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 (he/him) is a
Filipino-American composer born in New York City and raised in
the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently, his compositional interests
have become centered around discovering the intersects of
musics influenced by traditional, avant-garde, popular, and
indigenous Philippine musics.
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.
Steinway Artist Natsuki Fukasawa’s music career has
taken her throughout U.S. cities as well as to Europe,
Scandinavia, Israel, Australia, Brazil, Japan, and China,
performing at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, and
Copenhagen’s Tivoli Concert Hall. Fukasawa has won many accolades
and international prizes, including rave reviews
in Strad and Fanfare magazines and the Best
Chamber Music Recording of the Year from the Danish Music Awards.
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 has a varied and busy conducting schedule.
Reviewers have described her conducting as “taut and finely
controlled” and giving “a striking sense of purpose.” She is
Music Director of the Diablo Symphony Orchestra,
conductor-in-residence for the Empyrean Ensemble at UC Davis and
Artistic Director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Matilda
also serves as a cover conductor for the San Francisco Symphony.
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 is a musicologist specializing in music and
food, opera, eighteenth-century instrumental music, jazz, and
Cuban popular music. He is the author of Feasting and
Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas
Diet (University of Chicago Press, 2021), the first
book-length study to explore rituals of eating and drinking and
gastronomic symbols in opera.
My research focuses on France during the long nineteenth century,
especially the intersection of the sonic and the kinetic in
embodied practices such as ballet. I draw on methodological
approaches outside the traditional musicological toolkit and
instead propose creative strategies for writing about otherwise
under-documented topics. Kinetic Cultures (UC
Press, 2023) considers these issues within the context of
the belle époque. In its broadest iteration, my work
reimagines what is possible for scholars doing historical work on
embodied practices—what to ta
