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.
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.
The Los Angeles native, who began composing in
ninth grade, composed and orchestrated “Noctilucence” in his
senior year of high school. The title comes from a type of
high-altitude cloud that has an ethereal shining quality that
only happens at night.
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.
Obituary written and picture provided by Robert
D. Morris (Eastman School of Music) and published by the
Society for Music Theory.
Wayne Slawson, computer music pioneer, composer, and music
theorist, died at 89 on August 6, 2022.
Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1932, Wayne Slawson was educated at
the University of Michigan (BA in mathematics, 1955 and MA in
music composition, advisor Ross Lee Finney, 1959) and Harvard
University (PhD in psychoacoustics, advisor S. S. Stevens, 1965).