There is important
information—particularly for first-year music students—to
read through regarding Music 6 (Theory) and Music 16
(Musicianship), including placement.
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.
Professor Kurt Rohde—a musician who plays viola, teaches, and
composes—received a 2024 commission from the Serge
Koussevitzky Foundation in memory of Andrew W. Imbrie
(1921–2007) to write a new work for Brightwork New Music.
In 2023 Professor Mika Pelo was selected for a composer residency
by the Peterson-Berger Foundation at Sommarhagen, the home of
the late Swedish composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger. As part of the
residency, Pelo composed a new
work, Akvareller (“Watercolors”).
The music of composer Hendel
Almétus (Ph.D. music composition ‘14) has been
described as “vividly virtuosic and quietly meditative” (San
Francisco Classical Voice). He has received commissions from
distinguished artists, ensembles and institutions, including
Earplay, Empyrean Ensemble, guitarist Dieter Hennings, Arizona
State University, and the Kodachrome saxophone quartet. He has
written for prominent artists including soprano Tony Arnold,
guitarist Magnus Andersson, and ensembles such as Alarm Will
Sound, Wet Ink Ensemble, Meridian Brass, and the One Art
Ensemble.
Roseville Community Band
Stephanie Sugano, conductor (B.A. music and sociology, ‘98)
Holst’s Second Suite is among the most beloved of the classic
wind band repertory and if it weren’t for the folk tunes
they were based on, they may as well be music for a British
royal. Other material presented on this program creates
distinct moods, from the hustle and bustle of Lisa DeSpain’s
“Bicycle Shop” to the calm playfulness of Samuel
Coleridge Taylor’s “Children’s Intermezzo.”
Program
Roseville Community Band
Percy Fletcher: Vanity Fair
arr. Karrick
Samuel Coleridge Taylor: ”Children’s Intermezzo”
from Othello Suite
UC Davis Concert Band
Gustav Holst: Second Suite in F
Viet Cuong: Sound and Smoke
Lisa DeSpain: The Bicycle Shoppe
Bruce Broughton: Overture to Miracle on
34th Street (from the 1994 film)
arr. Vinson
Cuban musicologist and novelist Alejo Carpentier understood Cuban
son from the 1920s and 1930s to represent Cuba’s most
significant musical innovation, due to the way it codified the
African-inspired, asymmetric 3 – 2 or 2 – 3 rhythmic timeline
known as the clave. Clave subsequently became a
predominant theoretical framework for Caribbean or “Latin”
musicking, shaping popular genres such as merengue and salsa and
influencing musical practices as far away as Uruguay and Brazil.
Around the same time of son’s peak in popularity, Afro-Cuban poet
Nicolás Guillén scandalized literary circles by imitating tropes
from son music and speech patterns associated with
Afro-descendant, underprivileged communities in what he called
“son poems.” Although Guillén’s son poems are commonly
acknowledged for their incorporation of Afro-Cuban rhythm, little
attention has been devoted to the way Guillén, despite having no
musical training, developed a poetics of clave. This paper uses
Guillén as a starting point to begin to theorize a broader
literary practice in the Caribbean that I call “writing in
clave.” Not only does writing in clave allow us to rethink the
way writers disrupted distinctions between elite and popular
culture and intervened in debates concerning race and nation. It
also establishes a (sometimes reciprocal, sometimes
nonreciprocal) dialogue with soneros, or son lyricists,
and demonstrates the way literature and popular music in the
Caribbean became spaces of mutual theorization.