Dr. Janet Nepkie, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Legal Issues in the Music Industry and Music Industry Internship, Catskill Symphony.

Year Hired: 1970

Tenure Status: Tenured 1977

Degrees Earned:
Ph.D. in Related Arts from New York University
M.M. in Music Performance from The University of Michigan
B.M. in Music, Certificate in Music Education from The University of Michigan

Dr. Janet Nepkie started SUNY Oneonta's Music Industry program in 1982 and is its principal designer. She is a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor and Coordinator of the extensive Music Industry Internship Program. She has been nationally profiled as one of the leading Music Industry Educators in ROLLING STONE magazine and was interviewed for Pollstar Magazine.

She is active in the development of Distance Learning initiatives and policies and has taught online and hybrid classes to an international audience. She developed and taught a course on virtual promotion and event production in the virtual world, Second Life.com. She has taught an online course for the SUNY Learning Network entitled Copyright for Higher Education.

She has presented four conferences to national audiences on Teaching and Technology: Copyright for Higher Education. She enrolls in Music and Entertainment Industry seminars on a yearly basis with the Practising Law Institute and has completed a seminar at Cornell University entitled "Computer Law and Policy."

Dr. Nepkie developed and taught the first Honors course for the Music Department and she served on the college-wide Honors Committee. She has served as Chair of the University Faculty Senate Undergraduate Academic Programs and Policies Committee, Chair of the Senate Ethics and Institutional Integrity Committee, Chair of the Senate Programs and Awards Committee and Chair of the Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Grading Authority. She is past-President of the Music and Entertainment Industry Educators Association, an international organization of music educators and business executives.

She is the SUNY Oneonta Teaching, Learning, and Technology Fellow for Copyright Inquiry and Implementation.  She is the Chair of the SUNY Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching & Technology and she chairs the FACT2 Task Group on Intellectual Property. She is a member of the Copyright Society of the USA and has served on the Board of Trustees of that organization. She is principal 'cellist with the Glimmerglass Opera Company, the Catskill Symphony Orchestra and she also works with numerous symphonies, chamber ensembles, and in recording studios where she has performed on recordings of albums, movie soundtracks and jingles.

Dr. Timothy Newton, Associate Professor ,

Year Hired: 2007

Tenure Status: Eligible 2012

DMA, is Assistant Professor of Music at SUNY Oneonta. He will be teaching music theory, coaching singers, conducting the chamber choir, instrumental chamber ensemble, and opera theater productions. Tim has taught and conducted at a number of institutions including Dartmouth, Grinnell, and Huntington Colleges, the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and the University of Illinois. He has led choral tours throughout the continental United States, England and Japan and has been active as a choral, orchestral, and opera/music theater conductor.

Versatility has always been a trademark of Tim's musical career, which has ranged from professional renaissance chorister to dance DJ, from jazz drummer to art song recital accompanist. At this stage, he is most focused on conducting and accompanying. He is passionate about dramatic music, especially choral-orchestral music and opera. This summer, Tim will serve as a choral conductor for the New York Summer Music Festival at SUNY Oneonta.

He holds a Bachelor of Music in piano performance and a Master of Music in conducting, both from Ithaca College, and a doctorate in choral conducting and literature from the University of Illinois. He has additional studies at the Royal College of Music (London), the Eastman School of Music, the Hartt School of Music, and the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute. Tim is the recipient of the Nicholas Temperley Prize for Excellence in a Dissertation in Musicology (University of Illinois, 2004), and the Julius Herford Award for Outstanding Research in Choral Music (American Choral Directors Association, 2005).

Tim is interested in the classical music recording industry and it's delivery systems and the changing face of concerts. His present research consists of conducting a series of interviews with chorus masters of London's symphonic choruses, outlining the present and future state of their organizations with regard to the trained amateur choral singer. He is also interested in the American songbook and its interpreters.

As a chorister, Tim has sung in London with the London Symphony Chorus, Philharmonia Chorus and Chamber Chorus, and the BBC Symphony Chorus at the BBC Proms, the Royal Festival Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, the Barbican Center, the Edinburgh Festival, the Welsh Proms, the Canary Islands Music Festival, and the Cité de la Musique in Paris. He has sung under Sir Colin Davis, Sir Roger Norrington, Daniel Gatti, Sir Richard Hickox, Sir Charles MacKerras, Stephen Cleobury, Marin Alsop, and Ilan Volkov among others. He has also performed early music with the Boston Bach Ensemble, the Baroque Artists of Champaign-Urbana, and Capella Alamire, broadcast on WGBH-Boston.

As a pianist, he served as an apprentice with Pittsburgh Opera under Theo Alcantara, as symphonic pianist with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, pianist and chorus master with Ithaca Opera, staff accompanist at Ithaca College, and as Keyboard Artist with the King's Brass throughout the continental United States. His most recent accompanying has included a recital of new sacred art songs for San Jose Opera Resident Artist, Kirk Eichelberger, and an exploration of the Art of the Negro Spiritual with soprano Randye Jones at Grinnell College.

In his spare time, Tim loves traveling to the world's great cities, where you can find him exploring coffee shops and art museums, or standing in long queues to gain tickets for opera, symphony, and music theater performances. He is a closet Formula One racing fan, having grown up near the Grand Prix of the United States, and loves hiking, backpacking and canoeing in the Catskills, Adirondacks, the White Mountains. He rang in the new millennium on the top of Slide Mountain in the Catskills, and later that year, hiked part of Denali National Park in Alaska