Best of the Bay, San Francisco Classical Voice’s annual reader
poll, has honored the American Bach Soloists, under the director
of UC Davis’ Jeffrey Thomas, with two awards this year.
ABS won in the categories of Best Early Music/Baroque Ensemble
and Best Festival for their American Bach Soloists Summer
Festival and Academy.
Music composition doctoral student Aida Shirazi’s “Lullaby for
Shattered Angels” is being performed as part of the inaugural
“New Music
from the Islamic World” series at Music at the Anthology
(MATA) in New York July 8.
Music professor Kurt Rohde’s “Power Is
Everywhere” songs will have its world premiere in San Francisco
May 30. Rohde’s songs are a kind of companion piece to Maurice
Ravel’s Chansons madécasses that will also be part of
the “Francophilia”
concert by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.
Rohde’s music in “Power is Everywhere” is set to the writings of
Michel Foucault, the 20th century philosopher and
literary critic.
“I find the writings and lectures of this groundbreaking thinker
to be direct, anything but simple, and yet always so clear,” said
Rohde. “The singer is the observer, actor and deliverer of the
message; she is not there to simply sing the text – she is there
to instigate the way the music unfolds.”
He calls it a “a surreal singspiel” influenced by opera, song
cycles and theater.
The concert, which will also be performed in Berkeley June 1,
will also include works by Debussy, Massenet and Rorem. Nikki
Edenfield will be the singer.
Rhode, a violist who is a member of Left Coast, recently
completed works for the Lyris Quartet, the Lydian String Quartet
and eighth blackbird. His opera, “Death with Interruptions,”
premiered in March 2015, will be performed at UC Davis Nov. 11
and 12.
UC Davis cello student Angelica Rojas won the Senior Division in
the local California Music Educators Association
competition. Angelica will perform in the Sacramento
Section’s Winners Recital in the fall, will be given a cash
award, and will have the opportunity to compete at the state
level in the fall of 2018. Also, UC Davis alumnus Stephanie
Sugano won best teacher in the Placer County chapter of the CMEA.
Grace and Grant Noda, long-time supporters of the UC Davis
Department of Music and the original donors for creation of the
Ann E. Pitzer Center, will be honored at a noon concert and
reception May 25.
The long-time Davis residents made the initial $1.5 million
donation that eventually led to construction of the Pitzer Center
which houses a recital hall and music department facilities. The
lobby of the center is named for them.
Philip Acimovic, a Ph.D. candidate in music composition, has
received a Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational
Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship for the academic year
2017-2018.
Acimovic’s dissertation analyzes three musical works from
different eras that challenge established musical conventions of
clarity, intent and perception: “Musical Offering” by Johann
Sebastian Bach (1747), “Holiday Symphony” by Charles Ives (1913)
and “Melodien” by György Ligeti (1971).
Audio engineer Steve Bingen for the UC Davis Department of Music
has been profiled by Jeff Hudson of the Davis
Enterprise. Read
Hudson’s article that takes you behind the scenes prior to
and during a concert and the ability to watch a Pitzer Center
performance on your computer.
Graduate student Sarah Messbauer has been awarded the
coveted President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship for
academic year 2017–18. In addition to a stipend,
Messbauer has been invited to attend the prestigious
Annual Meeting of President’s Predoctoral Fellows and
Dissertation Year Fellows sponsored by the UC Office of
the President.
Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology Hannah Adamy was awarded the
Charlotte Frisbee Student Paper Prize. Adamy’s paper, “Sounding
Absence: Tanya Tagaq’s Theoretical Intervention at Polaris,” has
been awarded this prize. The prize recognizes the most
distinguished student paper in ethnomusicology of Indigenous
music research presented at the SEM annual meeting. The prize
comes with an award of $100.
Kurt Rohde has received a two-year appointment (2017-2019) as a
curator at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.
In this capacity, each curator is encouraged to realize their own
vision, and to encourage artists to do the same. As a group,
their responsibility is to make the best possible use of the
Center’s resources to create concerts and special events that
embody the values of diversity, inclusion, and excellence.
Fawzi Haimor, an
alumnus of UC Davis and the Indiana School of Music has been
named the music director of the Württembergische Philharmonic in
the town of Reutlingen, just south of Stuttgart, Germany.
Fawzi Haimor has been named music director of
the Württembergische Philharmonie after a unanimous vote
by the musicians. He was selected from 18 auditioning
candidates. Local media have introduced him as ‘an
American of Arab roots’ (“Amerikaner mit arabischen Wurzeln”).
The Society for Ethnomusicology has awarded the 2016 Bruno Nettl
prize to Henry
Spiller for his recent book, Javaphilia. The prize,
awarded annually and comes with a $500 award, recognizes ”an
outstanding publication contributing to or dealing with the
history of the field of ethnomusicology, broadly defined,
or with the general character, problems, and methods of
ethnomusicology.”
UC Davis Distinguished Professor Emeritus D. Kern Holoman returns
to the classroom this fall to teach his Music 10: Introduction to
Musical Literature. And now it will be offered in the recital
hall of the soon-to-open Ann E. Pitzer Center.
A momentous performance of “Carmina Burana” featuring the UC
Davis University Chorus, Symphony Orchestra and Pacific Boychoir
conducted by music MFA student Garrett Rigsby received
outstanding praise in the Sacramento Press.
Jonathan Favero (Ph.D. student in composition) was recently
selected to be part of the inaugural Mellon Public Scholars
Cohort at UC Davis for 2015-16 . The ten members of the cohort
represent eight different departments and programs, and their
interests address issues and problems in history, education,
incarceration, gentrification, and citizenship.
Serena Yang (Ph.D. student in musicology) was awarded the Nippon
Foundation Fellowship for the 2016-17 academic year. The
fellowship will allow Serena to pursue language study at the
prestigious Inter-University Center for Japanese language studies
in Yokohama and join a cohort of Nippon research fellows.
The UC Davis Symphony Orchestra will perform a program titled
“Parisian Russians” on Saturday, May 7, at 7 p.m. in the
Mondavi Center’s Jackson Hall. Featured will be works by
three composers — Igor Stravinsky, Serge Koussevitzky and
Sergei Prokofiev — who were all born in
czarist Russia in the late 1800s. They all departed Russia
due to the social turbulence that accompanied the Russian
Revolution of 1917, lived in Paris for a time during the years
between the world wars and then settled (for at least a
while) in the United States.