Announcing the Don C. Gillespie Graduate Fellowship for Musicology/Ethnomusicology

The University of Georgia Hugh Hodgson School of Music is honored to announce the creation of the Don C. Gillespie Graduate Fellowship, made possible by a generous gift from Dr. Don Chance Gillespie’s estate.

Dr. Don Gillespie, a graduate of the University of Georgia’s School of Music (now Hugh Hodgson School of Music), led a rich long musical life. Though he may not have received the public recognition of performers and composers, his advocacy as a publisher made many significant musical works of the twentieth century possible. Much of his remarkable career was spent in New York City, working for the prestigious international music publishing house C. F. Peters.  

“We are so grateful for his gracious gift, which will provide important support to our graduate musicology students. These students will go on to have similar influences on the musical world. We are also very grateful to the Gillespie family for their efforts in making this gift possible as well as critical work in preserving valuable materials from the Don Gillespie estate that will now reside in the UGA Special Collections Library,” said Dr. Pete Jutras, director of the Hodgson School.

Over the course of his career at Peters, Gillespie acted as the interface between eminent American and other composers and their publisher. His collection contains thousands of letters, books, scores autographed by the composers, and numerous rare reel-to-reel tapes, LPs, and cassettes, documenting important performances and interviews with the composers. In his will he bequeathed both funds and a priceless collection of musical memorabilia to his alma mater.

“Thanks to this most generous gift, students and scholars interested in researching composers such as George Crumb, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and others will be able to use this collection at UGA to shed new light on the music, musicians, and musical life of 20th-century America. Highlights of the 19th-century portion include an original letter from Richard Wagner, and the manuscript of an early vocal suite by Richard Strauss,” said Professor David Haas. Another piece of the collection is a basket, which was a gift to Gillespie from the Norwegian government to recognize him for his role in discovering a large number of Edvard Grieg’s musical manuscripts, autographs and letters while at C.F. Peters.

PhD candidate, Jenn LaRue, is the first recipient of the Gillespie Fellowship. Her dissertation focuses on the music of the Nigerian composer and scholar Akin Euba (1935-2020), whose compositions incorporated Western and African musical idioms. LaRue uses qualitative methods and theoretical analysis to examine how Euba composes layers of musical meaning for both African and Western audiences. Her approach centers the creative process with an emphasis on Euba’s concept of creative ethnomusicology and raises questions of why we privilege certain ways of knowing and music making. LaRue's dissertation chair is Dr. Dr. Rumya Putcha, Assistant Professor of Music and Women's Studies.

"It is truly an honor to be the first recipient of the Gillespie Fellowship. This award allowed me the time and freedom to focus on my dissertation. I'm grateful to Dr. Gillespie's family for their efforts to remember him in this way, which will benefit musicology and ethnomusicology students at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music for years to come. Dr. Gillespie had a tremendous impact as an advocate for new music, and I hope I can follow in his footsteps as I advocate for African composers in my own research,” said LaRue.

Gillespie was born and raised in Metter, Georgia. After completing his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Georgia and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he moved to New York where he worked with C.F. Peters for 31 years until his retirement in 2002. He spent many years in New York supporting the new music scene and playing his friends’ compositions in ensembles around the city. Years later, Gillespie returned to his hometown of Metter where he resided until his death in October 2019.