School of Music - Stanley C. Pelkey
Stanley C. Pelkey (2005)
Musicology
B.A. Asbury
M.A. Eastman
M.A. Rochester
Ph.D. Eastman
He was the first musicologist nationwide to receive a prestigious Pew Younger Scholars Graduate Fellowship to support his graduate studies. Trained as both a musicologist and a historian, at WMU, he teaches courses in music history and literature, research methods, and ethnomusicology. He was previously on the faculty at Gordon College in Massachusetts, and he also has been an instructor at Eastman.
His research focuses on American film and television music, as well as various aspects of English musical culture, including piano and organ music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Handel reception history, and the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. His research has been supported by awards from the American Handel Society, London Handel Institute, and Presser Foundation. He was also the recipient of the 2009 Ralph Vaughan Williams Fellowship. He has presented numerous papers at scholarly conferences, co-edited Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines (University Press of Mississippi, 2005), has authored entries for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, as well as numerous book reviews, and contributed to the collection Music in the Whedonverse (Scarecrow Press, 2009), edited by Kendra Preston Leonard.
A tenor and an organist, he has served as Director of Music for a number of churches and has been featured on recitals in New York, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Michigan. His organ teachers include Mark Schell, Katie Pardee, Russell Saunders, Michael Farris, and Karl Schrock. He has also studied North Indian tabla with Jerry Leake and plays the Native American flute.
Email: stanley.pelkey@wmich.edu