The Taproot New Music Festival is now accepting applications for participating composers. The festival will take place on the campus of the University of California, Davis, during the last week of January, 2020, and will culminate in weekend performances (January 28–February 2, 2020).
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.
UC Davis Professor of Music Henry Spiller has been selected as a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (Amsterdam) for 2019–20, where he will be in-residence fall quarter 2019. Spiller, who has spent a number of years research music of West Java, Indonesia—and who recently published a book titled Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015)—will take the opportunity to write about the interrelationships of cultural, natural, and human resources, in the bamboo instruments made in Bandung, Indonesia. Spiller’s project is titled “Bamboo Murmurs: Music, History, and Place in Bandung, Indonesia.” He joins a carefully selected community of sixty scholars, artists, and writers at the Institute.
The Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship for 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 music graduate student alumna Jessica Bejarano (‘08) recently became the first woman to conduct the American Youth Symphony, which is based in Los Angeles.
UC Davis Graduate Student Composer Aida Shirazi will participate in IRCAM’s ManiFeste 2019 to have her new composition, Ardea Alba I, performed by the Orchestre Phiharmonique de Radio France in Paris. During the festival Shirazi will with work with internationally-renowned composer Kaija Saariaho and UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of Music Carmine Emanuele Cella.
Lecturer in Music Brian Riceis a highly acclaimed performer, educator, and recording artist and one of the most versatile percussionists in the Bay Area. Though best known as a specialist in Brazilian and Cuban music, Brian can be heard playing a multitude of styles and his percussion playing graces over 60 recordings.
Svanibor Pettan is a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley in the Spring semester 2019 and teaches the course Music and Minorities in Europe. Otherwise, he is professor and chair in ethnomusicology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His academic degrees are from the universities in Croatia, Slovenia, and the United States, while his fieldwork sites include former Yugoslav lands, Australia, Egypt, Norway, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and the USA.
