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.
UC Davis Faculty Affiliate Susan Lamb Cook, cello, will be
performing some of the Schubert selections on this Friday’s
Faculty Recital, Worlds Apart, as
well as on her Great Composers Chamber Music Series at the
Harris Center at
Folsom Lake College, on Sunday, April 7th.
UC Davis music department composition alumnus Gabriel José
Bolaños (PhD 2016) will join the music faculty
at Arizona State University starting Fall of 2019. His recent
music engages with theories of ecological listening: how our
sense of hearing evolved primarily to interpret our environment.
UC Davis Professor of Music Henry Spiller and graduate student
Gillian Irwin spoke with interviewers from the Voice of America,
Indonesia, about student life for Indonesian students studying at
UC Davis, and about the music department’s Sundanese Gamelan
Ensemble.
From contemporary choral works to classics by Bartók and
Mussorgsky, the UC Davis department of music will present three
diversely programmed concerts within a week at the Mondavi
Center.
Bey’s union with Bourelly, who is a lecturer
in the College of Letters and Science’s department of music,
initially occurred around the former “no man’s land” area of
Cold War Berlin in 1999; the two met there and agreed on a
collaboration. In the piece, the performers move through a
landscape filled with atmospheric sound bites, punctuated by
waves of guitar motion and commentary on today’s tumultuous
world.
Violist and composer Kurt Rohde says he’s
planning to hang up his instrument in 2028, which might not
seem especially imminent. But he’s determined to use that time
to make things better for the violists who come after him.
The Sacramento
Saturday Club has awarded UC Davis undergraduate music major
Mira Huang—a soprano and undergraduate peer advisor—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.
