ABOUT
Janice Macaulay received her doctor of musical arts degree in composition from Cornell University, where she studied composition with Karel Husa and Steven Stucky. A native of Rhode Island, she holds a bachelor of arts degree magna cum laude in English (Phi Beta Kappa) and master’s degrees in both English and music from Brown University.
Awards have included the Alex Shapiro Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music for Kaleidoscope for wind symphony, Best of Category Prizes for Chamber Music and Vocal Music in the International Delius Composition Competition for Three Pieces for String Quartet and for Love Poems of Emily Dickinson for soprano and piano.
She received Special Commendations from the International League of Women Composers for Elegy for Orchestra and for Brass Quintet as well as an Honorable Mention for the IAWM’s Judith Zaimont Prize for C. D. D. in memoriam for solo viola, three grants from Meet The Composer, two grants from the Cornell Council on the Creative Arts, and a grant from the National Women’s Music Resource Center for a special reading session of Orbits for orchestra by the Bay Area Women’s Philharmonic. Her music has been performed at the Charles Ives Center for American Music, at colleges and universities across the country, and at numerous regional and national conferences of the Society of Composers, Inc. and of the International Alliance of Women in Music.
With forty years’ experience teaching music history, theory, and keyboard performance as well as conducting chorus, orchestra, and chamber ensembles, Dr. Macaulay has also served as Vice President of the Maryland-area Council for Higher Education in Music. She was Associate Professor and Music Department Coordinator at Anne Arundel Community College (Arnold, MD), and coordinated the theory, keyboard, and chamber music programs at Wells College (Aurora, NY). She has also taught music theory and appreciation at Brown University, Cornell University, and at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where she taught Expanded Harmony, Writing Music, Twentieth-Century Techniques, Introduction to Music, Instrumentation, and Special Topics in Music, Art, and Society: Women in Music.
She has lectured on a wide variety of musical topics for the Elderhostel program at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, including The Nine Symphonies of Beethoven, 1791: Mozart’s Last Year, Beethoven: The Early Years, Music and Culture in Classical Vienna, Beethoven: The Middle Years, Mozart’s Symphonies, Beethoven: The Later Years, Stravinsky and the Russian Ballet, The Music of Béla Bartók, Orchestration, Don Giovanni, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, Women in Music, Music Along the Danube, Elements of Style, and Amadeus: Fact or Fiction?
For more than a decade as a Visiting Tutor in the Graduate Institute in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD), she taught across the curriculum, including seminars in philosophy, literature, political science, and the history of science. She has also led Community Seminars on classic texts, including Huckleberry Finn, Gulliver’s Travels, Walden, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, Don Quixote, The Republic, The Prince, Shakespeare’s History Plays, Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda, Persuasion and Emma, All the King’s Men, Go Down, Moses and As I Lay Dying, The Raj Quartet, Frankenstein, Dracula, The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, Howard’s End and A Passage to India, O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, Animal Farm and 1984, It Can’t Happen Here, and The Handmaid’s Tale. She has also taught Special Topics: The Prince in Politics and Literature in the Honors College at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.