Works by Aida Shirazi, a doctoral student in music composition,
are featured on several recent and upcoming live or recorded
online concerts.
Her “albumblatt” will be part of a concert by pianist Sarah
Cahill broadcast on BBC Radio on Nov. 20. It is part of Cahill’s
“The Future
is Female” project that commissioned works by women composers
from around the world.
Tiara started at Davis this quarter and is pursuing a degree in
music, though she first started to sing when she was about four
years old.
“When I turned seven, I realized that I loved music and I loved
to sing, and it was something I was truly passionate about, so
I found a voice teacher who was willing to train me and I began
to learn the right techniques and healthy habits early on,”
Tiara said.
Two UC Davis alumni are among 20 composer-librettist
pairs preparing a new opera for consideration to be
performed at West Edge Opera’s “Aperture” project. “Aperture” is
an online performance space for new opera works,
which launches in November of 2020.
Ryan Suleiman,
composer (PhD, Music, ‘20), and Cristina Fríes,
librettist (M.A., Creative Writing, ‘19), have titled their new
work School for Girls Who Lost Everything in the
Fire. The piece is a social tale about a group of
orphaned girls finding the hope to rebuild their lives in a
Catholic school in the aftermath of destruction amid mysterious
phenomena.
“Broken,” a composition by Mika Pelo, associate professor of
music, was given its premiere performance by celebrated
pianist-composer Rolf Hind on October 7 at King’s
Place in London. The concert, “Is it too soon to talk about all
this?,” featured a series of short works.
Ryan Suleiman, a
doctoral student in music composition at UC Davis, has long
been concerned with the environment, nature and climate change.
Over the past few years, Suleiman has written works
titled Drought, Skies of
Smoke and Burning. In
the spring he reached out to other musicians to see what they
had to say about music that explores the natural environment,
with an emphasis on climate change, for a series of YouTube
interviews.
Professor Emeritus Albert J. McNeil was a
transformative force in the music department during his 21 years
as a faculty member (1969–90). UC Davis is celebrating McNeil’s
100th birthday.
The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble begins its all-online concert
season with a program titled Soft-Spoken. It
features flutist and UC Davis lecturer in music Stacey Pelinka in Soft-Spoken, a world
premiere from the multi-talented artist David Dominique,
Zeppelin, a flute and cello duo by UC Davis professor of
music Laurie San
Martin, and Kurt Rohde’s (also a UC
Davis professor of music) remixes of songs by Hildegard
(Ave Maria) and Joni Mitchell (Blue),
as well as trios by Beethoven and Albert Roussel.
Aida Shirazi (PhD student in composition
at UC Davis) spoke to NPR Capital Public Radio’s Jennifer
Reason
in a September 1, 2020 interview. Aida began by relating her
grandfather’s musical interest and influence and her initial
music study in Iran, which included several female students
in a bachelor’s program despite Iran’s government
restrictions on women.
Recently William Storz (B.A. Music, ’20) received the 2020 David
S. Saxon Award for Excellence in the Performance of Early Music
bestowed by UC Davis Music Department. Storz also received the
honor in 2019.
On June 5, Professor Laurie San Martin, chair of the music
department, presided (via Zoom) over the annual end-of-year
celebration for the music class of 2020 and department faculty
and graduate students.
“Spring quarter 2020 was the most challenging ever,” said San
Martin. “With the cancellations of the department’s in-person
classes and performance schedule, our students, faculty, and
staff overcame obstacles of absorbing new technology for remote
instruction in order to complete the academic year and graduate
the class of 2020.”
The Department of Music is proud of its students. Not only have
they risen to the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic,
but in the wake of the senseless killings of George Floyd,
Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, they have committed themselves
to social justice. We resoundingly support our students’ efforts
to make the world a more inclusive and safer place, and we
continue to elicit their input on how best to address the
systemic racism that endangers people of color. We stand
with our students in protesting violence against black and brown
members of our community.
Laurie San Martin, professor and chair of the music department,
has announced that Distinguished Professor of Music Anna Maria
Busse Berger will retire in July 2020. Busse Berger joined the
department in 1988.
The UC Davis Department of Music brings life to both classic and
newly created works. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic we will
not offer in-person concerts in the Fall of 2020. We hope we
can return to presenting in-person concerts sometime between
January and June of 2021. In fact, we have many spectacular and
diverse programs planned by the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra,
Empyrean Ensemble, Chorus, Concert Band, and others.
Beginning in October, we will livestream weekly noon
concerts thanks to generous gifts made to the Joy S. Shinkoskey
Series of Noon Concerts Endowment. Gifts to the endowment are
made by local Davis resident Brett Hewitt and others, and support
professional musicians from our region. If you are able, consider contributing to
the fund.
We are also exploring the possibility of streaming a few creative
performances by our student ensembles. We will release more
information as our options become more clear. Any streamed
concerts will be shown on the Music at UC Davis YouTube
channel.
Graduate student composer Aida
Shirazi has been selected to be one of ten composers from
around the world to participate in the IRCAM Cursus Program for Composition
and Computer Music in Paris, France, in 2020–21. At Cursus, which
was founded by composer-conductor Pierre Boulez,
the ”philosophy is that the computer is a tool for musical
creation.” In 2019 Shirazi participated in IRCAM’s ManiFeste
summer festival.
Graduate student Jonathan Favero, who
is studying composition at UC Davis, will have his piece for solo
flute, Meditation on King, performed
by Ensemble Mise-En’s
Kelley Barnett via YouTube
streaming. The program will also include five other solo
works and two premieres, on instruments from flute to
contrabass flute.
The
College of Letters and Science graduate student exhibition
will include work by two doctoral students in composition and
theory. The exhibition showcasing work by 29 graduate students in
seven disciplines will take place online this year due to
COVID-19. Sarah Wald is
presenting her Rumination on ‘La Prima Vez’ (for
solo flute), performed by Wald, and Meditation on ‘La Prima
Vez’ (for piano four hands), performed by the piano duo
ZOFO, along with the scores and program notes. The pieces are
part of her dissertation collection of works based on Sephardic
songs. Adam
Strawbridge will present a video performance by ZOFO of his
Ohrwurm, made up of ten variations of Bach’s
chorale “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort” (BWV 20).
Doctoral student in composition Aida
Shirazi has been included in an extensive feature on female
composers from Iran in The New York Times. The piece
focuses on the Iranian Female Composers Association, which
Shirazi helped found.
Christian Baldini, director of the UC
Davis Symphony Orchestra, also serves as the music director and
conductor of Sacramento’s Camellia Symphony Orchestra. Recently
Baldini created and conducted this brief performance of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Finale) with Camellia musicians in
isolation. The video was produced and edited by UC Davis audio
engineer Stephen Bingen.
