Tonia Ko introduces recent compositions which feature
creative transcriptions of field recordings and found sound.
She will discuss the various technologies involved,
orchestration tools and techniques, as well as the continued
influence of the long-standing bubble wrap practice “Breath,
Contained” on her creative work.
“The Song of Creation” (pictured) is a painting by San
Francisco-based artist Tino Rodriguez, and serves as the main
inspiration for the concerto featured on this program by Juan
Sebastián Cardona Ospina, titled “Eyes to Look Otherwise.” The
concerto is dedicated to the featured soloist, saxophonist
Michael Hernandez. Hernandez commissioned the work as part of
his “Latinx Storytellers” project.
Program
Campus Band
Mattea Williams: One Magnificent Light
Quincy Hilliard: Out of Darkness
Alex Shapiro: Lights Out
Joe Hisaishi / arr. Kazuhiro Morita: Selections from Princess
Mononoke
UC Davis Concert Band
Akito Matsuda: Crescent Moon Dance from Sound!
Euphonium
Kevin Charoensri: Rising Light
Jennifer Jolley: Lightway
Juan Sebastián Cardona Ospina: Eyes to Look
Otherwise
with Michael Hernandez, soprano saxophone
Inspired by three paintings of Tino
Rodriguez
Commissioned by the Latinx
Storytellers Project
Members of the Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers
Dr. Diane White-Clayton
Jessica-Elisabeth Hansen
Joel Brown
Douglas Griffin
With guest conductor Dr. Jan Taylor, the choruses of UC
Davis — the Concert Choir and the Chamber Singers — join
to sing the music that Albert J. McNeil (1920–2022) loved and
championed.
McNeil was a transformative force in the music department
during his 21 years as a faculty member (1969–90). He greatly
increased participation in the University Chorus from an
occasional course to a full public performance group, and
created the University Chamber Singers. He founded a music
education program and was an original faculty member of the
African American and African studies program. As founder and
longtime director of the Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers in Los
Angeles, he had a profound effect on the performance,
preservation and presentation of African American spirituals.
Program
Albert J. McNeil (arr.): Hold Out Your Light
and John the Revelator
B.E. Boykin: Go Down Moses
Jeffrey Ames: In Remembrance
Rosephanye Powell: To Sit and Dream and The Word Was
God
Moses Hogan (arr.): The Battle of Jericho
and Ev’ry Time I feel the Spirit
Byron Smith: Worthy to Be Praised
Jester Hairston (arr.): In Dat Great Gettin’ Up
Morning and Elijah Rock
Performing selections from the Great American Songbook the big
bands perform charts by legends by the likes of Gershwin,
Porter and Ellington. The evening concert is sure to be filled
with lush harmonies, soaring solos, and irresistible rhythms in
the comfortable and warm Ann E. Pitzer Center.
Joseph Straus has argued that musicology and theory often focus
on so-called “normal” listeners. As a disabled woman who has
multiple sclerosis, I aim to subvert these ableist erasures. As
such, I offer an autoethnography of what I call my neuroqueer
experience of music: I am sexually attracted to (long-dead)
composers such as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák.
The selections on this program are by composers who
conscientiously worked to break the mold of the orchestral
forms of their time: Debussy rendezvoused with poets and
artists who influenced the young composer to somehow bring
impressionism into music. For Takemitsu, Western music was
itself an escape from postwar occupied Japan and he
experimented with it. Shostakovich, in over 15 symphonies,
sought to imbibe each with the most intense feelings of their
time, from revolution to despair and resilience.
In Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun, a solo flute player in
the orchestra evokes the imagery of the mythical Pan and his
enchanting flute. Pan is the Greek fertility
god, represented with horns, legs, and ears of a goat,
and is associated with flocks and herds and music. When he
wakes up from a nap he tries to remember his dream, only to fall
asleep again, hoping to meet his nymph friends in his next dream.
In his Requiem for String Orchestra,
Takemitsu used early 20th-century tonalities by Western
composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and made his own experimental
mark on 20th-century art music. Coincidentally, Igor Stravinsky
heard this Requiem and sang its praises to American and European
classical artists.
Shostakovich wrote his Sixth Symphony in curious proportions: The
first movement is a lengthy Largo (slow and yet also serious) and
features a beautiful English horn solo and haunting solos on
flute and piccolo that are reminiscent of the flute solo in
Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun. The second movement by
contrast is a short scherzo filled with delightful rhythmic
tricks, and as if one scherzo wasn’t enough, Shostakovich ends
the symphony with another. It’s full of bombastic string
work, almost a study for his later Festive Overture.
Program
Claude Debussy: Prélude à “L’Après-midi d’un
faune,” L. 86
Tōru Takemitsu: Requiem for String Orchestra
Dimitri Shostakovich: Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, op. 54
An educator with 14 years of experience, Afro-Cuban female
author Eva Silot Bravo is an interdisciplinary and
independent scholar, former diplomat and international negotiator
in the United Nations, representing Cuba and developing
countries. The focus of her presentation is her recently
published non-fiction academic book: Cuban
Fusion: The Transnational Cuban Alternative Music
Scene, on Cuban music and transnationalism.
Student chamber ensembles, the Samba School directed by faculty
member Brian Rice, and also the Bluegrass and Old Time String
Band directed by faculty member Scott Linford will perform
works in progress.
Althea SullyCole studied her primary instrument, the
kora — a 21-stringed West African harp — under korists
Yacouba Sissoko and Edou Manga. She is a multi instrumentalist,
vocalist, and ethnomusicologist from New York
City. From 2024 to 26, Althea will be performing research
on an Award for Faculty from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, which, among other things, will fund fieldwork in
Mali and Guinea in support of her scholarship on historical
collections of musical instruments from the Mandé region of
West Africa.
Howard Levy — two-time Grammy Award Winner (Pop Music
Performance and Instrumental Composition) — is an acknowledged
master of the diatonic harmonica, a superb pianist, innovative
composer, educator and producer. At the age of 19, he
discovered how to play the diatonic harmonica as a fully
chromatic instrument by developing techniques on it that had
never existed before. This enabled Howard to take the harmonica
out of its usual role as a Folk and Blues instrument, and into
the worlds of Jazz, Classical, Middle Eastern music, and
more. His discovery unlocked infinite possibilities for
the harmonica world.
Program
To be announced from the stage.
Free
This Shinkoskey Noon Concert is made possible with support
from the Joy S. Shinkoskey Series of Noon Concert Endowment.
