Orchestral ConductingPh.D., Composition, State University of New York at BuffaloM.A., Conducting, Pennsylvania State UniversityB.A., Conducting and Composition, Catholic University of Argentina
Josiah Tayag Catalan (he/him) is a
Filipino-American composer born in New York City and raised in
the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently, his compositional interests
have become centered around discovering the intersects of
musics influenced by traditional, avant-garde, popular, and
indigenous Philippine musics.
Music Annex, Room 1108, 233 Cushing Way, Davis, CA 95616
Ph.D. Ethnomusicology, University of British Columbia (2014)
Juan Diego Díaz is an ethnomusicologist with a geographic
research interest in Africa and its diaspora, particularly Brazil
and West Africa. He explores how African diasporic musics
circulate and transform across the Atlantic and how they serve
individuals and communities in identity formation.
Advising appointments available via Zoom by appointment. Please
email Professor Dosman to request an appointment; immediate
advising appointments are available via Zoom 11am –1 pm on
Monday, Sep. 30. Regular office hours (in person) are 2–3 pm on
Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, University of Michigan
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.
Steinway Artist Natsuki Fukasawa’s music career has
taken her throughout U.S. cities as well as to Europe,
Scandinavia, Israel, Australia, Brazil, Japan, and China,
performing at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, and
Copenhagen’s Tivoli Concert Hall. Fukasawa has won many accolades
and international prizes, including rave reviews
in Strad and Fanfare magazines and the Best
Chamber Music Recording of the Year from the Danish Music Awards.
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 has a varied and busy conducting schedule.
Reviewers have described her conducting as “taut and finely
controlled” and giving “a striking sense of purpose.” She is
Music Director of the Diablo Symphony Orchestra,
conductor-in-residence for the Empyrean Ensemble at UC Davis and
Artistic Director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Matilda
also serves as a cover conductor for the San Francisco Symphony.
Scott Linford is a music scholar,
filmmaker, and musician who has conducted research in West
Africa, Central America, and the United States. His primary
research interests include participation and musical experience,
identity and belonging, agriculture and the environment, musical
repatriation, and colonial and post-colonial politics. Raised in
the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds a master of arts degree
and Ph.D.
Pierpaolo Polzonetti is a musicologist specializing in music and
food, opera, eighteenth-century instrumental music, jazz, and
Cuban popular music. He is the author of Feasting and
Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas
Diet (University of Chicago Press, 2021), the first
book-length study to explore rituals of eating and drinking and
gastronomic symbols in opera.
My research focuses on France during the long nineteenth century,
especially the intersection of the sonic and the kinetic in
embodied practices such as ballet. I draw on methodological
approaches outside the traditional musicological toolkit and
instead propose creative strategies for writing about otherwise
under-documented topics. Kinetic Cultures (UC
Press, 2023) considers these issues within the context of
the belle époque. In its broadest iteration, my work
reimagines what is possible for scholars doing historical work on
embodied practices—what to ta
Ph.D. Ethnomusicology, University of British Columbia (2014)
Juan Diego Díaz is an ethnomusicologist with a geographic
research interest in Africa and its diaspora, particularly Brazil
and West Africa. He explores how African diasporic musics
circulate and transform across the Atlantic and how they serve
individuals and communities in identity formation.
Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, University of Michigan
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.
Oscar Garibay is recognized as a versatile musician. As a
classical instrumentalist, Garibay has won several concerto
competitions and toured internationally with various orchestras
and bands. In his role as a mariachi musician, Garibay has
performed on tour with the Grammy Award-winning Mariachi Los
Camperos. He has also accompanied critically acclaimed artists,
including Steven Sandoval, Shaila Dúrcal, Lupita Infante, Ana
Bárbara, Yuri, Beatriz Adriana, Juan Valentín, Leo Dan, and many
others.
D.M.A. Jazz Studies, University of Colorado-Boulder 2017M.A. Instrumental Music Performance, California State University, Fresno 2012B.A. Instrumental Jazz Performance, California State University, Fresno 2010
California native Otto Lee is a
saxophonist, educator, and composer. After completing a bachelor
of arts degree in instrumental jazz performance (2010) and a
master’s degree in music performance (2012) at California State
University Fresno, he began his teaching career at CSU
Fresno as well as Fresno Pacific University where he was in
charge of the big band applied lessons. After spending a brief
stint as the director of jazz studies at CSU Fresno, he decided
to pursue a DMA in Jazz Studies from University of Colorado,
Boulder (2017).
