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
Medieval, Renaissance History and Theory,
Historiography, Missionary Music in Africa
Anna Maria Busse Berger is Distinguished Professor of Medieval
and Renaissance History and Theory. 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. 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 Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
Her book Medieval
Music and the Art of Memory won 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.
In 2019, Busse Berger was made an Honorary Member of the
AMS. She also received $210,000 from the Henry Luce
Foundation together with her colleague Henry Spiller to research
a Music History of Indonesia. Her book The Search for
Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891–1961: Scholars,
Singers, Missionaries will appear with the University
of Chicago Press in the fall of 2020.
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.M.A. Choral Conducting from Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music
Conductor and baritone Caleb Lewis is
Lecturer in Music and Director of Choirs at UC Davis. 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.
Caleb has also studied as a classical singer throughout his
musical education (including a doctoral minor in voice).
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.
