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.
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. Soprano Nikki Einfeld, stars
in 4:30 Movie, complemented by percussion and
electronics.
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.
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.”
Olin
Hannum:* Odds and Unevens (2018, revised 2023)
* Olin Hannum (B.A. music ‘09) is the Associate
Director of Bands at Oregon State University. In that capacity he
oversees and directs all aspects of the Athletic Bands program,
including the Oregon State University Marching Band, Rhythm and
Beavs travel band, Basketball Bands, and other ensembles. In
addition to the Athletic Bands program, Hannum conducts and
directs the Wind Symphony, and teaches other courses in music.
Olin Hannum (B.A. music ‘09) is the Associate Director of
Bands at Oregon State University. In that capacity he oversees
and directs all aspects of the Athletic Bands program, including
the Oregon State University Marching Band, Rhythm and Beavs
travel band, Basketball Bands, and other ensembles. In addition
to the Athletic Bands program, Hannum conducts and directs the
Wind Symphony, and teaches other courses in music.
The Yorùbá dùndún drum serves dual purposes as a musical
instrument and speech surrogate. This talk shares a series of
interdisciplinary studies that explore the dùndún’s ability to
acoustically represent Yorùbá speech and song and potential
factors that may contribute to the successful decoding of drum
messages. The first half of the talk will focus on results from
a set of acoustic analyses conducted on a corpus of Yorùbá
speech and song excerpts and their representation on the
dùndún, focusing on microstructural correlations in pitch and
rhythmic features. The second half will discuss a
cross-cultural behavioral study exploring the role of
individual differences in language and musical expertise on the
effectiveness of speech and song surrogacy recognition.
Kristina Knowles is a music theorist with
research specialties in rhythm and meter, music and time, music
theory pedagogy, 20th-century music, and music cognition.
She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in music theory
and music cognition at ASU, and has presented at numerous
regional, national, and international conferences in the fields
of music theory and music cognition, including the Society for
Music Theory, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and
the European Music and Analysis Conference. Her most recent
publications include chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Music
and Time (2022) and Expanding the Canon: Black Composers
in the Music Theory Classroom (2023) and an article in
Contemporary Music Review (2022) on rhythm and meter in
works by George Crumb. Currently, she is working on several
multi-disciplinary collaborative research projects as well as a
larger project examining experiences of time in music.