Music

Jessica M. Gutierrez is the first music and Native American studies major to receive a Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research since it was established in 1994.

Each year up to two graduating seniors who have completed outstanding research, scholarship or creative activity tied to any academic subject while at UC Davis are awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research.

Partially in celebration of Wagner’s 202nd birthday, and partially for an awesome time, the Awesöme Orchestra will hold its 31st session—

The American Musicological Society and the Music Division of the Library of Congress are pleased to present a series of lectures highlighting musicological research conducted in the division’s collections. Open to the public, the series is held in the Library’s famed Coolidge Auditorium in the Jefferson Building. It is the same room that Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring premiered in, with Martha Graham.

Her lecture can be viewed below:

El Motivo (2013), including Ortiz’s and all the ponies go mad with joy

Film of the live performance.

The study of ethnomusicology shows that music is more than just organized sound. By digging into the roots of various music styles, ethnomusicology uncovers social and historical meanings unique to its cultural context.

To support our campus’ own ethnomusicology program, the music department is putting on Musics of the World Ensembles of UC Davis, a showcase featuring four of the university’s world music groups. The performance will take place on Fri., April 24, at the Mondavi Center.

Jessie Ann Owens, former dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in the College of Letters and Science, and professor of music at UC Davis, has been appointed the Robert Lehman Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, for Fall 2015. I Tatti is the foremost research institution in the world for Italian Renaissance art, history, literature, and music, and the visiting professorship is an appointment of Harvard University.

The arts at UC Davis are in full bloom this quarter with a special emphasis on work by students, many of whom are finishing final projects for graduation.

Two UC Davis ethnomusicology grad students—Gillian Irwin (first year) and Sarah Messbauer (ABD)—share this year’s Marnie Dilling Prize, presented by the Northern California Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology for the best graduate student presentations at its annual chapter meeting, which was held on February 28, 2015, at UC Berkeley.

In Saramago’s 2005 novel, death appears as a woman who falls in love with a cellist and is transformed by that love. It’s a perfect vehicle, Rohde says, for using music to convey the drama. “In this opera, music is the transformative force that turns death from this thing that doesn’t exist into a human being. It’s a very confusing process for her, and she has to do things that are increasingly human. For example, she’s never spoken—she never had to—and when she starts to speak, I make her stutter and gradually start to form words.