IU Music school professor shares money from award

Mary Wennerstrom was struck by an odd sensation upon receiving her latest academic commendation.\n"It's a little like reading your own obituary," she said with her characteristic laugh.\nWennerstrom, who is the associate dean of the Jacobs School of Music, was recently named the newest recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gail Boyd de Stwolinski Center for Music Theory Pedagogy, located at the University of Oklahoma. The award, which included $10,000, was presented at the annual conference of the Society for Music Theory in Los Angeles early last month. \nThe award is yet another star in the crown of a career many decades in the making, but she wants to share it with others.\n"My idea was to put the money towards establishing an endowment and use that for a teaching award," Wennerstrom said.\nThe IU Foundation, she explained, will accept endowments starting at $10,000 and pay out five percent interest, creating an annual award of $500 for outstanding graduate instructors of music theory.\nWennerstrom has been a part of IU history since the late 1950s, when she began her Bachelor of Music in piano performance. She also completed both her masters and doctoral degrees in Bloomington and was appointed to the music theory faculty as a lecturer in 1964.\n"I'm not sure I was ready (for the position)," Wennerstrom said. "It was definitely a trial by fire."\nHer teaching career began, she explained, just as the School of Music was dramatically increasing the size of its student body.\n"I once had two separate sections of 200 students," she said.\nWennerstrom would eventually serve over twenty years as chair of the Department of Music Theory, where she trained hundreds of graduate teaching assistants, including current faculty member Robert Hatten.\n"I was a student here in 1973," Hatten said, "and took Dr. Wennerstrom's pedagogy courses."\nLike Wennerstrom, Hatten holds both a master's and a doctoral degree from the School of Music. Hatten, who came to IU after teaching most recently at Pennsylvania State University, said his opinion of Wennerstrom has not diminished over the years.\n"She's still a great teacher," he said. "She's had an enormous impact on the curriculum. We still use her anthology, for instance."\nThe "Anthology of Twentieth-Century Music" is one of Wennerstrom's many publications, combining analytical and aural musical skills with a chronological study of music literature, and remains an integral part of IU's innovative music theory curriculum. Wennerstrom not only helped develop the curriculum, but also cultivated the vast system of assistant instructors who bear much of the responsibility for teaching the anthology to IU's music undergraduates.\nTimothy Best, who serves as a theory instructor and is also the president of the Graduate Theory Association, had nothing but praise for Wennerstrom.\n"I have taken two courses with professor Wennestrom and cannot emphasize enough what a brilliant and committed pedagogue she is," he said.\nAfter dedicating her career to the development of music theory educators such as Best, Wennerstrom has decided to pass on her recent award in a way that will honor their hard work and commitment to the field.\n"The fact that she has decided to use the award money in this way is such a reflection of her generosity and commitment to teaching," Best said. "The award will be a powerful incentive for AIs in the department to aspire to the kind of excellence that professor Wennerstrom embodies."\nWennerstrom said she could find nothing more appropriate to do with the money than to encourage and reward future educators.\n"It's nice to write articles and get published," she said. "It's how you get tenure, after all. But teaching is what we do"