For our midterm project, students did archival research at UVA's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library about the beginnings of UVA's music department in 1921. Our research focused on three topics:

• Arthur Fickenscher: the inaugural chair of UVA's music department, Fickenscher invented a microtonal keyboard called the "Polytone" that is now displayed in UVA's music library. Fickenscher was also an active community musician: he was music director for an early iteration of UVA's glee club, as well as the Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville.
• John Powell: a concert pianist, composer, ethnomusicologist, and UVA alumnus, Powell was an influential musical and political thinker in 1920s Virginia. Powell is now well-known for his white-supremacist beliefs and was an active figure in drafting and promoting Virginia's 1924 Racial Integrity Act.
• A musical pageant performed to honor the UVA centennial in 1921. Fickenscher music directed the pageant, while Powell composed an overture for it. Titled "In the Shadow of the Builder," the pageant tells the story of Jefferson designing UVA's architecture, and it featured an ensemble of female "Greek dancers," decades before women were admitted to UVA.
• During their research students engaged with a variety of archival artifacts, including handwritten letters, newspaper articles, concert programs and posters, photographs, and UVA's 1921 yearbook. Their blog posts put these archival objects into conversation and connect their objects to themes discussed in class including musical modernism, nationalism, race, and colonialism.