Music

Music composition doctoral student Aida Shirazi’s “Trio for Violin, Horn, and Piano” is being performed by the Sierra Ensemble on Friday, Oct. 6 at 7 p.m. in the Presidio Officers’ Club, 50 Moraga Avenue, San Francisco. 

Tickets are available through Eventbrite. 

We are pleased to announce that the Sacramento Business Journal named the Ann E. Pitzer Center a Best Real Estate Project of 2017. We are grateful and proud of the work LPAS Architecture + Design and Kitchell have done to bring this building to life. The students and community of UC Davis love using this great space.

Best of the Bay, San Francisco Classical Voice’s annual reader poll, has honored the American Bach Soloists, under the director of UC Davis’ Jeffrey Thomas, with two awards this year.

ABS won in the categories of Best Early Music/Baroque Ensemble and Best Festival for their American Bach Soloists Summer Festival and Academy. 

UC Davis selected music department graduate student Hannah Adamy (ethnomusicology) as their Graduate Student Researcher for “Engaged Scholarship and Engaged Learning” for 2017–18. 

As part of the new strategic plan, UC Davis has a desire to fund community-informed arts initiatives. Adamy will be helping Michael Rios, the faculty advisor to the Provost, to design a plan to make this happen. She will be researching other institutions with these kinds of community-engaged arts programs and compiling data about them.

Music composition doctoral student Aida Shirazi’s “Lullaby for Shattered Angels” is being performed as part of the inaugural “New Music from the Islamic World” series at Music at the Anthology (MATA) in New York July 8. 

A story about the concert appears in The New Yorker. 

Music professor Kurt Rohde’s “Power Is Everywhere” songs will have its world premiere in San Francisco May 30. Rohde’s songs are a kind of companion piece to Maurice Ravel’s Chansons madécasses that will also be part of the “Francophilia” concert by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.

Rohde’s music in “Power is Everywhere” is set to the writings of Michel Foucault, the 20th century philosopher and literary critic.

UC Davis cello student Angelica Rojas won the Senior Division in the local California Music Educators Association competition. Angelica will perform in the Sacramento Section’s Winners Recital in the fall, will be given a cash award, and will have the opportunity to compete at the state level in the fall of 2018. Also, UC Davis alumnus Stephanie Sugano won best teacher in the Placer County chapter of the CMEA.

Grace and Grant Noda, long-time supporters of the UC Davis Department of Music and the original donors for creation of the Ann E. Pitzer Center, will be honored at a noon concert and reception May 25.

The long-time Davis residents made the initial $1.5 million donation that eventually led to construction of the Pitzer Center which houses a recital hall and music department facilities. The lobby of the center is named for them.

Gillian Irwin, MFA candidate in ethnomusicology at UC Davis, has received a Fulbright Student Research Grant to study Indonesian music education.

Philip Acimovic, a Ph.D. candidate in music composition, has received a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship for the academic year 2017-2018.

Acimovic’s dissertation analyzes three musical works from different eras that challenge established musical conventions of clarity, intent and perception: “Musical Offering” by Johann Sebastian Bach (1747), “Holiday Symphony” by Charles Ives (1913) and “Melodien” by György Ligeti (1971).