Music and Dance
Fanfare for Oregon
The University of Oregon composes a music and dance facility for the twenty-first century.

The School of Music and Dance has long been one of the University’s brightest beacons. One of the oldest comprehensive music programs in the West, it’s also become one of the best in recent years, with faculty quality and enrollment numbers soaring. The 600-seat Beall Hall, one of the nation’s finest concert venues of its size, provides a splendid showcase for everything from student recitals to faculty performances to appearances by some of the world’s top chamber music ensembles. The school serves not only University students and faculty members, but also many community groups, and it hosts statewide contests and workshops for Oregon middle and high school students.

JACK LIU
The new Leona DeArmond Academic Wing will provide teaching studios, classrooms, performance space, and student practice rooms.

Yet the school has been a victim of its own success, as the burgeoning ranks of top-notch students and faculty musicians put untenable pressure on the 1920s-era facilities, still used despite its outdated acoustical properties. Building additions in 1951 and 1978 failed to keep pace with the school’s growth. Designed for 300 music majors, the building strained under the presence of 500 majors and 4,000 nonmajors; the faculty and staff size has increased by a third in the past decade. But this spring the school is being reborn as an architectural makeover provides new space and facilities suitable for a twenty-first-century music school.

The expansion and renovation, coordinated on the school’s side by assistant to the dean and project manager Janet Stewart, increased the building’s square footage by 50 percent to 90,000, providing desperately needed teaching studios, staff offices, rehearsal areas and practice rooms (students were known to practice in restrooms and stairwells at night), and community spaces. Financed by legislative bonding approved in 2001 and a private fundraising campaign that exceeded matching it by nearly $3 million, the project was designed by a team led by Portland’s Boora Architects, nationally renowned for their work in educational and performing arts facilities, including the Portland Center for the Performing Arts.

The new Thelma Schnitzer Performance Wing boasts a 3,000-square-foot instrumental rehearsal hall capacious enough to accommodate the entire UO symphony. It also adds practice rooms, faculty teaching studios, jazz and percussion studios, a new recording studio, and a freight elevator, which will save the backs of many future percussionists who have to haul literally tons of gear.

The other substantial addition, the Leona DeArmond Academic Wing next to Pioneer Cemetery, adds twenty-eight faculty teaching studios, office space, teaching studios for the Community Music Institute, three new classrooms (including a sixty-five-seat music education teaching lab that can double as a small and informal performance space), and more studios and practice rooms. The new learning spaces are acoustically isolated, bright with natural light, and environmentally friendly—earning a LEED Silver rating for features including a “green” roof that captures rain runoff and quiet-running, energy-efficient lighting, air conditioning, and heating that provides the controlled temperatures and humidity needed for temperamental instruments. Many of the rooms are flexible, easily converted to accommodate various kinds of teaching and performance practices students need to succeed in a turbulent music business that’s changing more rapidly than ever.

The project also looked beyond classrooms. With artistic boundaries falling everywhere, and musical creativity rising as a result, it’s essential that students from various disciplines (performance and composition, say, or electronic music and jazz) have informal places to talk and show each other new ideas. “It’s common in almost all educational planning now to recognize that a lot of learning occurs not just in the classroom but in the corridors” and elsewhere, explains Tom Pene ’71, M.Arch. ’74, who headed the design team along with fellow Boora principal Amy Donohue, UO adjunct professor for architectural design. “But the building was defined by hallways—there was no there there.” The spacious new lounge area and a number of other comfortable crannies provide such social spaces. “The idea was to create an area where students felt they had a home and a center—what the University describes as a hearth space, a gathering place for students to perform and just hang out,” says Pene, whose class in music appreciation with professor Robert Trotter kindled a lifelong love of classical music, including service on the board of Portland’s Chamber Music Northwest. The remodel brings the building into compliance with health, safety, and disabled-access codes and adds restrooms, some of which had been converted to faculty offices (producing both bathroom humor and long lines at concert intermissions). And it dramatically improves the acoustics. A stroll through the halls of the old building was a symphony—or actually a cacophony—in motion. In various rooms, students practiced dozens of different instruments, playing in numerous styles—not just orchestral music, but also voice, electric and electronic sounds, world music, jazz, even rock. Sound leaked from one area to the other, giving students an additional obstacle to overcome as they worked to learn their already challenging passages.

