Kennesaw State University’s Bobbie Bailey School of Music is expanding the scope of undergraduate education by integrating research, cultural exploration, and international collaboration into its music curriculum. This summer, assistant professor Dr. Stephen Wadsack and undergraduate student Brandon Hall conducted an eight-week study focused on Greek trumpet compositions, a field that has received little attention in the broader music community.
Dr. Wadsack has spent two years studying the teaching methods and performance traditions of Greek trumpet musicians. He guided Hall through works that are rarely performed or largely unknown outside Greece. “This music is highly underrepresented and almost all of it is not in circulation,” Wadsack said. “We were looking at pieces that the broader music community doesn’t know exists.”
The project included efforts to preserve living history by documenting oral histories from original composers who are still alive. With support from KSU’s Undergraduate Research Symposium, Wadsack and Hall are building a database to make these works accessible for future performers and scholars.
Their research culminated with travel to Greece, where Hall and three other KSU students participated in a music festival on Corfu Island. The group attended masterclasses each morning and rehearsed with the local Mantzaros Philharmonic under Sokratis Anthis in the evenings. The week concluded with an outdoor concert for World Music Day, featuring both KSU students and Greek musicians.
For Hall, this was his first time traveling outside the United States. “Even traveling after Corfu in Athens and the Acropolis, music was everywhere,” he said. “The rocks are older than Jesus Christ; and the music connects it all. It was incredible.”
Hall is a senior trumpet performance major at KSU and president of the university’s Trumpet Club. He has advanced twice to the National Trumpet Competition, which selects about fifty top collegiate trumpeters nationwide from thousands of applicants each year. He plans to feature some of the Greek repertoire discovered during his research in his upcoming senior recital. Hall emphasized how important it was to have support for independent exploration: “The grant gave me the opportunity to dive in and pursue leads rather than being constrained by geography,” he said.
Wadsack noted that this project represents progress for arts research within academia: “Within academia, research in STEM-related fields is often favored over other disciplines,” he said. “So, to have a project focused on applied music be accepted into the university’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program is significant for the fine and performing arts, both here at KSU and beyond.”
Hall reflected on his experience by saying: “I love music and learning all aspects of it. My time here and this research has shown me that performance and scholarship don’t have to be separate; they make each other stronger.”