Scott Linford is a music scholar,
filmmaker, and musician who has conducted research in West
Africa, Central America, and the United States. His primary
research interests include participation and musical experience,
identity and belonging, agriculture and the environment, musical
repatriation, and colonial and post-colonial politics. Raised in
the San Francisco Bay Area, he holds a master of arts degree
and Ph.D.
Brian Rice is 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, he can be heard playing a multitude of styles,
and his percussion playing graces over sixty recordings.
After coming to the United States over two decades ago, Rita
Sahai continued her extensive music studies under the world
famous sarod maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, who passed away in
2009. Impressed by her talent and passion toward music,
“Khansahib,” as she affectionately called her guru, gave her the
title Gayan Alankar (Jewel of Music).
Sahai, an acclaimed composer, performer, and teacher, tours
throughout the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and India. She is also in
demand at recording studios at home and abroad, where she
graciously lends her voice to many diverse musical projects,
including contributing vocal tracks for Grammy Award-winning
artist Béla Fleck and performing on Alonzo King’s Sacred
Texts, a CD of international music that won the Isadora
Duncan Award for music excellence. She has also collaborated on
several live musical productions with Jennifer Berezan’s “Edge of
Wonder” project.
Heni Savitri began to
study sindhènan (Javanese singing with
gamelan) in 2002. In 2003 she won the competition for best singer
in her native district of Wonogiri, Central Java. She entered the
Performing Arts Conservatory in Surakarta in 2004 and began
representing the institution in competitions the following year,
as well as performing in shadow plays. Upon enrolling in the
Indonesian Arts Academy in Surakarta she was selected as the
singer for many recordings of new faculty compositions and
traditional works, representing the academy in the 2008
international vocal competition in Jakarta. She has recently been
performing with gamelan groups in the United States, including at
the Indonesian Consulate in New York City, at Tufts University,
Cornell University, the Indonesian Embassy in Washington D.C.,
Earlham College, Friends of the Gamelan Chicago, and with Sumunar
Gamelan in Minnesota.
Hailed for the “arresting color” (Cincinnati Enquirer) of her
voice, Julie Miller has appeared as a soloist with many
orchestras and opera companies. Notable performances include
Emilia (Otello), Annina (La traviata), Ida
(Die Fledermaus), Krystina (The Passenger),
Baroness Nica in Charlie Parker’s Yardbird plus
understudies of Octavian (Der Rosenkavalier) and
Waltraute (Die Walküre) with Lyric Opera of Chicago,
Hackney Empire and Madison Opera.
Icelandic violinist Hrabba Atladottir is a graduate of the
University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany where she studied under
Prof. Tomaszewski and Prof. Gerhardt. In Berlin she worked at the
Deutsche Oper and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under
conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Nikolaus Harnoncourt,
Bernard Haitink and Christian Thielemann to name a few.
Bassoonist Lynn Hileman’s performances as a soloist and chamber
musician have taken her around the world, with appearances in the
United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia at venues
including the November Music and GLOW Festivals (the
Netherlands), the Surround Festival (Belgium), Centro Mexicano
para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (Mexico), Festival
Internacional de Sopros (Brazil), National Sawdust, Park Avenue
Armory and the Long Play Festival (NYC), and numerous
International Double Reed Society conferences.
Michael Mannella, a native of Detroit, Michigan, joined the
faculty of UC Davis in the fall of 2023 and has been a member of
the United States Air Force Band since 2005. He currently acts as
the personnel manager for “The Commander’s” Jazz Ensemble and is
a member of the concert band.
Steinway Artist Natsuki Fukasawa’s music career has
taken her throughout U.S. cities as well as to Europe,
Scandinavia, Israel, Australia, Brazil, Japan, and China,
performing at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, and
Copenhagen’s Tivoli Concert Hall. Fukasawa has won many accolades
and international prizes, including rave reviews
in Strad and Fanfare magazines and the Best
Chamber Music Recording of the Year from the Danish Music Awards.
Faythe Vollrath, harpsichordist, performs as a soloist and
chamber musician throughout the United States. Hailed by the Wall
Street Journal for her “subtly varied tempo and rhythm
that sounds like breathing,” her solo performances include venues
such as MusicSources in Berkeley, CA, Gothem Early Music in New
York City, and Bruton Parish Church in Colonial Williamsburg.
