Featured Faculty

Dr. Daniel Koppelman          Dr. Trudy Fuller          Dr. Steven Walter

Piano and Music Technology Professor Dr. Daniel Koppelman

What do you get when you take a college student majoring in pre med and combine a love of gadgets, a talent for math and an ever-broadening interest in music? You get Daniel Koppelman and his career in music technology. 

For Koppelman, music technology brought together music and gadgets and numbers. “It’s a natural niche for me as a musician,” he says. “I love to work with things that are new and evolving.”

Pre-med morphed into music, and Koppelman went from UC Berkeley to UC-San Diego to San Francisco State, where he got his undergraduate degree in piano performance. His master’s at Indiana University followed not long afterwards, and then he headed back to UC-San Diego where he combined his interests in contemporary music, rhythm, and computers and completed his doctorate.

Koppelman explains that music technology takes many forms: the commercial side of recording and production; computer-aided-instruction; music notation software as well as burning cds, editing audition tapes. Then, his face lighting up, he says, “there is a small part: using technology in live performance in a creative way, doing things you just can’t do with acoustic instruments. My background as a performer makes this the most interesting part for me.”

For Koppelman, music technology is “like one big multifaceted instrument, which expands what you can do in real time, live in front of an audience.” And he does perform in front of a live audience on a regular basis. In addition to solo appearances, he and his wife, Ruth Neville, comprise duo runedako, performing a repertoire that ranges from “traditional literature for two pianos and piano four-hands to interactive works for piano, electronics, and computer.”

All music majors run into Koppelman in his Introduction to Music Technology course. In that class, in addition to introducing digital audio, MIDI, notation, and multimedia applications, he teaches about binary numbers and how computers process information. At that point, he jokes, he often sees students fall into two different types: “those who love math and those who, uh, don’t.”

His advanced courses are entirely different. They are filled with students whom he calls “the geeks, but in a good way,” those who like working with computers and electronics, solving puzzles and experimenting. “If you like that,” he says, “and love sound, then music technology is for you.”

Koppelman hails from fairly large educational institutions. And yet he seems to have settled in quite well at Furman, which he describes as “smaller than my high school.” He says that an experience in his first week set the tone for his professional life at Furman. “I was walking across campus and saw [President] David Shi. At these other places, you could go years and not see the president, so I was wondering if he would even remember who I was. To my surprise, he said to me, ‘Hi, Dan. I listened to your CD last night.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, I could really like it here.’”

He likes his students as well, and he characterizes them as “creative, talented, interested and interesting.” This year, he has eight students focusing on music technology, students who are “really enthusiastic, to the point of fighting over time in the advanced studio.” These students have discovered what Koppelman did in his combination of music, math and gadgets: “It’s one way of being a real 21st-century musician.”

In 2005, Koppelman was one of two Furman professors selected to receive a prestigious ‘Career Enhancement’ grant, funded by the Mellon Foundation. In addition to funding lectures and performances as far afield as Paris and Odessa (Ukraine), this award enabled him to commission four new compositions, which were premiered as part of a week-long “live sampling festival”—involving faculty colleagues, students, guest composers, and a visiting artist from Amsterdam—at Furman in May, 2006.

Koppelman recently released Escapement, a 2-disc CD/DVD set of 21st-century music for piano and electronics, which documents work he did while on sabbatical in 2003.

Voice Professor Dr. Trudy Fuller

When Trudy Fuller is teaching voice students at Furman, she pulls parallels from a lot of different areas: athletics, acting, literature, history, even archaeology. Singing, she says, is more than just, “Stand and Deliver.”

For Fuller, it’s a combination of the necessary abdominal strength and flexibility, the proper technique to avoid injury, the extremes way outside of speaking voice range. It’s a constant discovery in finding out the nature of a student’s voice, and then encouraging that student to not only sing, but play the part. And, it’s the literature, the history, the knowledge of what’s gone on before.

When all those things come together for someone, “that person can be formidable on the stage,” she says.

And she should know. She’s been fairly formidable on the stage herself, having appeared with such major American opera companies as the Houston Grand Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. And she’s been a major influence for some formidable voices such as mezzo-soprano Betsy Bishop, profiled on the student profiles page.

A graduate of the University of Arizona where she earned a doctoral of music arts in vocal performance, Fuller grew up playing piano, flute and saxophone. Her formal vocal training began at the University of Northern Colorado, where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She also studied in Chicago at the Center for American Artists, where she trained for opera. In addition to voice, she says, ballet movement, fencing and personal coaching rounded out her studies.

Fuller has been at Furman since 1983. In 2003, she received the Alester G. Furman, Jr., and Janie Earle Furman Award for Meritorious Teaching. She’s clearly telling the truth when she says, “I love acting. I love singing. I love music.” But her eyes light up when she talks about the students she teaches.

“You get to know them,” she says. “You see them weekly, more than weekly. You see them grow. They come in undecided. And there are so many opportunities at Furman…recitals, concerts. The faculty here helps them decide where their niche is.”

The scores of successful graduates who have studied with her and the fortunate voice students who make up her current studio share the good fortune that Trudy Fuller found her own niche at Furman.

Guitar Professor Dr. Steven Walter

As a teenager, when Steven Walter asked for a guitar, his dad thought it was just another phase, and he told him that if we wanted one, he’d have to build it himself.

He had no idea what he had started.

Walter and a friend, whose father was an amateur cabinet maker, set out to build a classical guitar. His friend’s guitar was meticulous, but never completed. “I got mine done,” he says, “but it was like Picasso’s guitar— asymmetrical. But it worked. It was mine.”

And that guitar was the first of many. “I’d build one, play that one, build another one, sell that. I did that all the way through college and my first year of grad school.” His second year at Boston Conservatory, his parents gave him a concert-quality instrument and he quit building for the next six years, finishing his master’s degree and beginning his doctoral studies at Florida State.

At Florida State, he found himself one of 50 guitar majors and none of them knew how to fix guitars. “So I began repairing,” he says. “I learned a lot about what made really fine instruments. Plus it paid for my rent and my wife’s engagement ring.”

Repairing instruments got him back into building them, and after his 16th or 17th, he realized the ones he was building were as good or better than the one he was playing. He’s been playing his own ever since, and building more, four at a time.

Walter has been at Furman since 1997, teaching music appreciation and music history in addition to giving guitar lessons, building guitars and performing. Teaching at Furman, he says, is fun and challenging. “Furman isn’t a school where you have to stay a few days ahead of the students; here, you have to stay a few years ahead.” He characterizes music majors at Furman as “a pretty driven group,” undergraduates who perform at a high level.

Master craftsman, gifted teacher, acclaimed performer. What gives him the most satisfaction? That all depends on when you ask the question. Summers, he works on building guitars, up to his elbows in wood shavings. In the fall, teaching is more consuming, and guitar building gets put on hold till Christmas break. Most of his concerts are in the winter and spring, when he’s not building guitars, since that process results in nicked fingernails, problematic for a concert guitarist.

Most days, though, he’ll tell you it’s a combination of all three, punctuated by the challenge of raising two children, now four and two. That has added a new dimension to his life and to his music, particularly preparing for concerts. “The level of concentration to memorize an hour or more of music is really challenging with the freneticism of small children in your life,” he says.