Not all the improvements took place inside. Along with two new wheelchair ramps, the design included a new service road, a new campus gateway structure along East 18th Avenue, bike parking, landscaping, drainage improvements, and a brick floor for the courtyard that will make it usable for events throughout much more of the year. The new additions were designed to match the classic old building, which was also spruced up. The music school refurbishing, along with similar improvements to the College of Education now nearing completion, should give the University’s south side a more welcoming face, and better connect the area to the heart of campus. The project’s price tag came to $19.2 million, with the new wings named after two of the three lead donors; the third, Lorry Lokey, asked that the main building be named the MarAbel B. Frohnmayer Music Building, after UO President Dave Frohnmayer’s mother. She graduated from the school in 1932, followed by two of her children, both of whom went on to became music professors. “Music was really the theme of her life,” said one of them, Philip Frohnmayer ’72, “the glue that held the family together.”

The remodel produced a much more inviting, embracing, efficient, and educationally advanced music building. “Our success makes us always have to play catch up with facilities and furnishings,” says Brad Foley, dean of the School of Music and Dance, who inherited the project from his predecessor, Anne Dhu McLucas. “It’s taken the building this long to catch up. That’s a good problem to have. We’re going to see even more success in the future because of the quality of these new facilities.”

Still, this round of rebuilding omitted a major proposed item that had to be left off the list, as it would have consumed the entire budget: a new, flexible performance hall that can stage the kind of multimedia, dance, and theater performances that Beall Hall’s concert-only setting can’t. Nevertheless, the architects made sure that the redesigned space could easily accommodate a new hall someday. Maybe that’ll be the coda to the never-ending composition that is the School of Music and Dance.

—Brett Campbell, M.S. ’96

The school hosted an open house on Sunday, March 1, followed by a concert at Eugene’s Hult Center for the Performing Arts. The official dedication ceremony was scheduled for March 6.

Web Extra!
Go to music.uoregon.edu for more information.

Anthropology
Oral Histories
Professor John Lukacs explains why prehistoric women had bad teeth.

A few 100,000 years ago, the plat du jour was fire-roasted woolly mammoth with sprinklings of nuts, and berries on the side. Mobile bands of stone-wielding men chased migrating beasts while women foraged for edible roots and established temporary cave shelters. In time, the constant moving got old.

JIM BARLOW
John Lukacs examining teeth in a 250,000-year-old skull from Africa

Quitting their nomadic lifestyle in favor of crop cultivation, most of these primitive peoples survived long enough to reproduce. They evolved into Homo sapiens farmers. Saber-tooth tigers ate the unlucky ones, who rather rapidly devolved into teeth and bones.

By studying prehistoric teeth and bones, UO anthropology professor John Lukacs has shown that as hunter-gatherers settled down into agrarian communities—about 10,000 years ago—the incidence of dental caries (cavities) in women rose in comparison to their male companions. He says our ancestors’ increasingly sedentary lifestyle gave rise to women’s higher fertility rates. Linking pregnancy with higher levels of sex hormones, calcium-depleted saliva, food cravings and aversions, Lukacs says that prehistoric women’s dramatic decline in oral health was inevitable.

He recently published his findings in Current Anthropology. The article questioned long-standing assertions among dental anthropologists. Most of his colleagues believe diet change and division of labor among the sexes associated with agrarian cultures resulted in the difference in cavity numbers between prehistoric men and women. Another popular theory posits that women have a genetic predisposition to cavities. But Lukacs is “absolutely convinced” that higher fertility rates also play a significant role in explaining the disparity in oral health between the sexes.

Lukacs first studied anthropology in the late 1960s at Syracuse University. His father was a physician, and he says he was naturally drawn to biology and anatomy. In 1977 he received his Ph.D. in evolution and anthropology from Cornell University, where he was first introduced to dental anthropology. He wanted “to figure out who is related to whom by determining biological affinity through tooth morphology.”