B.A. UC Davis, music composition and theoryM.A., music composition and tuba performance, CSU, Sacramento
Portia Njoku, a composer, tubist, and music educator, holds a
bachelor of arts degree in music composition and theory from
the University of California, Davis and a double master’s degree
in music composition and tuba performance from California State
University Sacramento. As an active performer, she has
held principal positions with many ensembles and continues to
freelance with chamber groups like the highly popular German
Brass Band, Grand Isle Fire Brigade throughout the
Sacramento and Bay Area regions.
New England Conservatory of Music, Master of Music (2001)
UC Davis Lecturer in Music I-Hui Chen is a
compelling pianist who seamlessly radiates her music and thoughts
to the audience. Critics consider her musicality to be honest and
direct, reflecting the composer’s original intentions, yet
retaining her own creative individuality. In addition to her role
as a solo performer, she is a dedicated teacher to young
musicians and an experienced collaborative pianist.
Cindy Behmer, Lecturer in Music and Chamber Music, teaches oboe
at UC Davis and California State University, Sacramento. Dr.
Behmer performs regularly with numerous organizations in Northern
California and Nevada, including Sacramento Philharmonic and
Opera, Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra, Broadway at Music
Circus, Stockton Symphony, Modesto Opera, Reno
Philharmonic, and Oakland Symphony.
A native of Northern California, Dagenais Smiley
earned her bachelor of music degree at Oberlin
Conservatory as a student of Milan Vitek and her master’s degree
from University of Southern California under the instruction of
Kathleen Winkler. She is proud to have worked under notable
conductors such as Leon Fleisher, David Zinman, Robert Spano,
Michael Tilson Thomas, and John Williams. She has participated in
master classes given by Yuval Yaron, Kathleen Winkler, Alexander
Barantschik, Fritz Gearhart, the Calder Quartet, and Glenn
Dicterow.
Stacey Pelinka is a member of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and
the Eco Ensemble. She plays principal flute with San Francisco
Opera’s Merola Program productions and second flute with the
Berkeley Symphony, the Santa Rosa Symphony, the San Francisco
Chamber Orchestra, and the Midsummer Mozart Festival. A certified
Feldenkrais Method® practitioner, Stacey teaches Feldenkrais at
the San Francisco Symphony. She attended Cornell University and
the San Francisco Conservatory, where she studied with Timothy
Day.
Currently Artist Affiliate in cello and chamber music at the
University of California, Davis, Susan Lamb Cook is an
active performer and educator in the capital region.
Bachelor of Music degree, Indiana University and Master’s degree, University of Texas, Austin
Jolán Friedhoff relocated to Davis in 2008 after serving as
assistant concertmaster of the Saar State Opera Orchestra
(Germany) for twenty years. Since her return to California, she
has performed as assistant concertmaster and concertmaster for
several orchestras in the region, including the Sacramento
Philharmonic, Modesto Symphony, Berkeley Symphony, and the Bear
Valley Music Festival. She also has been part of the
Mendocino Music Festival orchestra, Sacramento Choral
Society, and Sierra Master Chorale.
Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, University of Michigan
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.
Michael Goldberg, guitar, is currently playing solo and chamber
recitals throughout the United States. He has toured as part of
the Alma Duo, an ensemble of violin/viola and guitar, and is also
a longtime member of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, a group
devoted to contemporary music performance. He has recorded on the
Arabesque and Kameleon labels.
Peruvian-born mezzo-soprano Zoila Muñoz teaches voice at UC Davis
and is a performer and vocal coach at Apollo Arts in the
Sierra foothills, recently singing in their 2026 Dido
and Aneas.
Concert Band director Pete Nowlen has been a member of the UC
Davis faculty since 1988. Nowlen has been a dynamic part of the
northern California musical scene for nearly
thirty years. He is dedicated to renewing and
sustaining classical music’s relevance in our society, and
his career has led him to surprisingly diverse
opportunities.
Michael Seth Orland has appeared extensively in the Bay Area as a
chamber musician, playing with the San Francisco Contemporary
Music Players Earplay, the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players,
New Music Theater, the Empyrean Ensemble, Other Minds, and in the
San Francisco Symphony’s New and Unusual Music Series.
A champion of contemporary music in the United States and abroad,
violist Ellen Ruth Rose is currently a member of Empyrean
Ensemble, the flagship new music ensemble in residence at UC
Davis, and Earplay, the San Francisco-based contemporary
ensemble.
