The Department of Music presents more than 100 concerts each year
by a range of ensembles. The department sponsors an annual
artist-in-residence program, bringing internationally renowned
artists for performances and lectures. The department also
presents a free weekly noon-concert series, which features
visiting artists, department ensembles, and student performers in
an informal setting.
To request the current performance season brochure, or to
subscribe to our e-mail events list, please email
us.
Blue Heron has been acclaimed by The Boston
Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s
indispensables” and hailed by Alex Ross in The New
Yorker for its “expressive intensity.” The ensemble ranges
over a wide repertoire from plainchant to new music, with
particular specialities in fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish
polyphony and early sixteenth-century English sacred music and is
committed to vivid live performance informed by the study of
original source materials and historical performance practices.
Blue Heron’s catalogue of a dozen recording include five discs of
music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, copied in 1540 for
Canterbury Cathedral, much of which consisted of world premiere
recordings; the fifth disc won the prestigious 2018 Gramophone
Classical Music Award for Early Music, the first ever awarded to
a non-European ensemble in the four-decade history of the
Gramophone Awards.
Founded in 1999, Blue Heron presents a concert series in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has appeared at the Boston Early
Music Festival; in New York City at Music Before 1800, The
Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and the 92nd Street Y; at
the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and
Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.; at the Berkeley Early Music
Festival; at Yale University; in Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City,
Milwaukee, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Providence, St.
Louis, San Luis Obispo, Seattle, and Vancouver; and in Cambridge
and London, England. Upcoming engagements include a visit to the
University of California, Davis, and a debut at the Tage alter
Musik Regensburg. Blue Heron has been in residence at the Center
for Early Music Studies at Boston University and at Boston
College, and has enjoyed collaborations with A Far Cry, Dark
Horse Consort, Les Délices, Parthenia, Piffaro, and Ensemble Plus
Ultra.
Cipriano
de Rore:I madrigali a cinque voci
with Italian recitations by Viola Ardeni, lecturer in the
Department of French and Italian at UC Davis
Blue Heron brings to Davis mid-sixteenth-century Italian
madrigals for five voices by the Flemish composer
Cipriano de Rore, setting lyric poems by
Petrarch and others. The poems will be recited in Italian to
make audible the ways in which the music captures a wide range of
emotions about the pain and pleasures of love. Blue Heron’s
world premiere recording (in 2019) of De Rore’s 1542 madrigal
set was made possible in part by the research of Jessie Ann
Owens, UC Davis Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus and
former dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies. The
collaborative project was awarded the American Musicological
Society’s Noah Greenberg Award.
De Rore arrived in Italy in the 1530s, working at first as a
freelance musician. His very first publication was the 1542
Madrigali a cinque voci, the book from which the
madrigals to be presented are taken. This landmark publication
launched his successful career as chapelmaster in Ferrara,
Venice and Parma, where he died in 1565 at only 49.
He was the first composer to organize a madrigal book in modal
order, moving from minor to major keys. The poetry itself is
also highly organized, consisting of a cycle of sixteen
sonnets. The ordering enables the music to express both the
large-scale narrative of the poetry as well as its many
affective moments. One of the important conclusions Owens has
drawn about De Rore’s work is that his innovations were
genre-defining for the madrigal as a whole: “These madrigals,
each one a world unto itself, when taken together, tell a story
about the pain of love. With this print De Rore established the
madrigal as a genre that celebrates the fusion of music and
poetry.”
Founded in autumn 2008 by internationally renowned soloists who
for many years have championed the interpretation and promotion
of contemporary music, Berlin PianoPercussion is
an ensemble characterized by the individual and complementary
personalities of its members. During the Festival of Centre
Acanthes 2008 in Metz, pianists Prodromos Symeonidis and Ya-ou
Xie gave a series of concerts with works for two pianists and two
percussionists under the direction of Sylvio Gualda, the
reception of which led them to launch a new piano-percussion
ensemble.
