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.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.
