April Greenan
Director, McKay Music Library
Musicology
PhD - University of Maryland at College Park
MA and BM - University of Utah
Specializing in European art music of the 18th century, Dr. Greenan has twice been invited to present her research at the annual meeting of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Oxford University. She has given papers at national meetings of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
She is the author of the entry for Eingang in New Grove II and a contributing author to the Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment to be published in 2009. She edited the musical texts in Johann Adam Hiller's treatise Anweisung zum musikalisch-zierlichen Gesange [Treatise on Vocal Performance and Ornamentation], first published in 1780, for the English translation published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Greenan's secondary area of research follows the history of music in the United States and particularly the role of music as both an agent of and impediment to what historian David Roediger calls “the whitening of America.”
She has written chapters on the multicultural origins of Western music and on women as performers and teachers for the textbook, Music: A Multicultural Experience, by Shelley Davis and Karl Signell published by Kendall/Hunt.
She often lectures on the intersections of music and science and is especially interested in how the human brain processes and responds to music. Since 2002 she has worked closely with Mr. Kim Peek, on whom the movie Rain Man (1988) was modelled. Dr. Greenan discovered that Mr. Peek, a mega-savant, possesses unprecedented musical abilities in addition to his exceptional memory and calculation skills. Her work with Mr. Peek has been documented in Scientific American, The Sunday Telegraph (London), and Spektrum der Wissenschaft. She has appeared in eleven internationally broadcast television documentaries on savant syndrome and related topics for The Discovery Channel, National Geographic Television, Channel ARTE (Europe), Spiegel TV (Germany), CBC TV (Canada), and other production companies in Australia, Poland, and Japan.
Bringing her research into the classroom, Dr. Greenan teaches courses in music of the Classical era and American music. She teaches the rite-of-passage bibliography course for graduate music students and has taught in the University's Honors College for several years. She is an ardent proponent of the centuries-old liberal arts education, and encourages students to cultivate a multidisciplinary philosophy of learning.
Dr. Greenan is the founding director of McKay Music Library, a learning center that provides multimedia materials and technology essential to the study of music. With over 13,000 CD recordings, DVDs, scores, books, and state-of-the-art notation, composition, and mixing and editing equipment and software, McKay Library primarily serves the students and faculty of the School of Music and welcomes the University community.
Dr. Greenan has appeared as a vocal soloist on the Nova Chamber Music Series, with the Salt Lake Symphony, the Riverton Metropolitan Orchestra, the University of Utah Symphony, and in recital.
From 1997 to 1999 she served as associate director of the Maryland Boy Choir, an ensemble that has performed at the White House, the Kennedy Center, and throughout North America. Just prior to joining the faculty at the University of Utah School of Music, Dr. Greenan conducted the Choir on tour in Romania. The Maryland Boy Choir received the 1999 Grammy award for best choral performance.