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
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.
D.Mus. Choral Conducting from Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music
Conductor and baritone, Caleb Lewis is lecturer of Music and
Director of Choirs at UC Davis. He holds the Doctor of Music
degree in choral conducting from Indiana University’s Jacobs
School of Music, as well as degrees in choral music from Emory
University in Atlanta and Furman University in Greenville, South
Carolina.
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.
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
Busse Berger has published articles and books on notation,
mensuration and proportion signs, music and memory, mathematics
and music, historiography, and music in African mission stations.
It is indicative of the interdisciplinary nature of her work that
she has won major awards from scholarly societies representing
the three musicological disciplines: the American
Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the
Society for Ethnomusicology. Winner of the Alfred Einstein
Award from the American Musicological Society (AMS) for best
article by a young scholar, she has had fellowships at the
Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa
I Tatti, Florence (twice); the Guggenheim Foundation,
the NEH, the Stanford Humanities Center, the University of
Vienna, and the Institute of Advanced Studies
(Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin.
In her first book,
Mensuration and Proportion Signs she presents the first
fundamental study of time signatures in early music and their
relationship to other measuring systems of the period and
fifteenth-century arithmetic. Her book Medieval
Music and the Art of Memorywon the ASCAP Deems
Taylor Award and the Wallace Berry Award from the Society of
Music Theory for 2006, and has been translated into
Italian. Her article “Spreading the Gospel
of Singbewegung: An Ethnomusicologist
Missionary in Tanganyika of the 1930s” won both the Colin
Slim Award for best article by a senior scholar from
the AMS and the Bruno Nettl Prize from the Society for
Ethnomusicology in 2014. She co-edited (together with Jesse
Rodin) the Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (2015).
In 2015, Busse Berger gave the Faculty Research Lecture at
UC Davis, the Academic Senate’s highest honor. In addition,
she won
the UC Davis Honors Teaching Award in 2019.
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.
