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 is a Filipino-American born
in New York City and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He
holds a degree from the Sacramento State School of Music
where he studied composition with Stephen Blumberg and
Leo Eylar and violin with Anna Presler and Ian Swensen.
During his studies at the Sacramento State School of Music,
he was chosen to represent the music department for the
annual One World Initiative campaign to raise awareness
around current global issues.
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.
Prior to accepting the position at UC Davis, Dosman was
the Director of Choral Studies and associate professor at the
University of Southern Maine. He was also the artistic director
of the Community Chorus at South Berwick, the Chorus Master for
the Portland Symphony Orchestra’s Magic of Christmas series and
Opera Maine. He began his collegiate teaching career as the
Director of Choral and Vocal Activities at Colby College and
worked as an adjunct voice professor at Molloy University.
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.
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.
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 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.
