Music

Film of the live performance.

The study of ethnomusicology shows that music is more than just organized sound. By digging into the roots of various music styles, ethnomusicology uncovers social and historical meanings unique to its cultural context.

To support our campus’ own ethnomusicology program, the music department is putting on Musics of the World Ensembles of UC Davis, a showcase featuring four of the university’s world music groups. The performance will take place on Fri., April 24, at the Mondavi Center.

Jessie Ann Owens, former dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in the College of Letters and Science, and professor of music at UC Davis, has been appointed the Robert Lehman Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy, for Fall 2015. I Tatti is the foremost research institution in the world for Italian Renaissance art, history, literature, and music, and the visiting professorship is an appointment of Harvard University.

The arts at UC Davis are in full bloom this quarter with a special emphasis on work by students, many of whom are finishing final projects for graduation.

Two UC Davis ethnomusicology grad students—Gillian Irwin (first year) and Sarah Messbauer (ABD)—share this year’s Marnie Dilling Prize, presented by the Northern California Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology for the best graduate student presentations at its annual chapter meeting, which was held on February 28, 2015, at UC Berkeley.

In Saramago’s 2005 novel, death appears as a woman who falls in love with a cellist and is transformed by that love. It’s a perfect vehicle, Rohde says, for using music to convey the drama. “In this opera, music is the transformative force that turns death from this thing that doesn’t exist into a human being. It’s a very confusing process for her, and she has to do things that are increasingly human. For example, she’s never spoken—she never had to—and when she starts to speak, I make her stutter and gradually start to form words.

Rita Sahai was among ten Indian-American achievers to be honored by the National Federation of Indian American Associations (NFIA), at its 18th biennial convention, which was held March 6–8, 2015, in Cerritos, California. The award given to Sahai was in the category of Liberal and Fine Arts.

Fitting a squeeze-box Argentinian bandoneón – an essential element of tango dance-hall bands – into a classical-music milieu is a bit of a stretch. The two sound-worlds are so fundamentally different that it’s hard to imagine how they could intersect. Nonetheless, star Argentinian bandoneónist J.P. Jofre and the Santa Rosa Symphony gave it a whirl on Sunday at Weill Hall in Rohnert Park, premiering a concerto for bandoneón and orchestra by Pablo Ortiz, an Argentinian professor of composition at UC Davis.

The second gem of the evening was composer Dan VanHassel’s fzzl, written for snare drum with transducer. Percussionist Megan Shieh was a dynamic presence in a work informed by African drumming. Van Hassel’s score makes ample use of all sides of the snare drum.

Composer Pablo Ortiz will have his Bandoneon Concerto premiered by the Santa Rosa Symphony, with J.P. Jofre, for whom the work was written, on February 7th at the Weill Concert Hall at the Green Music Center.

Baritone Mischa Bouvier was vocally and dramatically larger than life as the bumbling giant and murderous monstrosity that Polyphemus is. His gruesome act of crushing Acis under a stone leads to one of the baroque’s saddest musical moments, in which the chorus sings, unaccompanied, “Ah, the gentle Acis is no more,” and the members of the excellent ABS chorus, for just a moment, managed to bring time to a standstill.

Composer Sam Nichols had a first performance of his things that had no opposites—fragments from Tim Horvath for soprano, flute, guitar, and harp—with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, on their December 7 and 8 “Sung and Strummed” concerts (2014). Nichols received a Fromm Foundation award and commission for the piece. As reviewed by Benjamin Frandzel of San Francisco Classical Voice:

On November 25, 2014, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University announced Sam Nichols as one of twelve composers to receive commissions for a work to be performed in 2015–16. Kurt Rohde won a Fromm commission in 2013, and Laurie San Martin in 2011. According to the Fromm Foundation’s press release:

September 21, 1922 – November 20, 2014

The musicologist Sydney Robinson Charles, professor emerita at the University of California, Davis, died November 20, 2014, in Hopkins, Minnesota, where she had moved to be nearer to her son, Gordon, his wife, Susan, and her grandchildren, William and Caroline. She served her entire musicological career (1961–85) on the Davis campus, where she was central in establishing musicology and its infrastructure, including the foundations for the Ph.D. degree inaugurated in 1989.

Professor Anna Maria Busse Berger has earned two national awards for her article, “Spreading the Gospel of Singbewegung: An Ethnomusicologist Missionary in Tanganyika of the 1930s,” which appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, (University of California Press, Vol. 66, No. 2, pp. 475–522). With these two awards and her 2006 award from the Society for Music Theory, Busse Berger has been given the top scholarly prize from all three major music societies in the United States.