Tito Talamantes, who directs the UC Davis Mariachi Ensemble, was
featured by Fox 40 News. Talamantes now directs the Advanced
Mariachi Ensemble at Cesar Chavez High School in Stockton, where
he began as a student.
Matilda Hofman, a lecturer in music at UC Davis, has been named
the new Artistic Director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble
beginning with their 2023–24 season. Left Coast is based in the
Bay Area and has gained a reputation for bringing to light
treasured works alongside new creations by living composers.
Graduate student composer Max Gibson along with collaborator
Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambaksh (Librettist) will see the premiere of
their short opera Leonard as part of Jewellery
Quarter Festival in late July. The work was commissioned by
the Birmingham
Opera Company in the United Kingdom.
Professor Laurie San Martin (B.A., music, ‘91) was guest
faculty at the 14th Cortona Sessions for New
Music in Italy. In addition, three compositions by San Martin
were performed in concert during her residency June 12-25.
Professor Mika Pelo has been selected for a composer residency by
the Peterson-Berger Foundation at Sommarhagen, the home of
the late Swedish composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger. Pelo will be
in residence July 28 – Aug. 18.
Three members of the UC Davis Department of Music faculty gave
presentations at the recent Music Teachers’ Association of
California’s annual conference. Susan Lamb Cook, artist
affiliate in cello, Heidi Moss Erickson, voice, and Natsuki
Fukasawa, piano, participated in the 2023 convention held in
Santa Clara.
Professor Pierpaolo Polzonetti has
received the 2023
Library Travel Grant conferred by the Cuban Research
Institute (CRI) and the Kimberly Green Latin American and
Caribbean Center (LACC) to conduct research in the Díaz-Ayala
Cuban and Latin
American Popular Music Collection at the Florida
International University, Miami. His project is titled
“Cuban Sound Recipes: Songs About Food from Son to Salsa.”
Doctoral student musicologist Sarah Miller has been awarded a UC
Davis Russel J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational
Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship. This
fellowship supports students as they begin the advanced stage of
doctoral study by offering funding during the quarter immediately
following advancement to candidacy, providing summer research and
writing support, and providing for a full academic year
fellowship for dissertation writing.
Graduate student musicologist Anushka Kulkarni was awarded a UC
Davis Critical Language Scholarship which enables her to take a
summer intensive language program overseas for U.S. academic
credit.
Graduate student composer Trey Makler has
received a 2023 Creator
Fund Award from New Music USA, an organization that has for
more than ten years supported composers, musicians, and
organizations with grants so they can create new works and
build community.
Vocal performance major Crisia Regalado has won the
2023 Lucy Becker Scholarship from Music in the Mountains (in
Grass Valley, California). Crisia competed with Gioachino
Rossini’s “Una voce poco fa” from The Barber of Seville.
She studies with Zoila Muñoz at UC Davis, with whom she says she
chose to go to UC Davis to study voice. 
Professor Kurt Rohde’s new micro
opera 4:30
Movie will premiere April 29 and 30, 2023, at the
Bayview Opera House in San Francisco as part of a program
presented by the Left
Coast Chamber Ensemble. Soprano Nikki Einfeld, stars
in 4:30 Movie, complemented by percussion and
electronics.
The San José Chamber Orchestra will give the
premiere performance of Professor Pablo Ortiz’s ZOFO
Encajonado on May 14, 2023, at 7:00 pm at St. Francis
Episcopal Church in Willow Glen, California. ZOFO
Encajonado is a concertino in three movements for piano four
hands, cajon, and strings. ZOFO is a piano duo comprised of
Eva Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi, and they have
frequently collaborated with Pablo Ortiz, and have been in
residence at UC Davis.
“Requiem for Gerry” by Professor Pablo Ortiz will premiere at the
Teatro Colón on March 22. The work was commissioned as a tribute
to the late Gerardo Gandini, founder and director of the Columbus
Theater Experimental Center.
Scott Linford, assistant professor of music, has produced and
recorded a new album—Ears
of the People: Ekonting Songs from Senegal and The
Gambia—as part of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings,
a nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian
Institution. The album features nine master players of the
ekonting, a three-stringed instrument made from a gourd and
papyrus reed by people of the Jola ethnic group.
Distinguished Professor of Music, emeritus, Jessie Ann Owens, has
been awarded the prestigious Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime
Achievement Award by the Renaissance Society of America. The
board of directors of the society gives the award annually to an
individual with “uncompromising devotion to the highest standard
of scholarship, accompanied by exceptional achievement in
Renaissance studies.”
Professor Carol A. Hess has published a new book, Aaron
Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural
Politics (University of Illinois Press). In it she
gives an in-depth examination of the composer’s exchange of music
and ideas with Latin American composers.
Professor Kurt Rohde has been given a 2022
San Francisco Arts Commission fund. The $20,000 commission will
be used to support 4:30 Movie, a new twenty-minute
micro-opera using poems by Donna Masini published
in 4:30
Movie (Norton, 2020). These funny, touching,
ruthless poems take the reader through the diagnosis,
treatment and death of the author’s sister from cancer.
Using the language of how movies are made and consumed, Masini
tells the story of her sister’s struggle, and of her grief—both
during her treatment and after her death.
The
National Endowment for the Arts has awarded an Arts
Project Grant to the Newtown Creek
Alliance, which is in the process of creating a site-specific
performance piece composed by Professor Kurt Rohde. The Newtown Creek separates the
border of Queens and Brooklyn, and has a history of being one of
the most polluted waterways in the country. The piece is
called the Newtown Odyssey,
which is being actively developed through workshops with artists
and local community organizations.