Chase Spruill IV, violin Dagenais Smiley, violin and UC Davis
lecturer in music
Cassandra Lynne Richburg, viola Susan Lamb Cook, cello and UC Davis
lecturer in music I-Hui Chen, piano and
UC Davis lecturer in music
Wayang Bali, the Balinese Shadow Play (which features a
live gamelan accompaniment), is one of the most revered
traditional art forms in the world.
According to Balinese philosophy, a wayang performance
is a symbol of the cosmos. The dalang (Shadow Master) represents
God; the screen represents the world, including the atmosphere;
the damar (oil lamp) is the sun and the banana log underneath the
screen is the earth on which the creatures walk; the wayangs
(puppet characters) are the creatures. The accompanying
gender music represents irama djaman, which
means in phase with the periods of history.
Plots for the shadow play are drawn from the Mahabharata
myth cycle. Five brothers are pitted against one hundred jealous
cousins in a struggle for power involving gods, demons, magical
weapons, and the inevitable beautiful princess.
Wayang Bali takes place in two languages simultaneously:
the ancient language and the language of the audience.
Free to attend. There are a limited number of in-person
spaces available (please specify upon registration whether you
plan to attend in person or not).
Zachary James Watkins is a composer and
electronic music artist. He will be visiting UC Davis’s music
department several times over the 2021–22 school year, including
a May 2022 performance of his piece Affirmative Action
with The Living Earth Show (an artist-in-residence guitar and
percussion duo), and working with graduate students in
composition and creative writing for their collaborative
performance work in late May 2022, titled See / Hear /
Say.
Watkins has received commissions from Documenta 14, the Kronos
Quartet, The Living Earth Show, sfsound, and the Seattle Chamber
Players among others. His 2006 composition Suite for String
Quartet was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition.
Zachary has performed in numerous festivals across the United
States, Mexico, and Europe and his band Black Spirituals opened
for pioneering Drone Metal band Earth during their 2015 European
tour. In 2008, he premiered a new multi-media work entitled
Country Western as part of the Meridian Gallery’s
Composers in Performance Series. Zachary completed
Documentado / Undocumentado (Moving Parts Press, 2017),
a multimedia interactive book in collaboration with Guillermo
Gómez Peña, Gustavo Vasquez, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Felicia Rice.
Zachary has been an artist-in-residence at the Espy Foundation,
Djerassi, and the Headlands Center for The Arts.
Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell,
Robin Holcomb, and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In
2006, Zachary received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording
Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred
Frith, Alvin Curran, and Pauline Oliveros.
Erika Oba, flute
Stephanie Neumann, saxophone Jacob Lane, piano and UC Davis graduate
student of music
Program
“Of California Ecology” will feature compositions inspired
by nature in California, and will include new works by
Julie Herndon, ensemble members, and
Kian Ravaei—winner of Sl(e)ight Ensemble’s 2020
call for scores.
Eclipse Quartet is dedicated to the music of
twentieth-century and present-day composers, with a special
appreciation of women composers. The scope of their repertoire
spans works by John Cage, Morton Subotnick, and Roscoe Mitchell,
to Ruth Crawford, Kajia Saariajo, and Meredith Monk. Eclipse’s
residence at UC Davis may include performances, workshops,
lecture demonstrations, student composition readings,
masterclasses, and private lessons.
Sarah Thornblade and Sara Parkins, violins
Alma Lisa Fernandez, viola
Maggie Parkins, cello
Program to be announced.
Eclipse Quartet is dedicated to the music of
twentieth-century and present-day composers, with a special
appreciation of women composers. The scope of their repertoire
spans works by John Cage, Morton Subotnick, and Roscoe Mitchell,
to Ruth Crawford, Kajia Saariajo, and Meredith Monk.
In harmony with other venues on the UC Davis campus and across
the state of California, The Arts departments are committed to
providing as safe an experience as possible to our greater
community—and will do so until state or county guidelines are
lifted.
There are three ways for you to attend, regardless of whether or
not the event is ticketed.
