Winner of the 2017 Earplay Donald Aird Composition Competition
(for his quartet Aeropittura), Daniel Godsil will
be a guest composer at Western Illinois Univeristy’s New Music
Festival 2019. The Festival takes place in Macomb, IL, March
3-5.
“[Professor] San Martin started the piece during a quiet
composing retreat at Lake Tahoe in 2016 that was interrupted by
ongoing news of gun violence. That charted the course for the
piece.”
“I kept reaching for joy and humor, but there was all this
noise happening behind it.” … “What it sounds like is very
much a part of the process.”
UC Davis music graduate student composer Adam
Strawbridge, along with Wyatt Cannon are
winners of the SFCMP’s SF Search (call for scores)
program. Both winners will have their pieces performed on the
Player’s May 2019
concerts at SFJAZZ, which features the music of Julius
Eastman and Bay Area composer, improviser, and pianist Myra
Melford.
The UC Davis College of Letters and Science’s Department of Music
is holding auditions for University Chorus on Tuesday, Jan. 8,
from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Music Building. Students, faculty,
staff and community members are encouraged to audition. There are
openings for all voice parts.
Joining the chorus provides singers with the opportunity to
perform onstage in Jackson Hall at the Robert and Margrit
Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. The hall’s superb
acoustics are renowned by numerous acclaimed musicians and
vocalists who have performed there.
UC Davis alumnus Luciano Chessa (PhD 2004)
recently conducted the Mannes Orchestra of the New School in a
never-before-heard edition of a symphony written by a
modern master composer Julius Eastman. Eastman died
in 1990 in relative obscurity as he had spent his remaining years
in intermittent periods of homelessness, with many of his
belongings—including his scores—lost.
The University Chorus under the direction of Caleb Lewis is
currently in rehearsal for “Una Navidad Latina/A Latin
Christmas,” featuring Spanish and Latin American Christmas music
from the church and the village. Photographer Justin Han attended
a recent rehearsal and captured the Chorus developing the
concert’s program. All photos by Justin Han, copyright UC
Davis.
UC Davis alum, Kristin
Kirk, an undergraduate music composition major who graduated
with Honors in 2017, is featured in an ad for the university’s
Office of Educational Opportunity and Enrichment Services’
#FirstGenUCDavis campaign. The program spotlights students and
alumni who are the first in their families to graduate from
college.
A work by UC Davis music department chair and professor Laurie
San Martin with words by Lucy Corin, professor of English, will
have its world premiere Nov. 18. “Witches” will be performed by
the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and the vocal ensemble Volti Nov.
18 in Berkeley and Nov. 19 in San Francisco.
Keys
to Transposition teaches a step-by-step, strategic
approach built on key and starting from scales, arpeggios, and
common patterns. It has several “failsafes” to prevent students
from going wrong, and each unit includes excerpts from the
orchestral, solo, and chamber repertoire, starting with passages
with no accidentals and few leaps and gradually adding
difficulty. Each standard key also includes at least one duet
excerpt.
Experiencing Latin American Music 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.
Jeffrey Thomas, professor emeritus, and the American Bach
Soloists were honored by the website SF Classical Voice as
winners in their annual Best
of the Bay series.
Musicians representing UC Davis faculty, staff and students are
participating in a summer chamber music program called CalCap
which is being held at California State University, Sacramento.
Pete Nowlen, director of UC Davis Concert Bands, is the director
of CalCap which runs July 22 to August 3 in two one-week sessions
Among the musicians participating in the workshops are student
Oscar Santamaria, bassoonist, who performs with the UC Davis
Symphony Orchestra and Concert Band, and staff member Marjorie
Phillips from environmental toxicology who is a flutist.
The Department of Music, UC Davis, announces lecturer Caleb Lewis
to direct both the University Chorus and the Chamber
Singers beginning fall quarter, 2018. Originally from
Rome, Georgia, Lewis moved to Berkeley in 2017, where he worked
as a church musician, music teacher, and performer. While in
Berkeley, he also worked as assistant conductor of the San
Francisco Bach Choir and sang as a regular baritone soloist
and chorister with San Francisco Choral Artists.
“It will be an extraordinary journey!” said the ensemble’s
director Matilda Hofman. “I believe the ‘St. John Passion’ has
not been performed at UC Davis in decades, and the students are
all so excited to be part of this great work of art. It is an
exciting collaboration between the Early Music Ensemble, the UC
Davis Baroque Ensemble as well as members of the Davis High
School Baroque Ensemble.”
The UC Davis Green Big Band will perform a jazz rendition of
the operetta song “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” by
Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II from the 1928 operetta
“The New Moon” in a modern arrangement by Manricks. Also on the
list are “Jazz Police” by Gordon Goodwin, written around 2003,
and “Groove Merchant” by Jerome Richardson, written in the late
1960s and arranged by Thad Jones.
Pianist Richard Glazier, an expert in the music of George
Gerswhin (and his era) who has performed Rhapsody in
Blue nationally and internationally, will appear
with the Concert Bands of UC Davis on Friday, June 1, for a
performance of a band-and-piano version of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody
in Blue” at 7 p.m. in the Mondavi Center, under the direction
of faculty member Pete Nowlen.
Rimsky-Korsakov is widely considered to have been a master of
orchestration, and “Scheherezade” contains what many regard to
be the most striking and vivid musical depiction of a storm at
sea in all of the orchestral repertoire.
