Prospective graduate students are now welcome to go
online and submit
their applications to UC Davis for the 2020–21 academic
year. Music deadlines are as follows:
When doctoral music composition students at UC Davis hear their
music played for the first time, they hear it played by
professionals who are champions of new music with years of
performance experience.
“There’s no shortage of performance opportunities, especially
for a research program, and that’s something that’s attractive
to students.” —Professor Kurt Rohde
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 Howard
Mayer Brown Fellowship for a minority graduate study in
musicology for 2019 was awarded to UC Davis music graduate
student Serena
Yang.She is the first UC Davis
student to earn the Brown fellowship from the American
Musicological Society.
UC Davis Associate Professor of Music Mika Pelo is one of fifteen
composers who has been awarded a 2019 Fromm Music Foundation
commission. The foundation seeks to strengthen composition and to
bring contemporary concert music closer to the public. In
addition to the commissioning fee, a subsidy is available for the
ensemble performing the premiere of the commissioned work.
Distinguished Professor of Music Anna
Maria Busse Berger was elected an honorary member of the
American Musicological Society (AMS) at their 2019 meeting in
Boston. According to the AMS By-laws, Honorary and Corresponding
members of the AMS are those scholars “who have made outstanding
contributions to furthering its stated object and whom the
Society wishes to honor.”
The American Musicological Society has given its annual award for
a book in the category of teaching to UC Davis Professor of Music
Carol A. Hess. Experiencing
Latin American Music (UC Press) draws on human
experience as a point of departure for musical
understanding. Students explore broad topics—identity, the
body, religion, and more—and relate these to Latin American
musics while refining their understanding of musical concepts and
cultural-historical contexts.
Kjetil Klette-Bøhler is Associate Professor at
the Institute of Norwegian Social Research (NOVA) at Oslo
Metropolitan University. As a musicologist (University of Oslo,
2013), his research focuses on groove, music and politics in Cuba
and Brazil. His talk is based on a book project about the
aesthetics and politics of timba music in Cuba.
Music department lecturer Otto Lee makes his concert debut as
director of the UC Davis Jazz Bands on Nov. 21.
The concert’s program features compositions by jazz masters Dave
Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, Wayne Shorter and others.
Lee is a saxophonist, educator and composer who received a
bachelor’s degree in instrumental jazz performance and a
master’s degree in music performance from California State
University, Fresno. He completed his doctoral degree in jazz
studies from the University of Colorado Boulder’s School of Music
in 2017. He has performed as a freelance musician in Denver, the
Bay Area and throughout the Central Valley.
The 7 p.m. concert is in the Ann E. Pitzer Center. Tickets are
$24 for general admission and $12 for students and may be
purchased through MondaviArts.org, by phone at 530-754-2787,
or at the door.
Lee will also lead the Jazz Combos of UC Davis in a free concert
on Dec. 3 at 6 p.m. in the Pitzer Center.
The UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by music director and
conductor Christian Baldini, opens
its season with one of the more flashy openings in all of
the standard symphonic repertoire. Strauss’s Don
Juan is a remarkable tour-de-force for the
entire orchestra. It is a twenty-minute orchestral tone poem that
parallels the fictional story of Don Juan, which originated as
early as 1630 and inspired—among others—Mozart to write his opera
Don Giovanni.
Maestro Baldini is very fond of the music by Richard Strauss,
having conducted several of his tone poems in previous seasons.
“Strauss wrote Don Juan when he was only 24,
and this is considered a revolutionary piece in many ways, from
its great breadth of virtuosity to its cunning characterization
of different moments in the poem by Nikolaus Lenau, on which it
is based,” said Baldini. “I chose to pair one of the most
energetic, dramatic and poetic works of the symphonic literature
with two beautiful and very different concertos, which feature
the soloist in a very different way – from the exquisite
Romantic, lyrical vein of Rachmaninov, to the extraordinary and
imaginative sound world of Lutosławski.”
Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto is quintessentially Romantic;
tuneful as it is virtuosic. For all the piano soloist’s
dazzling passages, Rachmaninov wrote unforgettable melodies for
the strings. The piece’s success is one of the many reasons
Rachmaninov is remembered for his concertos more than his other
works. The soloist, Leyla Kabuli, is a
previous member of the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, albeit as a
violinist. She was for three seasons pianist of the prestigious
San Francisco Youth Orchestra, and is pursuing her undergraduate
degree at UC Berkeley in electrical engineering and computer
science as a Regent’s and Chancellor’s Scholar. Kabuli has
performed extensively on piano, including as a soloist with
several California symphony orchestras and on National Public
Radio’s program for accomplished young performers called “From
the Top.” She currently studies with Yoshikazu Nagai at the
San Francisco Conservatory of Music and
with Michael Seth Orland, who teaches at UC Berkeley and UC
Davis.
Sacramento-born violinist Maximilian
Haft performs the solo violin role
in Chain II. Lutosławski wrote
three major works late in his life by the name “Chain,”
which illustrate the musical idea in the composition that
each element overlaps and also sequences in a specific
order. Chain II is the most concerto-like of
the three, and at several points the orchestra reacts (at the
direction of the conductor), but not exactly in time. In this way
the work has the feeling of a dialogue. Max Haft recently
performed Chain II with the Noord
Nederlands Orkest, which was well received. He performs with
several important contemporary ensembles in Europe, but also
plays jazz and pop music. He often performs with White
Hinterland, The Eef van Breen Group, and HHHJ, a group devoted to
splicing together chamber music and free jazz.
Robert & Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, Davis, CA
Sharmi Basu is an Oakland born and based South
Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of
decolonizing musical language. She attempts to catalyze a
political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining her anti-colonial
and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality
within the arts. Beast Nest, Sharmi’s primary performing project,
utilizes an unwavering depression and restrained horror to
channel left-eyed spirits. She is an MFA graduate from the Center
for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and
Recording Media and has worked with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell,
John Bischoff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and
more. Her workshops on “Decolonizing Sound” have been featured at
the International Society for Improvised Music, the Empowering
Women of Color Conference, and have reached international
audiences. She performs almost 100 times a year and has toured
through the United States and Canada as well as internationally
in Europe.
