Music

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.

UC Davis Associate Professor of Music Mika Pelo is one of fifteen composers who has been awarded a 2019 Fromm Music Foundation commission. The foundation seeks to strengthen composition and to bring contemporary concert music closer to the public. In addition to the commissioning fee, a subsidy is available for the ensemble performing the premiere of the commissioned work.

Distinguished Professor of Music Anna Maria Busse Berger was elected an honorary member of the American Musicological Society (AMS) at their 2019 meeting in Boston. According to the AMS By-laws, Honorary and Corresponding members of the AMS are those scholars “who have made outstanding contributions to furthering its stated object and whom the Society wishes to honor.”

The American Musicological Society has given its annual award for a book in the category of teaching to UC Davis Professor of Music Carol A.

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 Lecturer Rita Sahai has received a gold medals by the Global Music Awards for one of her songs, “Incessant Time—Samaya Nirantar,” from her recent album, Samaya Anubhuti—The Experience of Time. She was recognized in World Music and Female Vocalist categories.

UC Davis Professor of Music Juan Diego Díaz joins a cohort of new scholars at both the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS) and the Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities (CAMPSSAH) at UC Davis.

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,

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. 

Selected composers are:

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. The International Contemporary Ensemble performs the music of Shirazi, Anahita Abbasi, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh from the Iranian Female Composers Association.

Along with composer Theo Chandler, UC Davis graduate student in music Daniel Godsil has received the Steven R. Gerber Prize from the League of Composers/ISCM for his composition titled Cosmographia. Cosmographia was premiered by Ensemble Dal Niente at UC Davis in November, 2018, and was conducted by UC Davis Professor of Music Christian Baldini.

Lecturer and director of the Concert Band Pete Nowlen is the co-author of the recently published “Keys to Transposition: A Method for the Teaching & Learning of Transposition on the Horn” (Ensemble Publications). The Horn Call, the Journal of the International Horn Society, has praised the method book as one of the most insightful works on the technique of transposition.

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. Spiller, who has spent a number of years researching music of West Java, Indonesia and who recently published a book titled Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015), will

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.

A new recording of “Choral Works” composed by Pablo Ortiz, professor of music, has been released by Naxos Records.