Music

This past spring Catherine Adoyo (B.A. music and Italian, ’98) was featured in the PBS documentary DANTE: Inferno to Paradise. ​The film contained interviews with the world’s foremost scholars on Dante including Adoyo. 

Mariana Da Silva Gabriel, Ph.D. student in musicology, was awarded the Northern California Prize in Musicology for her paper “More Than Words: A Study of Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil’s ‘Cálice’ and ‘Covert’ Musical Protest.”

Gabriel’s paper examined the imbrication of religious resonance and potent play with linguistic homophony and non-lexical singing in the protest music of Gilberto in the context of military dictatorship in 1970s Brazil. 

Pablo Ortiz, Distinguished Professor of Music, will have an opera, Kassandra, premiered at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on August 23, with performances until September 1. The opera features text by the Uruguayan playwright Sergio Blanco.

Lecturer in voice Jonathan Nadel will sing in the chorus for Beethoven’s Ninth—sung in Ukrainian—at the Kennedy Center on Aug. 4 with the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Music Anna Maria Busse Berger was awarded the Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Award by the Emeriti Association and Vice Provost of Academic Affairs, UC Davis. The award will augment Busse Berger’s research project on music in Moravian mission stations from 1732 to 1950.

Chris Froh, continuing lecturer, received the 2024 Undergraduate Teaching Award from the Academic Federation. Froh is known for teaching courses that include Theory, Rock Music, History of the Beatles, percussion ensemble and individual percussion students.

Professor Kurt E. Rohde’s composition seeking all that’s still unsung will receive its world premiere at Brandeis University performed by the Lydian String Quartet on April 6.

Professor Carol A. Hess has recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for American Music, which promotes music of the Americas. The presentation was made on March 23 during the society’s annual conference.

This honor is given by the society’s Board of Trustees in recognition of the recipient’s significant and substantial lifetime achievement in scholarship, performance, teaching, and/or support of American Music.

Robert S. Bloch, UC Davis professor emeritus of music, died on November 4 at age 89. He was a member of the faculty from 1974 to 2000, primarily teaching violin and music theory in addition to giving concerts. The UC Davis Music Department remains grateful for the musicianship Bloch shared on stage and in the classroom.

Colin Minigan, a graduate student in music composition, was invited by Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp, chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, to set music to the Bard’s words and write underscoring for William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The production is a contemporary staging of the classic comedy and is directed by alum Josy Miller (Ph.D., performance studies, ‘15), and with Minigan’s added music it has a “folksy indie pop” feel to it.