New Year, New Faces: Dr. Sabra Statham
Amber Haeberle
Issue date: 2/11/09 Section: News
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Statham was added to the music faculty in the fall of 2008, in part to meet the needs of their new music education program.
In addition to being a musicologist, she is also a violist and is teaching a wide range of courses including general education course introduction to music, music and politics seminar, ethnic music seminar.
You can even catch her teaching strings and applied violin lessons.
"I started playing violin when I was 3-years-old," Statham said. "And, basically, music has been the center of my life ever since."
Beginning her undergraduate work in 1989 at LSU, she studied violin and music.
After two years, Statham transferred to Happy Valley where she graduated from Penn State with a bachelors' degree in music with emphasis in violin performance.
She continued her education at Penn State and obtained two master's degrees, in violin performance and in music theory and history, both completed by 1996.
"When I published my first paper, my master's thesis, I decided to pursue my Ph.D. I went to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for my Ph.D. It's one of the most outstanding schools in the world for music, and I specialized in historical musicology - actually paleography of plainchant, that's Medieval music, and contemporary music," Statham said.
Joining the ranks of the musical elite, Statham completed her dissertation just recently, on Feb. 1, which now gives her the rights and privileges of all other doctoral graduates.
Now that she has completed her doctoral work, she plans to get back to performing and give a recital sometime this spring.
She would like to play some of the music that she wrote about in her dissertation, music written by WWII émigrés, much of it never performed.
Throughout her educational pursuits for the past 10 years, Statham taught part-time at Penn State Main, classes similar to what she is offering here.
She also worked in the community teaching Suzuki violin.
She founded three Suzuki violin outreach programs in Centre County, something she is very proud of.
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