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.
Kyle Bruckmann, lecturer in
music at UC Davis in oboe, is giving a live-streamed
Quarantine Concert from 5:30 to 6:00 pm on Friday, April 17. The
short performance will be live-streamed
on Twitch and will also be made available for viewing
afterwards. Donations made during the program are given to that
particular performer. The Quarantine
Concerts are a series of short programs organized by the
Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) in Chicago in order to provide
performers a space to share their work and also earn money in
this period of COVID-19-related cancellations.
It sure has been helping sustain me, being a fly on the
walls of so many dear experimental music colleagues across the
country, as we try to make sense of continuing our creativity,
and the sharing thereof. —Kyle Bruckmann
The ESS has a mission that ”nurtures artists, heralds new
works, and builds a broad, supportive community of makers,
enthusiasts, and creative partners through production,
presentation, education, and preservation.”
UC Davis Professor of Music Kurt Rohde has new a CD, it wasn’t a
dream, released by Albany Records featuring two major
chamber compositions. The first work, it wasn’t a
dream, sets a sequence of poems by Diane Seuss to
music performed by soprano Charlotte Mundy, tenor Andrew Fuchs,
and pianists Michael Brofman and Miori Sugiyama.
The Sacramento
Saturday Club has awarded UC Davis undergraduate music major
V. Leone Rivers—a percussionist—a $500 scholarship. The
Sacramento Saturday Club was organized on December 9, 1893. It is
the oldest musical organization in Sacramento—and one of the
oldest west of the Rockies.
The Department of Music has cancelled all performances and
lectures for the academic Spring Quarter. We have made this
decision because we truly believe it is in the best interest of
our students, musicians, faculty, and the community at
large.
Choruses, orchestra, and our different bands will reschedule
repertoire and visiting musicians, as able, to one of their
existing future dates in 2020–21. Other events will be
rescheduled when possible. Ticket holders of concerts in April,
May, and June will automatically be offered a refund.
Please allow for some extra processing time for this to take
place.
We know this is a difficult moment to comprehend. We hope that by
taking these measures we will be actively participating in
slowing the virus’s spread, allowing for a quicker recovery
period, and we can then return to normal presentations as soon as
possible.
Thank you—and we hope to see you sooner rather than later.
—Staff and Faculty, UC Davis
Department of Music
The concert will include Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, with
soloist and former Davis resident Andrei Baumann,
and Christ on the Mount of Olives, and San
Martin’s what remains, written for the UC Davis
orchestra and chorus.
The production features regional folk songs, classical Indonesian
ballads and Sundanese and American pop music; dancers from the
group Padepokan Seni Jugala; and the multi-media program “Learn
from Pring” (pring refers to the wisdom of bamboo). The
audience will be invited to participate.
UC Davis Graduate Student in Music Esther DeLozier has been
named Student of the Month for February, 2020, by the Society for Ethnomusicology
(SEM). SEM will feature Esther as Student of the
Month on their website and Facebook page. Begun in
January of 2019, the recognition highlights research and
accomplishments of its members to the public. Esther’s
dissertation examines the live interactions between artists
and their audiences.
Leaving my country of birth [Venezuela] has expanded my vision
of what it means to be a citizen in and of the world while
pursuing a doctorate in ethnomusicology has increased my
enthusiasm and respect for the cultural and artistic diversity
that is part of that world. As a citizen and a scholar, I
strive to share my appreciation for the arts by promoting their
richness and importance within and beyond [academia].
