“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.
Second-year undergraduate student Jason Chen is a physics major
and member of the UC Davis Concert Band. On March 8, the Concert
Band will premiere ”Noctilucence,” a composition by
Chen, at Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing
Arts.
Cesar
Favila (B.A. music, ‘06), an assistant professor of
musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, and Paul
Feller, a doctoral musicology student at Northwestern University,
have won the 2022 Noah Greenberg
Award from the American Musicological
Society.
Albert J. McNeil, UC Davis professor emeritus of the Department
of Music and an original faculty member and chair of the
Department of African American and African Studies, died on Nov.
29. He was 102.
As part of an ongoing study stretching from Davis to Germany
and across the many islands of Indonesia, the UC
Davis Department of Music is holding a second
conference on Indonesian music. “Rethinking The History Of
Indonesian Music” on Nov. 5 brings together scholars from
around the globe
Professor Laurie San Martin, music department chair, and alumnus
Josiah Catalan
(Ph.D., music, ‘21) will have compositions performed at the
Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University on
Nov. 9. Their works were commissioned and will be performed by
Earplay, a
Bay area-based chamber ensemble.
Professor Laurie San Martin, music department chair, has received
a commission from the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at
Brigham Young University. San Martin’s commission will be for
Ensemble Ari, a group of Korean American musicians in the San
Francisco Bay Area.
Jeremy Borum (B.A. music ‘01) recently
orchestrated a rock opera titled The Witches
Seed by composer Stewart Copeland, which received its
first performance in an abandoned rock quarry in Italy this
summer. Copeland began his career as the drummer for the
British rock band The Police, and now enjoys a career composing
for concert, film, and the video game industry. Borum and
Copeland have collaborated on many projects over the years.
Ph.D. alumnus Ryan Suleiman (‘20), now an assistant professor of
music at Berklee College of Music, Boston, has launched a podcast
series, “Music and Nature,” which is affiliated
with Landscape
Music, a network of musical artists whose “mission is to
deepen public appreciation of the natural world by providing a
platform for contemporary composers and performers whose music
engages with landscape, nature, and place.” Ryan’s own music
compositions explore dreaming, the natural world, and the
understated beauty of everyday life. The podcast builds off a
couple of pilot episodes from 2020 and is available on your
favorite podcast service.
British Forum for
Ethnomusicology (BFE) recognizes outstanding scholarship in
ethnomusicology written in English. BFE has given a Special
Commendation to Professor Juan Diego Díaz for his
book Africanness
in Action: Essentialism and Musical Imaginations of Africa in
Brazil (Oxford UP, 2021) in its 2022 book prize
competition. The book focuses on “tropes of Africanness” in
self-identification and musical expression in the northeastern
state of Bahia in Brazil. The judges praised Africanness in
Action: “this is a beautifully written and profoundly
impressive work which offers a critically reflexive and
nuanced postcolonial representation of African music
in the Black diaspora.”
UC Davis alumnus Cesar Favila (B.A. music, ‘06)—now assistant
professor of musicology at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music—has
been given the Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellowship in
Music Studies from the American Council of Learned Societies
(ACLS).
Professor of Music, emeritus, Christopher Reynolds has been
elected a member of the
Musicology and Art History section of the Academia
Europaea (Academy of Europe). The purpose of the
Academy of Europe—an academy of sciences and humanities—is for
the advancement and propagation of excellence in
scholarship ”for the public benefit and for the advancement
of the education of the public of all ages.”
