Music

Professor Kurt Rohde has been given a 2022 San Francisco Arts Commission fund. The $20,000 commission will be used to support 4:30 Movie, a new twenty-minute micro-opera using poems by Donna Masini published in 4:30 Movie (Norton, 2020). These funny, touching, ruthless poems take the reader through the diagnosis, treatment and death of the author’s sister from cancer.

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded an Arts Project Grant to the Newtown Creek Alliance, which is in the process of creating a site-specific performance piece composed by Professor Kurt Rohde.

Second-year undergraduate student Jason Chen is a physics major and member of the UC Davis Concert Band. On March 8, the Concert Band will premiere ”Noctilucence,” a composition by Chen, at Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

Henry Spiller, professor of music, is the author of Archaic Instruments in Modern West Java: Bamboo Murmurs which has been recently published by Routledge. 

Cesar Favila (B.A. music, ‘06), an assistant professor of musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, and Paul Feller, a doctoral musicology student at Northwestern University, have won the 2022 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society.

Albert J. McNeil, UC Davis professor emeritus of the Department of Music and an original faculty member and chair of the Department of African American and African Studies, died on Nov. 29. He was 102.

Africanness in Action: Essentialism and Musical Imaginations of Africa in Brazil (Oxford University Press, 2021), written by Associate Professor of Music Juan Diego Díaz, has won three honorary mentions by the Society of Ethnomusicology, 2022:

>> The Alan Merriam Prize, which recognizes the most distinguished English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology.

Alumna Aida Shirazi (Ph.D., composition, ‘21) is participating in “Rage, Rhythm, Renaissance: Performances of/in the Ongoing Iranian Revolution,” a panel discussion, at NYU Tisch School of the Arts on Nov. 21. The event begins at 7 p.m. (ET) and will be available as a Zoom Webinar.  

Professor Laurie San Martin, music department chair, and alumnus Josiah Catalan (Ph.D., music, ‘21) will have compositions performed at the Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University on Nov. 9. Their works were commissioned and will be performed by Earplay, a Bay area-based chamber ensemble. 

Professor Laurie San Martin, music department chair, has received a commission from the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University. San Martin’s commission will be for Ensemble Ari, a group of Korean American musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Out of more than 200 applicants, San Martin’s commission was among those given to 13 composers who will write works for the specific ensembles and musicians.