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.
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.
D.M.A., Manhattan School of Music, New YorkM.M, William Paterson University, New JerseyB.MUS, QLD Conservatorium, Australia
Jazz composer/arranger, saxophonist/woodwind player and music educator Jacam Manricks has been a highly respected figure among the New York City jazz scene for over thirteen years. Manricks has released highly acclaimed albums as a leader (Labyrinth, Trigonometry, Cloud Nine, Chamber Jazz, and GilManricks) and performed as a sideman on countless other releases.
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.
