The School of Music will honor two Distinguished Award recipients at its annual Honors Convocation on Monday evening, April 25.
Diane Touliatos-Miles (Professor, University of Missouri - St. Louis) will be presented with the 2016 Distinguished Alumnus Award. The honor is bestowed in recognition of the important contributions she has made in musicology. She has been called “America’s most distinguished scholar of Byzantine music and one of the leading scholars in this field throughout the world.” She was awarded both M.A. and Ph.D. by The Ohio State University. Dr. Touliatos-Miles will present a special lecture entitled Kassia, the First Female Composer: Beautiful, Talented - but Too Brilliant to Become Empress on Monday, April 25 from 1:30 to 3 p.m. at the 18th Avenue Library, 175 W. 18th, Room 205. The lecture is free and open to the public.
A. Peter Costanza (Professor and Assistant Director Emeritus in the School of Music) will receive the 2016 Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his service at the Ohio State School of Music in multiple areas such as music education, information retrieval, music testing and research. He also served as Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Music, as a member of three University Committees and four Graduate School committees at Ohio State. He has served the Ohio House of Representatives and currently serves the Boards of Trustees of ProMusica Chamber Orchestra and the Columbus Children's Choir.
Diane Touliatos-Miles has been called “America’s most distinguished scholar of Byzantine music and one of the leading scholars in this field throughout the world.” She now adds the honorific “The Ohio State University School of Music Distinguished Alumnus, 2016” to a long list of distinctions she has received. After being awarded both the M.A. (1975) and the Ph.D. (1979) by The Ohio State University, she joined the faculty of the School of Music at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, where she was promoted to full professor in 1989 and was named University of Missouri Curators’ Professor in 2007, the first woman from the UMSL campus to be given this honor. In 1997 the UMSL faculty in Arts and Sciences elected her Director of its Center for the Humanities. She has published five books and over sixty articles on an impressively wide spectrum of topics in Byzantine music, ranging from her studies of the orthros, or Byzantine morning office, through various theoretical topics, such as the music treatise of Ioannes Plousiadenos, to her work on women composers in Byzantium, foremost among them being Kassia, the earliest female composer known by name, and whose works have been preserved. Indeed, Dr. Touliatos-Miles is the world’s foremost authority on Kassia, and has done a great service to the field of early music by making Kassia’s music available in modern editions. She has also performed an invaluable service to the scholarly community at large with the publication of A Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Manuscript Collection of the National Library of Greece: Byzantine Chant and Other Music Repertory Recovered (Farnham, Surrey, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). With manuscript titles and contents in Greek and English, commentaries in English, as well as bibliographies on each manuscript, the Catalogue is an indispensable reference source for musicologists, hymnodists, Byzantinists, and patristic scholars around the world.
A. Peter Costanza is Professor and Assistant Director Emeritus in the School of Music. After receiving his B.S. in Music Education from West Chester University, he taught elementary and secondary instrumental music in the Central Dauphin Schools, just outside of Harrisburg, PA. During that time, he completed a M.Ed. in Music Education from The Pennsylvania State University. After completing his Ed.D. in Music Education from Penn State, he was appointed an assistant professor at Penn State where he was the project director for “The Many Sounds of Music,” an Educational Television Series for Junior High students funded from a grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Education.
Upon coming to Ohio State, he served the School of Music in many areas, including Chairman of the Music Education Division; Director of the Information Retrieval System, a database of experimental research in the Arts; Director of the Music Testing Center, where he was responsible for the administration and maintenance of the School of Music Achievement Tests; Co-Director of the Center for Experimental Activities in the Arts; and Director of Graduate Studies. Ohio State University Committees of which he was a member include the University Task Force for revision of Master of Education degree, University Task Force on the Visual/Performing Arts Requirement, and the University Unconditional Admissions Committee. He also was a member of all four Graduate School Committees. His research has been published in journals at both the state levels (Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania) and in the Journal of Research in Music Education. His articles have appeared in many state and national publications and presentations have been made at national, state and local meetings, including The National Association for Music Education national meetings and CIC meetings in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
During his time at Ohio State, Dr. Costanza served as advisor to 58 Ph.D. students. He served as a Consultant/Evaluator of graduate programs in Music for both the Ohio Board of Regents and the New York Regents. Upon his retirement from Ohio State, he became the Senior Legislative Aide and Budget Analyst for the Ohio House of Representatives Finance and Appropriations Committee, a position he held for 12 years. He served as a member of the Board of Trustees and currently is Chair of the Trustees Circle of the ProMusica Orchestra. He also served as a member of the Board of Trustees and currently is a member of the Advisory Council of the Columbus Children’s Choir. He is married to Jayne Wenner and has two sons, Christopher and wife Eser and David, wife Robin and granddaughters, Zoe and Thalia.