The William E. Gribbon Memorial Fund was established in 1989 to encourage and enable college and university students to attend the Society’s annual meetings.
2023 Gribbon Scholars
Jared Clous (Belgium) is a master’s student in instrument making at HoGent School of Arts, Ghent, focused on reconstructing historical spinets and virginals. He is especially interested in how builders approached such instruments. He is currently building a Haward 1689 model, and a 1715 Keene and Brackley.
Gordon Cortney (USA) is an undergraduate percussion performance major at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA, and a performer and educator. His research focuses on the gyil, a Ghanian xylophone, as the focal point of society for the Daraga people, who live in the Upper West region of the country. In summer 2022, Gordon studied gyil repertoire at the Daraga Music Center in Medie, Ghana. He plans to pursue ethnomusicological research after graduation.
Kamiel Dockx (Belgium) is a master’s student at HoGent School of Arts, Ghent, focusing on the making of organs and harpsichords. His current project is to build a hypothetical reconstruction of a Hauslaib claviorgan. He is also a carillonneur. Kamiel looks forward to sharing his work and meeting fellow builders, researchers, and students. He will present his paper “Reconstructing the Hauslaib Claviorgan” at the 2023 AMIS meeting.
Patrick Huang (Canada) is a PhD student at the University of Western Ontario. His research focuses on comparative study of Ancient Graeco-Latin and Early Chinese musical systems. He will present his paper “Why Seven: Polychordia and String Standardisation of Ancient Greek Lyre and Early Chinese Guqin” at the 2023 AMIS meeting.
Maeve Carey Kozlark (USA) is a PhD student in historical musicology at New York University. As a multi-instrumentalist and an archival scholar, she found organology often in her thoughts as she studied and worked. Her current research, based in immigration studies, focuses on how musical instruments “are constructed, performed, and taught … under conditions of post-colonialism, memory, migration, and displacement, particularly among Irish-American migrant populations.” She will present her paper “The Banjo and Irish Music Tradition” at the 2023 AMIS meeting.
Daniel Meachum (USA) is an undergraduate student studying music and performing arts at California State University, Monterey Bay. He plays multiple instruments, including guitars, fretted and fretless bass guitars, piano, organ, mandolin, banjo, and drum set. Daniel has a passion for luthiery and plans to build towards a career making studio equipment.
Bastian Neelen (Belgium) is a student at HoGent School of Arts, Ghent, his research focused on eighteenth-century Hamburg harpsichords. He looks forward to sharing knowledge with other makers, researchers, musicians, and organologists, to bring his research to a higher level. Bastian will present his paper “The Remarkable Design of a Fleischer Harpsichord” at the 2023 annual meeting.
Salomé Strauch (France) is at work on a PhD thesis on the evolutionary processes of Central African harps. Her work involves combining the tools of organology with those of life sciences to better understand the processes of diversification. Trained as a biologist, Salomé is a PhD student at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.
Zhiyu (Alex) Zhang (China),a musician, engineer, and designer, is working on a dual bachelor’s degree in music and computer science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.Alex’s interest is the intersection of music, culture, and technology—the “sweet spot” for the study of musical instruments. He has worked extensively with Chinese instruments as composer and performer, and he hopes to bridge the seemingly wide gap between instruments in China and the music traditions of the West. He will co-present (with Stewart Carter) the paper “Kangxi, Father Amiot, and ‘Improvements’ to Ritual Instruments in Eighteenth-Century China” at the 2023 annual meeting.