Annette Richards is Professor of Music and University Organist at Cornell, and the Executive Director of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies. She is a performer and scholar with a specialty in eighteenth-century music and aesthetics, and interdisciplinary research into music, literature, and visual culture. She is founding editor of Keyboard Perspectives, a yearbook dedicated to historical performance and keyboard culture, but her scholarly work extends far beyond the organ and its music.
Elainie Lillios:Fluid | Crystal | Vapor
for Viola and Live, Interactive Electroacoustics
Peter Van Zandt Lane:Décalcomanie No. 2
for Viola and Live Electronics
UC Davis Lecturer Sam Nichols:Imaginary Units
for Viola and Electronics
Tina Tallon:excision no. 2—they didn’t know we were seeds
for Viola and Live Electronics
UC Davis Alumnus Richard Chowenhill:crush for Amplified Viola
A multiyear commissioning project that is modeled after Cher’s decades-long farewell tours, Kurt Rohde’s Farewell Tour—Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6—commissions new works by the most gifted composers who, Rohde feels, are underrepresented and deserve a wider audience, while also broadening the repertoire for viola. His project’s anticipated year of completion is 2028, at which time he will retire from playing in performance and donate his instrument to some talented whippersnapper who wants to play viola.
As our compositional careers progress, it’s good to sometimes reflect on process and productivity, and think about how we arrived at the present moment as a creative individual, composer, and musician. This presentation reflects on my compositional process and and describes how I began composing acoustic music, abandoned it for electroacoustics, and now have come to a “middle ground” where I compose both acoustic and electroacoustic music.
Acclaimed as one of the “contemporary masters of the medium” by MIT Press’s Computer Music Journal, electroacoustic composer Elainie Lillios creates works that reflect her fascination with listening, sound, space, time, immersion and anecdote. Her compositions include stereo, multi channel, and Ambisonic fixed media works, instrument(s) with live interactive electronics, collaborative experimental audio/visual animations, and installations.
Music students of UC Davis Professor of Music Kurt Rohde’s Music 122 “Improv” features works of improvisation by composers such as Cage, Oliveros, and Lewis, in addition to new work by students and Kurt Rohde.
Jean-Paul Bourelly, director
UC Davis Lecturer in Music
A type of jazz called “Conduction,” which was pioneered by Lawrence “Butch” Morris, is a system of improvisation whereby a conductor gives visual cues to musicians who perform in a sort of controlled freedom of rhythm, melody, and harmony.
Sinfonia spirituosa is a chamber orchestra dedicated to presenting bold, historically informed performances on period instruments. Through a vibrant and collegial exchange the group aspires to faithfully bring to life the broad spectrum of color, affect, and rhetoric in the music of the Baroque era, and to share their passion for performing this period’s extraordinary variety of repertoire with the diverse audiences of today.
The members of Sinfonia spirituosa lead multi-faceted careers as university professors, recording artists, soloists, chamber musicians, and members of symphony orchestras. They are active as teachers and performers on both period and modern instruments, and many are directors of their own ensembles specializing in early music, Romantic music, new music, jazz, and gypsy swing.
UC Davis Faculty Affiliate Susan Lamb Cook, cello Igor Veligan, violin | Gayle Blankenburg, piano
Works by UC Davis Professor of Music emeritus Ross Bauer, Founding UC Davis Professor of Music Jerome Rosen, UC Davis Professor of Music Pablo Ortiz (world premiere), David Lang, and Franz Schubert.
Laura Reynolds, oboe | Patricia Sands, clarinet
UC Davis Faculty Affiliate David Granger, bassoon
Trois Bois has been concertizing since 2009 and champions a wide range of repertoire from the eighteenth century to the present day. The trio particularly enjoys providing verbal commentary and context for their repertoire and inviting listeners into the conversation.
Jenny E. Sabin, an architectural designer whose work is at the forefront of a new direction for 21st century architectural practice, is the featured speaker in the Alberini Family Speaker Series in Design at UC Davis on April 17.
Presented by the College of Letters and Science’s Department of Design, this third lecture in the annual series will take place in the Ann E. Pitzer Center. The free talk will begin at 4:30 p.m., followed by a reception.