Kevin Stewart hails from the greater metropolitan area of
Detroit. Upon graduating from the University of Michigan, where
he received a Bachelor of Woodwind Performance degree, Kevin
headed west and settled in the Bay Area, hooking up with the San
Francisco Saxophone Quartet, the Nuclear Whales Saxophone
Orchestra, and most recently the South American jazz group
Quinteto.
Research Interest(s): Eighteenth-Century Studies, Cultural
History, Music
Julia Simon specializes in eighteenth-century French
literature and culture with special emphasis on the
relevance of Enlightenment social, political, moral, and
aesthetic theory today. She also works in music,
specifically on the cultural history of the blues. She is the
author of Time in the Blues; Rousseau among the
Moderns: Music, Aesthetics,
Politics; Beyond Contractual Morality: Ethics, Law, and
Literature in Eighteenth-Century
France and Mass Enlightenment: Critical Studies in
Rousseau and Diderot. Her current book project examines
calls for justice in the blues through a historical analysis of
economic relations and, specifically, the imposition of debt on
African Americans.
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
Medieval, Renaissance History and Theory,
Historiography, Missionary Music in Africa
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.
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.
Christopher Reynolds began his career as a lecturer and choral
director at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and
then taught and conducted at McGill University. He taught at UC
Davis from 1985-2018 and spent several years as Director of
Music at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. He has held visiting
professorships at Yale, Stanford, and UC Berkeley, and in Germany
at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Goettingen.
Robert Samson Bloch earned a master’s degree from the University
of Chicago and a le prix avec distinction from the Royal
Conservatory of Music, Brussels. He was a violinist and violist
known equally for his performance of early and contemporary music
and was 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.
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.
She published the books Josquin des Prez: A Guide to
Research, The Music of the Pepys MS 1236, and A Handbook
of Music and Music Literature in Sets and Series, and she
published many articles in the New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians. She also was an editor of the journal
Notes. Charles received her bachelor’s and master’s
degrees from the Eastman School of Music and her Ph.D. from the
University of California, Berkeley, in 1959.
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). He had been a member of the
Department of Music at UC Davis since 1972, and in
2007 became professor emeritus.
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.
Bachelor of Arts in music, UC BerkeleyMaster of Arts in music composition, UC Berkeley
When the University established the Department of Music in
1958, Jerome Rosen was the chair. He helped to write
both the undergraduate and graduate degree curricula. He
retired in 1988.
While studying at UC Berkeley, Rosen became associated with
Darius Milhaud, who was teaching at Mills College. In
1949-50 he studied in Paris with Milhaud and took lessons at the
Paris Conservatoire from the leading clarinet virtuoso of the
era, Ulysse Delécluse.
He went to Paris as the recipient of a UC Berkeley prize, the
George Ladd Prix de Paris. Rosen also received Fromm Music
Foundation grants (1953, 1954, and 1960), a Guggenheim Fellowship
(1958), and a residency at the Rockefeller Study Center in
Bellagio, Italy (1982).
Rosen was a composer of sixty works of solo and chamber
music, often including clarinet or saxophone, as well as vocal
pieces, works of symphonic scope and the operas Calisto
and Melibea (1979) and Emperor Norton of the
USA (1999), both produced in Main Theatre.
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.
Master's in music composition, University of Chicago
Richard Swift was a noted composer and one of the founding
editors of the UC Press journal 19th-Century Music. In
the 1970s he also served on the editorial board of this leading
scholarly publisher. He earned his master’s in music composition
at the University of Chicago in 1956, studying under Leonard
Meyer and Leland Smith, and he taught at the University of
California, Davis, from 1956 to 1991 where he was a pillar of the
arts and humanities and established the artist-in-residence
program while serving as the Music department chair from 1963 to
1971. His music compositions encompass the traditional genres,
including songs to texts by major poets in his acquaintance. He
was a rigorous composer, a valued theorist, and a gifted teacher.
William E. Valente (1934−1993) was professor of music at UC Davis
from 1950 to 1993. He taught music theory and composition,
was an undergraduate adviser for the Department, and conductor of
the University Concert Band. In honor and memory of Professor
Valente and his impact on the many students he taught, guided,
and inspired during his life as a mentor, an endowment was
established in name: The William E. Valente Music Scholarship
Fund.
He attended the University of Tulsa and Harvard University,
where he studied composition with Leon Kirchner. He was assistant
professor in music at Fisk University and visiting assistant
professor of music at Vassar College, joining the Department of
Music at UC Davis in 1972. He received numerous awards and
commissions for new compositions, including concerti for cello
and for piano with orchestra and works for symphonic band and for
chorus (including two masses).
