Chris Castro graduated in 2018 with a doctoral degree in
composition from UC Davis. He holds a bachelor’s degree in
composition and double bass from the Juilliard School.
Orchestral ConductingPh.D., Composition, State University of New York at BuffaloM.A., Conducting, Pennsylvania State UniversityB.A., Conducting and Composition, Catholic University of Argentina
Jean-PaulBourelly was
born in Chicago to Hatian parents and grew up on
Chicago’s South Side amid an unusual blend of Haitian meringue,
folkloric, and hard-edged urban blues. Along with his own musical
vision, which was inspired by Howlin Wolf, Jimi Hendrix, and
even Carlos Santana, Bourelly began to formulate his
unique musical style. At the age of eighteen, after a one-year
scholarship studying with the great alto saxophonist and educator
Bunky Green, he moved to New York City.
Ph.D. Musicology, Boston University 1986Mellomfag (equivalent to M.A.), German Studies, Trondheim University, Norway 1974Staatsexamen für das Lehramt an Gymnasien (equivalent to M.A.), Music, Musikhochschule Detmold, West Germany 1971
Areas of Specialization:
Medieval, Renaissance History and Theory, Historiography, Music
in African Mission Stations
Ph.D. Ethnomusicology, University of British Columbia
Juan Diego Díaz is an ethnomusicologist with a geographic
research interest in Africa and its diaspora, particularly Brazil
and West Africa. He is interested in how African diasporic musics
circulate and transform across the Atlantic and how they serve
individuals and communities in identity formation. He uses a
variety of approaches including close musical analysis, timeline
theory, groove analysis, phenomenology of the body, and discourse
analysis. He is also a long-term Capoeira Angola practitioner and
has led capoeira and samba ensembles.
Percussionist Christopher Froh specializes in
promoting and influencing the creation of new music through
critically acclaimed performances and dynamic lectures. To date,
he has premiered over 150 chamber and solo works by composers
from 17 countries. His collaborations include some of the most
significant composers of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, including Chaya Czernowin, David
Lang, Steve Mackey, John Adams, George Crumb, Liza Lim, Matthias
Pintcher, and Keiko Abe.
MusicologyPh.D. Musicology, University of California, Davis
Carol A. Hess has published books and articles on the music of
Spain and the Americas. Her work has been funded by the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the Spanish Ministry of Culture,
and the New York Public Library, among other entities. She
received the Society for American Music’s Irving Lowens Article
Award, and her book Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain,
1898–1936 (University of Chicago Press, 2001) won the
ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the American Musicological Society’s
Robert M. Stevenson Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in Iberian
Music, in addition to other prizes.
Matilda Hofman, whose conducting has been described as having “a
striking sense of purpose” and “taut and finely controlled”
(San Francisco Gate) has a busy and varied performance
schedule. She works regularly with a wide range of groups in
Europe, and in California, which she has made her home. Matilda
has performed at the Salzburg Festival, Berliner Festspiele,
Holland Festival and Ruhrtriennale among others.
Caleb Lewis is a young music professional interested in inspiring
others toward excellence. He works primarily as a
conductor with groups of people who want to be more
effective performers and who enjoy making music together. He
has degrees in choral music from Furman University
in Greenville, South Carolina, and Emory University, in
Atlanta. Recently, he completed coursework for his Doctor of
Music degree in Choral Conducting from Indiana University’s
Jacobs School of Music.
Pierpaolo Polzonetti specializes in opera and eighteenth-century
music and culture. His research work has been funded by the
Earhart Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies,
and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Violist and composer Kurt Rohde is a
recipient of the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a
Radcliffe-Harvard Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, a
Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lydian String Quartet Commission
Prize, and commission awards from the Barlow, Fromm, Hanson, and
Koussevitzky Foundations, and New Music/USA. He has received the
Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters and was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Studies.
Robert Samson Bloch holds a master’s degree from the University
of Chicago and a le prix avec distinction from the Royal
Conservatory of Music, Brussels. A violinist and violist known
equally for his performance of early and contemporary music, he
is the recipient of the First Prize in the Young Artists Contest
of the Society of American Musicians, the Kranichsteiner
Musikpreis, and an Alfred Hertz Memorial Fellowship.
Jonathan Elkus was born in San Francisco and attended UC Berkeley
and Stanford. He taught largely at Lehigh University and—from
1992 to 2002—served as lecturer and director of bands at UC
Davis. His visiting appointments include the North Carolina
School of the Arts and the Yale School of Music.
Andrew Frank (b. Los Angeles, 1946) studied composition with
Jacob Druckman at Bard College (B.A. 1968) and with George Crumb,
George Rochberg, and Richard Wernick at the University of
Pennsylvania (M.A. 1970). Since 1972, he has been a member of the
Department of Music at UC Davis, where he is professor emeritus
(2007).
Albert John Joseph McNeil is a native Californian, born in Los
Angeles. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the
University of California, Los Angeles, and did doctoral studies
at the University of Southern California, the Westminster Choir
College of Princeton, and the University of Lausanne,
Switzerland. He was director of choral activities for 21
years and headed the music education program at UC Davis.
David Nutter studied music at the Conservatorio di Musica “Luigi
Cherubini” and musicology at the Villa Schifanoia Graduate School
of Fine Arts (Florence, Italy). He received his Ph.D. from the
University of Nottingham in 1977. A specialist in
16th-century Italian music, his research interests include
secular and sacred vocal music, and music for the lute.
Slawson’s compositions include works for various chamber
ensembles, chorus and orchestra. He is best known for his
theories about an aspect of timbre called “sound color” and his
compositions of computer music that apply those theories. His
programming system, SYNTAL, is an adaptation of a computer speech
synthesizer to music composition.
Sydney R. Charles, professor emerita, joined the faculty of the
Department of Music in 1961 and retired in 1985. Her major fields
of research include musical practice and theory, 14th- and
15th-century English music, and musical iconography. Charles was
active in building the music collection at Shields Library, and
she served as chair of the department from 1977 to 1980.
