Music

Professor Mika Pelo has been selected for a composer residency by the Peterson-Berger Foundation at Sommarhagen, the home of the late Swedish composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger. Pelo will be in residence July 28 – Aug. 18.

Three members of the UC Davis Department of Music faculty gave presentations at the recent Music Teachers’ Association of California’s annual conference. Susan Lamb Cook, artist affiliate in cello, Heidi Moss Erickson, voice, and Natsuki Fukasawa, piano, participated in the 2023 convention held in Santa Clara.

Professor Pierpaolo Polzonetti has received the 2023 Library Travel Grant conferred by the Cuban Research Institute (CRI) and the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC) to conduct research in the Díaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collection at the Florida International University, Miami.

Doctoral student musicologist Sarah Miller has been awarded a UC Davis Russel J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship. This fellowship supports students as they begin the advanced stage of doctoral study by offering funding during the quarter immediately following advancement to candidacy, providing summer research and writing support, and providing for a full academic year fellowship for dissertation writing.

Graduate student musicologist Anushka Kulkarni was awarded a UC Davis Critical Language Scholarship which enables her to take a summer intensive language program overseas for U.S. academic credit.

Graduate student composer Trey Makler has received a 2023 Creator Fund Award from New Music USA, an organization that has for more than ten years supported composers, musicians, and organizations with grants so they can create new works and build community.

Vocal performance major Crisia Regalado has won the 2023 Lucy Becker Scholarship from Music in the Mountains (in Grass Valley, California). Crisia competed with Gioachino Rossini’s “Una voce poco fa” from The Barber of Seville. She studies with Zoila Muñoz at UC Davis, with whom she says she chose to go to UC Davis to study voice. 

Professor Kurt Rohde’s new micro opera 4:30 Movie will premiere April 29 and 30, 2023, at the Bayview Opera House in San Francisco as part of a program presented by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble.

The San José Chamber Orchestra will give the premiere performance of Professor Pablo Ortiz’s ZOFO Encajonado on May 14, 2023, at 7:00 pm at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Willow Glen, California. ZOFO Encajonado is a concertino in three movements for piano four hands, cajon, and strings. ZOFO is a piano duo comprised of Eva Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi, and they have frequently collaborated with Pablo Ortiz, and have been in residence at UC Davis.

“Requiem for Gerry” by Professor Pablo Ortiz will premiere at the Teatro Colón on March 22. The work was commissioned as a tribute to the late Gerardo Gandini, founder and director of the Columbus Theater Experimental Center.

The Ortiz composition will be performed as part of a celebration honoring Gandini and the renaming of the Experimental Center which becomes the Gerardo Gandini Room. 

Scott Linford, assistant professor of music, has produced and recorded a new album—Ears of the People: Ekonting Songs from Senegal and The Gambia—as part of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. The album features nine master players of the ekonting, a three-stringed instrument made from a gourd and papyrus reed by people of the Jola ethnic group.

Distinguished Professor of Music, emeritus, Jessie Ann Owens, has been awarded the prestigious Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award by the Renaissance Society of America. The board of directors of the society gives the award annually to an individual with “uncompromising devotion to the highest standard of scholarship, accompanied by exceptional achievement in Renaissance studies.”

Professor Carol A. Hess has published a new book, Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics (University of Illinois Press). In it she gives an in-depth examination of the composer’s exchange of music and ideas with Latin American composers. 

Professor Kurt Rohde has been given a 2022 San Francisco Arts Commission fund. The $20,000 commission will be used to support 4:30 Movie, a new twenty-minute micro-opera using poems by Donna Masini published in 4:30 Movie (Norton, 2020). These funny, touching, ruthless poems take the reader through the diagnosis, treatment and death of the author’s sister from cancer.

The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded an Arts Project Grant to the Newtown Creek Alliance, which is in the process of creating a site-specific performance piece composed by Professor Kurt Rohde.