For his recent work on cavities, Lukacs began by comparing teeth from persons living in western India with teeth excavated from archaeological sites on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. After finding that females suffered from cavities more than males—both in living and ancient peoples—he wondered how lifestyle, ecology, genetics, and the environment affected oral health. Our ancestors’ transition from spearing woolly mammoths to growing wheat and barley offered the perfect before-and-after conditions to serve as a model for investigating these questions.

Lukacs gathered data from 142 scientific reports on cavities—about 150,000 teeth—in humans living from 12,000 to 800 years ago. He calculated that, among hunter-gatherers, less than 1 percent of men’s teeth showed signs of cavities while about 4 percent of women’s teeth had cavities. During the transition time between hunter-gatherer and agriculture-based societies, men’s cavity rate was about 2 percent while women’s cavity rate was about 6 percent. Those numbers jumped to 10 percent and 18 percent, respectively, when agrarian communities were firmly established. Lukacs’ results were clear: farming females had more cavities than their male counterparts regardless of when or where they lived.

The transition from hunting-gathering to farming promoted a comparatively sedentary lifestyle for both sexes. Diets changed because both men and women became less reliant on hunting and more reliant on grains. Historically women had greater access to food because they were processing, storing, and cooking it. Lukacs says that all of these factors dramatically increased fertility rates. Further, he says that multiple pregnancies caused women’s saliva to become calcium depleted—the mineral was needed for fetal development—and therefore more acidic. And high mouth acidity promoted tooth decay.

Lukacs expected his work to raise a few eyebrows, particularly among anthropologists who maintain diet and behavior, and not increased fertility rates, explain why agrarian women have more cavities than men. But since such research is generally considered neither glamorous nor of general interest he was surprised to learn that, earlier this year, the popular magazine Glamour ran an article on his work: Quick question: Who’s the cavity king or queen in your relationship? “My work was relevant 10,000 years ago,” he says. “The objective of my research was not to provide health guidelines for modern women.”

Lukacs is now examining the teeth of nonhuman primates—orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees—for evidence of dental disease. The project started when a student asked him to identify a skull, which turned out to be a juvenile orangutan with a complete set of baby teeth. Four of them had enamel defects that looked exactly like humans’ enamel defects. “I was startled, impressed to find the same defect in not so closely related species. No one had documented this before.”

Luckacs has extended his studies to include australopithecines—a distant human ancestor—who lived about four million years ago. With funds from the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation, Lukacs travels to archaeological museums in Ethiopia, South Africa, and Kenya to examine their Australopithecus tooth collections. “The results will give us a window into the health of our ancestors at a stage we know nothing about.”

—Michele Taylor, M.S. ’03

RARE Program
Rural Renewal
Planners roll up sleeves to help big state’s smaller cities.

With the economy tanking, cities—especially rural cities—are struggling to cope with present conditions and to plan for the future. A University of Oregon program is helping with that preparation. Twenty-five college graduates and graduate-level students have fanned out to all corners of Oregon—from Pendleton and Vale to Warrenton and Port Orford—to work in community planning projects. The Resource Assistance for Rural Environments (RARE) program, administered by the University of Oregon’s Community Service Center, is focused on helping improve the economic, social, and environmental conditions of Oregon’s rural communities.

MAP AND PHOTO COURTESY RARE PROGRAM
Team members of this year’s community service internships from the University of Oregon’s RARE program (photo) are now working in towns across Oregon. The map shows the communities in which RARE has been active in the past fifteen years.

Laurel Reimer, a twenty-two-year-old UCLA graduate, is a RARE participant working as a hazard mitigation specialist. Reimer is helping Clackamas County cities develop plans to prepare for and recover from natural hazards such as floods and earthquakes. In search of a job related to urban planning and the environment, Reimer welcomed the chance to participate in the program. “I saw the RARE program as a great opportunity for professional development, personal growth, and a chance to experience a new community,” she says.

