Among our graduate degree recipients before 2004 are the
composers Eric Sawyer, Martha Horst, and Anne Guzzo; and
musicologists Donna M. DiGrazia, Carol Hess, Don Meyer, John
Palmer, Matthew Daines, Suzanne Jubenville, Mark Brill, and Paul
Christiansen.
Jeremiah Trujillo is an active soloist, collaborative pianist,
and historical musicologist. He is the recipient of numerous
awards, including a special prize for the interpretation of a
nineteenth-century Romantic work at the 2013 San Francisco
Young Pianists Competition. He is a recipient of the 2018
Faculty Recognition Award for Excellence in Musical Performance
at UC Davis, and the 2014 Eisner Prize for Music, awarded at
UC Berkeley. Jeremiah was also a finalist in the 2013 Carmel
Music Society piano competition, held at Sunset Center in Carmel,
CA.
Alex Van Gils is a composer, performer, and generative video
artist, exploring the interplay between human and electronic
creative agents. In his composition work he creates musical
systems that explore, amplify and transform the gestures of human
improvisational partners.
Alex lives in Brooklyn, NY, and his active projects include
XBUCKET, a performance trio featuring live-processed violin and
generative video, and also a discipline of daily audiovisual
compositions uploaded to @avg.music on instagram. Alex holds a
Ph. D. in Music Theory and Composition from UC Davis.
David Verbuč (from Slovenia) received his master’s degree in
ethnomusicology at UC Davis (with distinction), and his
bachelor’s degree in music education from the Academy of Music,
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (under the supervision of
Svanibor Pettan, professor of ethnomusicology).
Sarah Wald was born in Chicago. She
attended Columbia University in the City of New York for her
bachelor’s degree in music with a focus in
composition. While at Columbia, Sarah studied composition
with Tristan Murail and Arthur Kampela, as well as with Robert
Lombardo in Chicago. She also studied flute with Sue Ann
Kahn. Sarah then studied with Conrad Susa and David Garner
at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for her master’s
degree in composition. For her master’s thesis, she composed
and produced Elegy for a Lady: a Music Drama in One A
Ching-Yi Wang began her music training in piano at the age of
five, and started taking composition lessons at the age of twelve
and received bachelor and master of fine arts degrees in theory
and composition from Taipei National University of the Arts in
Taiwan (TNUA). One of her music compositions, Yu Lin
Ling, was awarded the Tune in Taiwan, 2002. Wang has taught
at Tainan National University of the Arts.
Her music can be found on the Taiwan Composer League’s Taiwan
Contemporary Composers I: Chamber Music CD, released in
2007.
Chia Wei Lin is greatly interested in the historiography of music
and the history of performers.
Born and raised as a pianist in Taiwan, Lin received her master’s
degree from Taipei National University of the Arts and her
bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan Normal University. She
began playing piano at age three and her formal music education
commenced at age eight. As a pupil of Professor En Wang, a
renowned pianist and an enthusiastic promoter of new Taiwanese
music, Lin has performed works by contemporary Taiwanese
composers, including the esteemed composer Mao-Shuen Chen. She
has been performing since the age of twelve, with several
premieres to her credit. Recently, she performed and recorded the
incidental music for the theater work Elephant’s
Graveyard, composed by contemporary American composers
Laurie San Martin and Garrett Shatzer in the Mondavi Center at UC
Davis.
Serena Yang is a postdoctoral fellow for the Japan Society for
the Promotion of Science.
Her research interests include twentieth- and
twenty-first-century music, interdisciplinary studies, cultural
studies, and Asian music. Yang holds a bachelor’s degree in
violin from National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan, and a
master’s degree in music history from the University of
Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music under Bruce McClung.
