In addition to teaching horn and the concert bands at UC Davis,
lecturer in music Pete Nowlen is director of the Rancho Cordova’s
Civic Light Orchestra called “Symphony d’Oro.” Through this
orchestra he builds on local connections.
Graduate student Ryan
Suleiman’s short opera Moon, Bride,
Dogs will be performed twice in a partnership with Bay
Area new music ensembles EARplay and West Edge Opera called
“Snapshot.” His opera is written to a libretto by UC Davis
graduate student in creative writing Cristina Fríes and was
premiered at UC Davis in May 2018 by the Brooklyn Art Song
Society along with five other pieces for voice and piano in
collaboration with the Program in
Creative Writing.
The Howard
Mayer Brown Fellowship for a minority graduate study in
musicology for 2019 was awarded to UC Davis music graduate
student Serena
Yang.She is the first UC Davis
student to earn the Brown fellowship from the American
Musicological Society.
UC Davis Associate Professor of Music Mika Pelo is one of fifteen
composers who has been awarded a 2019 Fromm Music Foundation
commission. The foundation seeks to strengthen composition and to
bring contemporary concert music closer to the public. In
addition to the commissioning fee, a subsidy is available for the
ensemble performing the premiere of the commissioned work.
Distinguished Professor of Music Anna
Maria Busse Berger was elected an honorary member of the
American Musicological Society (AMS) at their 2019 meeting in
Boston. 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.”
The American Musicological Society has given its annual award for
a book in the category of teaching to UC Davis Professor of Music
Carol A. Hess. Experiencing
Latin American Music (UC Press) draws on human
experience as a point of departure for musical
understanding. Students explore broad topics—identity, the
body, religion, and more—and relate these to Latin American
musics while refining their understanding of musical concepts and
cultural-historical contexts.
Music student Lauren Risha has had her paper—”‘In the Hands
of a Nobleman’: Enlightenment Values and Collective Morality in
Mozart’s Don Giovanni‘”—published in the 2019–20 UC
Davis Prized Writing publication. This year’s collection is the
30th anniversary of the annual publishing by the University Writing Program.
UC Davis Professor of Music Kurt Rohde
has been appointed the new Artistic Director of
the Composers Conference. The Composers
Conference, guided for nearly 50 years by Pulitzer
Prize-winning composer Mario Davidovsky, who recently passed
away, offers a unique opportunity for emerging composers,
professional musicians, amateur chamber players, and
conservatory-level instrumentalists and singers.
UC Davis Professor Kurt Rohde will be at the Bogliasco
Foundation in Genoa, Italy, for Fall Quarter
2019. While in residence, Rohde will compose
seeking all that’s still unsung, a new work for
string quartet and electronics commissioned by the Lydian
Quartet. Rohde’s new piece listens to the rapidly changing
sonics of the “outside” natural world and brings them “inside.”
It is an interior mirroring of the sounds that surround us and
that we take for granted, many of which are disappearing.
Eight composers from as close as Davis and as far away as Ankara,
Turkey have been invited to participate in the Taproot New Music Festival at UC Davis from Jan.
30 to Feb. 2. These composers will have their works
premiered by Quince Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, and the UC
Davis Empyrean Ensemble.
UC Davis graduate student in music Aida Shirazi will have a
composition performed at New York’s Lincoln Center in the
Mostly Mozart series on August 5.
UC Davis Professor of Music Henry Spiller has been
selected as a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced
Study (Amsterdam) for 2019–20, where he will be in residence
during the fall quarter of 2019.
UC Davis music graduate student alumna Jessica
Bejarano (‘08) recently became the first woman to
conduct the American Youth
Symphony, which is based in Los Angeles.
UC Davis Graduate Student Composer Aida Shirazi will participate
in IRCAM’s ManiFeste 2019 to have her new composition, Ardea
Alba I, performed by the
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France in Paris. During the
festival Shirazi will work with internationally renowned
composer Kaija Saariaho and
UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of Music Carmine Emanuele Cella.
UC Davis music professors Henry
Spiller and Anna Maria Busse
Berger have received a major grant from the Henry
Luce Foundation to look at source material collected by German
missionaries in Indonesia during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.