RARE participants come from a variety of backgrounds and bring to their communities a wide range of experiences. They receive special training in areas such as citizen involvement, outreach and communication, land-use planning, grant writing, and project management. A full-time RARE worker provides community service for eleven months (1,700 hours).

Examples of the kinds of RARE projects that have taken place across the state include implementing a county-wide tourism master plan, facilitating the coordination of a “green business” campaign, designing a citizen involvement program for a watershed council, assisting rural residents with small business skills, coordinating development of a citywide economic revitalization plan, and enhancing local farmers’ markets.

Participants are attracted to the RARE program from all over the country. Virginia Elandt graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, with degrees in geography and urban planning. She’s working with the City of Roseburg to improve and revitalize the downtown area and find creative ways to use vacant space and empty buildings. “I’m working directly with the City Council, Chamber of Commerce, Economic Development Commission, and local business owners to improve the economic conditions and provide more stability.” Elandt sees RARE as a great way to gain practical experience before applying to graduate school.

The program is now in its fifteenth year and has provided more than 300 participants to work for local communities (see map). In recognition of the long-term benefits of the RARE program, The Ford Family Foundation, based in Roseburg, has given the program a three-year $235,000 grant. The funding will help the program plan for its own long-term growth and sustainability. The UO provided matching funds of $110,000 from the provost’s office and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies.

PROFile
Dennis Galvan
Associate Professor International Studies

JOHN BAUGUESS

The Popular Republic of Misericordia isn’t a country you will find listed in any atlas. You can’t buy its exports and will never travel there on vacation. But for the 240 students in Dennis Galvan’s Perspectives on International Development class, the political, social, and economic future of Misericordia is a subject of impassioned debate.

Galvan, an associate professor of international studies, created the fictitious nation to give his undergraduate students a skin-in-the-game learning experience that sums up the course’s lessons. As an undergraduate at Stanford, Galvan participated in a role-playing simulation similar to the one he’s designed for his students, and he cites the experience as one of the most memorable lessons of his entire education. “There’s something about it that really sticks with you,” he says.

On the last day of class, students convene at Misericordia’s national conference, where they elect a new leader and determine the country’s economic future. Each student plays a specific role at the mock conference, acting as, for example, foreign aid donors, business people, representatives of political parties, members of the former royal family, and leaders of the military junta. After a term of studying the development of societies from sixteenth century Europe to modern-day China, Galvan’s students apply their historical and theoretical knowledge to advocate for their particular position as they collectively try to solve Misericordia’s many problems. The result is an experience Galvan fondly calls “chaotic,” as students suggest ideas, challenge each other’s positions, cajole, compromise, clash, and bargain their way toward a new government.

For many students, Galvan says, the Misericordia experience provides the moment when the term’s individual facts and ideas suddenly form a bigger truth about the complexities and challenges inherent in solving the problems of any society. Galvan’s hope is that his students—regardless of whether or not they decide to major in international studies—will be inspired by their experiences governing a fictional nation to travel, work, or study abroad in very real foreign countries. “No matter what the career you’ve chosen for yourself,” Galvan says, “international experience and exposure pulls you out of your comfort zone and starts to make you look at the world through different eyes.”

Name: Dennis Galvan

Education: B.A. ’87 in international relations, Stanford; M.A. ’90 and Ph.D. ’96 in political science, University of California at Berkeley.

Teaching experience: Member of the UO international studies and political science faculties since 2001, head of the International Studies Program since 2004. Assistant professor at the University of Florida from 1997 to 2001. Visiting lecturer at Berkeley, 1996–97.

Awards: Numerous teaching awards, including the UO’s Thomas F. Herman Faculty Achievement Award for Distinguished Teaching for 2008, as well as UO Mortar Board Professor of the Term for fall 2007.

Off campus: A self-proclaimed “tinkerer,” Galvan is currently building a fourteen-foot wooden sailboat and loves to go flat-water kayaking with his wife and their two sons.

Last word: “We have to come to grips with the fact that we have one view, and it’s part of a conversation. We need to be engaged in that conversation.”

— Mindy Moreland, M.S. ’08