This year’s “Arts and Humanities Graduate Exhibition at UC Davis”
showcases the work and research of graduate students across
seven disciplines — art studio, design, art history, music,
theatre, creative writing and French — at the Manetti Shrem
Museum.
Music’s Sam Clark-McHale, Jonathan Favero, Ryan Suleiman and
Sarah Wald will be featured in this interdisciplinary show.
The Camellia Symphony Orchestra’s program on May 19 and 20 will
begin with the world premiere of Jubilant
Burbs by composer Pablo Ortiz, a longtime member
of the music faculty at UC Davis.
New compositions by UC Davis Associate Professor of Music
and composer Kurt Rohde and graduate student Addie Camsuzou
recently premiered in the Bay area. Writer Jessica Balik for San
Francisco Classical Voice caught a performance and wrote
favorably of the new works.
Rohde composed music for “Three Scented Candles” with text
by Scott Hunter and ’s texts, while Camsuzou created music
for “Opens Lark in its Constellation” with text by Luke
Munson.
ABS Artistic and Music Director Jeffrey Thomas earned star
status with his peerless work on the podium. The suites (like
other Baroque works) can turn busy and dutiful when they’re
played too much for speed and showiness.
Writing It wasn’t a dream made Rohde
realize that a similar collaborative project would likely be
fruitful for graduate students in both departments. On
Saturday, the musicians presented two new works from this
project.
Local philanthropist and lover of music Grace Noda (née Imamoto)
died on Wednesday, March 14, 2018, surrounded by family and
music. She was 98 years old. She leaves behind a legacy of
kindness to others.
A free concert featuring music by Greek composer Mikis
Theodorakis — perhaps best known in this country for his music
for the films “Zorba the Greek” (1964), “Z” (1969) and
“Serpico” (1973) — will be presented at 7 p.m. Friday, May 4,
in the Pitzer Center on the UC Davis campus.
A distinctive series of events featuring collaborative efforts
between a number of UC Davis composers, as well as writers and
musicians from UC Davis and elsewhere, will take place
during May. Included will be recent works by UC Davis faculty
composer and violist Kurt Rohde; poet Diane Seuss, visiting
from Michigan…”
Fries and Sulieman are one of six duos from the College of
Letters and Science music and English departments that have
collaborated on works for voice, piano and some electronics.
The pieces will be premiered by the Brooklyn Art Song Society
at the “Creative
Writing” concert May 10.
The [violin] concerto is known for its mix of Hungarian folk
melodies, Bulgarian dance rhythms, modern microtonality and
references to Medieval and Renaissance music — including the
composer’s use of scordatura (an alternate tuning of the violin
that was used by Baroque composer H.I.F. Biber in some of his
violin sonatas).
UC Davis graduate student Josiah Catalan
won first place in the 2017 NACUSA (National
Association of Composers/USA) Composition Competition for
his piece titled Wanderlust, written
for flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and
percussion.
Laurie San Martin, professor of music, will
receive the Andrew Imbrie Award in music given by
the American Academy of
Arts and Letters. San Martin is
among the eighteen recipients of this year’s
awards in music, which total $225,000.
Aida Shirazi, graduate student in composition, will have her
“Vestiges” for strings and flute premieres on March 12
by the Left Coast
Chamber Ensemble in an evening titled “Sonnets to
Orpheus.” The performance takes place in the San
Francisco Conservatory of Music at 7:30 p.m.
The concert will be repeated on March 17 at Berkeley Hillside
Club at 7:30 p.m.
Esther DeLozier, a graduate student in music, has been appointed
to the 2018 cohort of Mellon Public Scholars. She will be working
with the California Arts Council on a review of their public arts
grant-making programs.
To explain his Visions, Messiaen wrote about
multiple definitions of what “Amen” might mean. These various
meanings loosely inspire his seven-movement piece. A little
like these multiple meanings, the short pieces by Castro and
Acimovic appealed to different aspects of Messiaen’s
idiosyncratic compositional style.
Conductor Jeffrey Thomas, a longtime member of the UCD music
faculty, will lead the performance of the Schubert Mass in G,
which was composed early in Schubert’s all-too-brief career…
The program also includes two orchestral works by English
composer Elgar, both of which will be conducted by doctoral
candidate Jonathan Spatola-Knoll.
Compositions by graduate students Philip Acimovic and Christopher
Castro are to have their world premieres in an upcoming Left
Coast Chamber Ensemble concert. Acimovic’s Reverent
Murmurs for Two Pianos and Castro’s
IV-I for Two Pianos are included in the
program Visions de l’Amen.
The concert will be performed in two Bay area venues,
first on Feb. 1 and 3 at the Berkeley Piano Club, then
on Feb. 5 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Professor Christopher Reynolds was elected an honorary
member of the American Musicological Society (AMS) at their 2017
meeting in Rochester, New York, along with Thomas
Forrest Kelly, Malena Kuss, and Judy Tsou.
According to the AMS By-laws, Honorary and Corresponding members
of the AMS are those scholars “who have made outstanding
contributions to furthering its stated object and whom the
Society wishes to honor.”
