Faculty Profile

Sam Nichols
Professor of Teaching
Chair of the Music Department

Composition, Theory, Analysis, Electronic Music

Map to Room 1106, Music Annex

Sam Nichols is a composer who lives and works in California. He attended Vassar College (AB 1994) and Brandeis University (PhD 2006). His composition teachers include Ross Bauer, Eric Chasalow, Annea Lockwood, David Rakowski, Richard Wilson, and Yehudi Wyner. He also studied analysis with Marty Boykan, and guitar with Terry Champlin. Since 2002 he’s taught in the UC Davis Department of Music; his subject areas include undergraduate and graduate courses in composition, music theory, and electronic music. 

He’s received commissions from a number of ensembles and organizations, including the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Earplay, the Empyrean Ensemble, and the Composers Conference. If you’d like to learn more about his music, please visit samnichols.net.

Room 1106, Music Annex
(530) 754-2919
ssnichols[remove-this-and-replace-with-at]ucdavis.edu
Event

Empyrean Ensemble
Season 37

Sam Nichols Matilda Hofman Stacey Pelinka Ellen Ruth Rose
Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center

Empyrean Ensemble
Sam Nichols, director • Matilda Hofman, resident conductor

Musicians Playing
Stacey Pelinka, flute
Kyle Bruckmann, oboe
Peter Josheff, clarinet*
Jennifer Ellis, harp
Ben Prima, percussion
Terrie Baune, violin
Ellen Ruth Rose, viola*
Thalia Moore, cello*

*core member

6:15 p.m. pre-concert talk with the composers

Program

Hannes Dufek: a black heart, the death of a friend and the end of a place: some lessons in falling apart WORLD PREMIERE

Addie Camsuzou: As Above WORLD PREMIERE
(Ph.D. music ‘23)

Hendel Almétus: Beyond the Waves WORLD PREMIERE
(Ph.D. music ‘14)

Martha Horst: Dickinson Fragments WORLD PREMIERE
(Ph.D., music ‘96)

Free, no tickets required

This concert is made possible with support from the Austrian Consulate General in Los Angeles.​

Ann E. Pitzer Center, Davis, CA
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Announcement

“Taproot New Music Festival Composes Connections”
Davis Enterprise

Sam Nichols

Taproot new music festival offers a lineup of new music groups and commissioned works over four days. “The festival is rooted in this place and produces unique works,” said Sam Nichols, festival coordinator, composer and music department faculty member. “The different groups and people come together and meet one another and share. We didn’t just want groups parachuting in and performing what they might perform elsewhere and then leave.”

Announcement

Taproot New Music Festival Composes Connections
UC Davis College of Letters and Science

Sam Nichols

Taproot new music festival offers a lineup of new music groups and commissioned works over four days. “The festival is rooted in this place and produces unique works,” said Sam Nichols, festival coordinator, composer and music department faculty member. “The different groups and people come together and meet one another and share. We didn’t just want groups parachuting in and performing what they might perform elsewhere and then leave.”

News

Long friendship leads to much music
November 18, 2015 (College of Letters & Science)

Laurie San Martin Sam Nichols

Music faculty members and husband and wife Sam Nichols and Laurie San Martin have known cellist David Russell for 20 years and they’ve been writing music for him nearly that long.

Nichols’ newest piece for Russell, “This Is Not a Toy For a Child,” will have its first performance by the UC Davis Symphony and Russell on Nov. 21. The concert is at the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis. 

Russell, Nichols and San Martin met while they were students at Brandeis University in the 1990s. They each have written three pieces for Russell, who is a lecturer in music at Wellesley College.

News

Concert Review: UC Davis Early Music Ensemble
November 18, 2015 (The Sacramento Choral Calendar)

Laurie San Martin Sam Nichols

I heard a very nice concert by the UC Davis Early Music Ensemble last year.  “Very nice,” though, doesn’t begin to express what I heard this past Wednesday night at the Episcopal Church of St. Martin in Davis.  Under the leadership of its new director, Matilda Hofman, the Early Music Ensemble has been transformed into something that demands notice.

News

UCD Symphony to perform three works by three different composers
November 13, 2015 (Davis Enterprise)

Christian Baldini Sam Nichols

The UC Davis Symphony Orchestra performs the first orchestral piece by French composer Olivier Messiaen, and the first orchestral piece by UC Davis faculty composer Sam Nichols, as well as the Third Symphony by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, during a performance at 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 21, in the Mondavi Center’s Jackson Hall. All three works have three movements, giving the program further symmetry.

The concert also will feature a return by cellist David Russell, who appeared with the orchestra in 2007 for the premiere of UC Davis faculty composer Laurie San Martin’s Cello Concerto. This time, Russell will be featured in the new cello concerto by Nichols (who is, incidentally, San Martin’s spouse).

News

things that had no opposites
December 12, 2014 (San Francisco Classical Voice)

Sam Nichols Michael Goldberg

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:

The three bits of text for that piece come from contemporary fiction writer Tim Horvath, a friend of the composer, and they enigmatically skirt in and around the consciousness of characters speaking in a mode somewhere between prose and poetry. Nichols responded empathetically, with a composition in which instrumental lines and the voice overlap and coincide with each other like different aspects of a single mind.

News

Sam Nichols Receives Fromm Foundation Commission
November 25, 2014

Sam Nichols

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:

Post

Sound Lab

Bob Ostertag Sam Nichols

The UC Davis Sound Lab is a place where students and faculty come together to make electronic music and sonic art. The Lab’s co-organizers are Bob Ostertag from the Cinema and Digital Media department and Sam Nichols from the Department of Music. Since the early 2000s we’ve been teaching a variety of classes on the creation of electronic music and sonic art. In 2015 we began teaching these classes in a new space, a converted warehouse located in the Art Annex.

Art Annex, 221 Cushing Way, Davis, CA 95616
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Overview

Empyrean Ensemble
Sam Nichols, director

Sam Nichols

Matilda Hofman, conductor-in-residence

The Empyrean Ensemble is a professional new music ensemble in residence with the music department. Although it’s not offered as a class for undergraduates, it does collaborate with student musicians, usually in winter quarter. For more information please contact the ensemble’s director, Sam Nichols. 

News

Rohde wins Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize, 2012

Kurt Rohde Sam Nichols

Kurt Rohde won the commission award for the Lydian String Quartet (in residence at Brandeis University) for his two pieces: Concertino for solo violin and small ensemble (which was also performed on a noon concert in 2011), and still distant, still here for large ensemble.

Sam Nichols received Honorable Mention in the contest for his piece Refuge for String Quartet, andWrack for Violin and Piano.

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