Earl MacDonald. He continues to appear as a guest conductor/clinician/adjudicator and performer/composer/arranger.
Jeffrey W. Holmes.
Erinn E. Knyt

Professor, Music History

A headshot of Erinn Knyt.
Knyt specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, aesthetics, music history pedagogy, performance practice issues, and Bach reception, and has written extensively about Ferruccio Busoni. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including American Music, Eighteenth Century Music, Journal of Musicology, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Musicological Research, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Musicology Australia, Music and Letters, 19th-Century Music, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and Twentieth Century Music.
A headshot of Erinn Knyt.
Miriam Piilonen

Assistant Professor, Music Theory, Honors Program Director

Miriam Piilonen
Miriam Piilonen is a music theorist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist. She is the author of Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human (2024, Oxford University Press), a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, with emphasis on nineteenth-century music-evolutionary texts by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Her second book, currently in progress and tentatively titled Music Theory on the Internet, historicizes and critically analyzes “music theory” as it has appeared online from the 1960s to the present.
Miriam Piilonen