Music

Laurie San Martin, professor and chair of the music department, has announced that Distinguished Professor of Music Anna Maria Busse Berger will retire in July 2020. Busse Berger joined the department in 1988.

Busse Berger’s areas of study include medieval and Renaissance history and theory as well as ethnomusicology. She has published articles and books on notation, mensuration and proportion signs, music and memory, mathematics and music, historiography, and music in African mission stations.

The UC Davis Department of Music brings life to both classic and newly created works. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic we will not offer in-person concerts in the Fall of 2020. We hope we can return to presenting in-person concerts sometime between January and June of 2021. In fact, we have many spectacular and diverse programs planned by the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, Empyrean Ensemble, Chorus, Concert Band, and others.

Graduate student composer Aida Shirazi has been selected to be one of ten composers from around the world to participate in the IRCAM Cursus Program for Composition and Computer Music in Paris, France, in 2020–21.

Graduate student Jonathan Favero, who is studying composition at UC Davis, will have his piece for solo flute, Meditation on King, performed by Ensemble Mise-En’s Kelley Barnett via YouTube streaming. The program will also include five other solo works and two premieres, on instruments from flute to contrabass flute.

The College of Letters and Science graduate student exhibition will include work by two doctoral students in composition and theory. The exhibition showcasing work by 29 graduate students in seven disciplines will take place online this year due to COVID-19.

Doctoral student in composition Aida Shirazi has been included in an extensive feature on female composers from Iran in The New York Times. The piece focuses on the Iranian Female Composers Association, which Shirazi helped found.

Christian Baldini, director of the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, also serves as the music director and conductor of Sacramento’s Camellia Symphony Orchestra. Recently Baldini created and conducted this brief performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (Finale) with Camellia musicians in isolation. The video was produced and edited by UC Davis audio engineer Stephen Bingen.

The Sacramento Saturday Club has awarded UC Davis undergraduate music major V. Leone Rivers—a percussionist—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. When established in 1893, the Sacramento Saturday Club’s fundamental mission was to promote and sustain the Sacramento area’s need and love for the greatest of the arts—music.

The Department of Music has cancelled all performances and lectures for the academic Spring Quarter. We have made this decision because we truly believe it is in the best interest of our students, musicians, faculty, and the community at large. 

As part of the California Women Composers series, the new chamber music ensemble Earplay shared the premiere performance of Fray, written by Professor Laurie San Martin. The work, which was commissioned by Earplay, can be viewed on Earplay’s YouTube channel.

Music major Matthew Rasmussen ‘20 will play the Weber Bassoon Concerto with the Solano Symphony Orchestra. He is one of three winners of the orchestra’s 2019 Young Artist’s Competition. Matthew is the principal bassoonist in the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra and studies with UC Davis lecturer in music David Granger.

Two versions of a miniature opera by Ryan Suleiman, a doctoral student in music composition and theory, and Cristina Fríes, who earned an M.A. in creative writing from the English department, will have performances in Sacramento, Berkeley and San Francisco this month.

“Bones of Girls,” a 40-minute piece, will have its first fully-staged production by the Rogue Music Project in Sacramento Jan. 24 at 7:30 p.m. and Jan. 25 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. at the CLARA Auditorium.

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

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.