One of the most important priorities of the music department
today is establishing a fund to cover the otherwise out-of-pocket
expenses for individual music lesson instruction for UC Davis
students. These students gain necessary one-on-one instruction
from a career professional in their field and use those skills in
individual and group performances—including the UC Davis Symphony
Orchestra, Choruses, Percussion Ensemble, Baroque, Early Music,
and more. We seek everyone’s support in this endeavor.
One of UC Davis’s highest priorities is the safety of its
students and all members of its community. UC Davis
prohibits all forms of sexual harassment and sexual violence,
including sexual assault, dating and domestic violence, and
stalking. Such conduct violates University policy and may
violate California law.
The Society for American Music has chosen UC Davis
Associate Professor of Music Beth Levy as their Vice President.
They have also elected members at large Mark Burford and Marian
Wilson Kimber.
Her book Frontier Figures: American Music and the
Mythology of the American West (UC Press) was published
in 2012. Her other interests include eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century aesthetics, reception history, and
representations of music in literature.
UC Davis graduate student Josiah Tayaq
Catalan has been awarded the 2021 commission for a new
work, which will be composed for solo piano. The commission
provides for a “private score reading and feedback session with
the Contemporary Players and SF Search panelists, a premiere of
the commissioned work on [their] at the
CROSSROADS series concert held in San Francisco on
April 10, 2021, plus an archival recording.”
“Broken,” a composition by Mika Pelo, associate professor of
music, was given its premiere performance by celebrated
pianist-composer Rolf Hind on October 7 at King’s
Place in London. The concert, “Is it too soon to talk about all
this?,” featured a series of short works.
Projeto Arcomusical, a world music sextet reimagining the
Afro-Brazilian single-string instrument called
the berimbau, will premiere pieces by five
doctoral students in composition—.
Projeto Arcomusical is a musics of the world sextet
reimagining the Afro-Brazilian berimbau through unique and
powerful chamber music. The ensemble formed in 2013 specifically
to interpret MeiaMeia, the composition cycle co-composed
by ensemble co-founders Gregory Beyer and Alexis C. Lamb.
Arcomusical released MeiaMeia as its first album in 2016 on
Innova Recordings. That same year Arcomusical received a Chamber
Music America Classical Commissioning Grant that produced
Roda, the kaleidoscopic, twenty-minute,
four-movement work by Elliot Cole. Roda is featured
on Arcomusical’s second album, Spinning in
the Wheel now available on National Sawdust
Tracks. MeiaMeia was under consideration for a 2018 Best
World Music Album for the Grammy Awards.
What is a musical bow (berimbau)?
Although the berimbau is a well-known instrument in
Brazil, most people in the United States are not familiar with
its elegant beauty and simplicity. And people remain largely
unaware of the diverse family of instruments to which the
berimbau belongs. Musical bows are the most popular and
widespread traditional string instrument found throughout
sub-saharan Africa, and the berimbau made its way to Brazil via
the transatlantic slave trade. The berimbau’s closest relatives
are found in southern Africa in the Portuguese speaking countries
of Angola and Mozambique, as well as in South Africa, Lesotho,
Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, and just about every other country in
the region. In Brazil, the pain and suffering of the enslaved
African in the new world is deeply connected to the soul of the
berimbau. Specifically in the practice of the body game known as
capoeira, the berimbau is celebrated and honored as an icon of
resistance against oppression. Furthermore, in the hands of
inspired musicians such as Naná Vasconcelos (1944–2016) and
Ramiro Musotto (1963–2009), the berimbau became the central
vehicle for the creative exploration of new musical frontiers.
Today, Arcomusical honors both the tradition and the innovation
of the berimbau’s past in every activity that supports the
mission to spread the instrument’s message of joy and hope well
into the future.
In this talk I outline some of the larger frameworks from my
book Black
Opera: History, Power, Engagement (2018) and take them
further to include a quick mention of Beyoncé’s Homecoming
(2018), and three operas on Black topics that debuted the
summer of 2019 (Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons, ”Fire Shut
Up in My Bones,” Opera Theater of St. Louis; Anthony Davis and
Richard Wesley, ”The Central Park Five,” Long Beach Opera;
and Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson, ”Blue,”
Glimmerglass Festival). I quickly place ”Fire Shut Up in My
Bones” and ”The Central Park Five” and then spend the most
time with ”Blue.” I have been fortunate to see all three
operas and got to know Tesori and Thompson through several
panels in the Breaking Glass series (run by Glimmerglass Opera
Festival).
Naomi André is Professor in Women’s
Studies, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and
the Residential College Arts and Ideas in the Humanities program
at the University of Michigan. She received her BA in music from
Barnard College and MA and PhD in musicology from Harvard
University. Her research focuses on opera and issues surrounding
gender, voice, and race. Her publications include topics on
Italian opera, Schoenberg, women composers, and teaching opera in
prisons. Her books, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti,
and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian
Opera (2006) and Blackness in
Opera (2012, edited collection), focus on opera from
the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and explore
constructions of gender, race, and identity. She recently
published Black
Opera: History, Power, Engagementwith University
of Illinois Press, a monograph on staging race and history
in opera today in the United States and South Africa. She has
served on the Graduate Alumni Council for Harvard University’s
Graduate School of Art and Sciences, the Executive Committee for
the Criminal Justice Program at the American Friends Service
Committee (Ann Arbor, MI), and has served as an evaluator for the
Fulbright Senior Specialist Program.
Felipe Lara, a Brazilian-American composer
praised by the New York Times and other
critics for his brilliant modern music, rates collaboration with
other musicians the most important aspect of his work.
Scott Linford is an Assistant
Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Cincinnati
College-Conservatory of Music. He has conducted musical fieldwork
in West Africa, Central America, and the United States around
themes of participation and musical experience, ethnicity,
gender, agriculture and the environment, musical geographies, and
colonial and post-colonial politics. Raised in the San Francisco
Bay Area, he holds an MA and PhD in Ethnomusicology from UCLA.
