Specialization: Program Directors

Thomas Vacanti

Dance Program Director, Professor

A black and white headshot of Thomas Vacanti.
Thomas Vacanti (BS in Dance, Skidmore College ‘02. MFA in Dance, Smith College ’04) is Professor of Ballet and Director of the Dance Program at UMass Amherst. In 2012, Tom received one of UMass Amherst’s highest honors, The Distinguished Teaching Award.
A black and white headshot of Thomas 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

A black and white photograph of Miriam Piilonen.
Miriam Piilonen is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Theorizing Music Evolution: Darwin, Spencer, and the Limits of the Human (2024 OUP), a critical examination of ideas about musical origins, with emphasis on nineteenth-century music-evolutionary texts by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. Miriam’s research interests span a range of topics in the history of music theory, composition and songwriting, electronic music and sound production, and new media studies.
A black and white photograph of Miriam Piilonen.