Music

Doctoral student musicologist Sarah Miller has been awarded a UC Davis Russel J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship. This fellowship supports students as they begin the advanced stage of doctoral study by offering funding during the quarter immediately following advancement to candidacy, providing summer research and writing support, and providing for a full academic year fellowship for dissertation writing.

Graduate student musicologist Anushka Kulkarni was awarded a UC Davis Critical Language Scholarship which enables her to take a summer intensive language program overseas for U.S. academic credit.

Graduate student composer Trey Makler has received a 2023 Creator Fund Award from New Music USA, an organization that has for more than ten years supported composers, musicians, and organizations with grants so they can create new works and build community.

Vocal performance major Crisia Regalado has won the 2023 Lucy Becker Scholarship from Music in the Mountains (in Grass Valley, California). Crisia competed with Gioachino Rossini’s “Una voce poco fa” from The Barber of Seville. She studies with Zoila Muñoz at UC Davis, with whom she says she chose to go to UC Davis to study voice. 

Professor Kurt Rohde’s new micro opera 4:30 Movie will premiere April 29 and 30, 2023, at the Bayview Opera House in San Francisco as part of a program presented by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.

The San José Chamber Orchestra will give the premiere performance of Professor Pablo Ortiz’s ZOFO Encajonado on May 14, 2023, at 7:00 pm at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Willow Glen, California. ZOFO Encajonado is a concertino in three movements for piano four hands, cajon, and strings. ZOFO is a piano duo comprised of Eva Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi, and they have frequently collaborated with Pablo Ortiz, and have been in residence at UC Davis.

“Requiem for Gerry” by Professor Pablo Ortiz will premiere at the Teatro Colón on March 22. The work was commissioned as a tribute to the late Gerardo Gandini, founder and director of the Columbus Theater Experimental Center.

The Ortiz composition will be performed as part of a celebration honoring Gandini and the renaming of the Experimental Center which becomes the Gerardo Gandini Room. 

Scott Linford, assistant professor of music, has produced and recorded a new album—Ears of the People: Ekonting Songs from Senegal and The Gambia—as part of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. The album features nine master players of the ekonting, a three-stringed instrument made from a gourd and papyrus reed by people of the Jola ethnic group.

Distinguished Professor of Music, emeritus, Jessie Ann Owens, has been awarded the prestigious Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award by the Renaissance Society of America. The board of directors of the society gives the award annually to an individual with “uncompromising devotion to the highest standard of scholarship, accompanied by exceptional achievement in Renaissance studies.”

Professor Carol A. Hess has published a new book, Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics (University of Illinois Press). In it she gives an in-depth examination of the composer’s exchange of music and ideas with Latin American composers.