Faculty Profile

Laurie San Martin
Professor of Music
Undergraduate Advisor (last names N–Z)

Composition, Theory, Analysis

On Leave Fall Quarter, 2024

Advising Appointments–please email to schedule an appointment. 

Map to Room 1113, Music Annex

Laurie San Martin, she/her/hers, is a composer who writes concert music for chamber ensembles, orchestra, and chorus. She also plays clarinet and occasionally conducts. At UC Davis San Martin usually teaches music theory, composition and recital preparatory classes. She also serves as a faculty advisor for music majors with last names N-Z. She loves to travel, exercise with her dog Ringo, and hang out with her family. 

Fun fact: Laurie San Martin went to UC Davis and lived in Bixby hall. 

For more information, please visit her website.

Room 1113, Music Annex
(530) 752-4492
Preferred Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
lasanmartin[remove-this-and-replace-with-at]ucdavis.edu
Announcement

Professor San Martin awarded guest composer at Sao Paolo Composer Festival

Laurie San Martin

The São Paolo Contemporary Composers Festival has invited Professor Laurie San Martin to be a Guest Composer at the coming 2025 festival.

Announcement

Laurie San Martin’s “Night Owls” performed by Ensemble Ari

Laurie San Martin

Professor Laurie San Martin’s work “Night Owls” will be performed by Ensemble Ari. This work was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition and is written for Ensemble ARI.

Event

Empyrean Ensemble
Season 37

Laurie San Martin Matilda Hofman Chris Froh Michael Seth Orland Hrabba Atladottir
Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center

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

Musicians Playing
Tod Brody, flute*
Peter Josheff, clarinet*
Michael Seth Orland, piano*
Chris Froh, percussion*
Hrabba Atladottir, violin*
Thalia Moore, cello*

*core member

Program

Pierre Boulez: Dérive 1

Laurie San Martin: New Work (World Premiere)

Maurice Ravel: Sonata for Violin and Piano, M. 77

Free, no tickets required

Ann E. Pitzer Center, Davis, CA
View map
Announcement

Professor Laurie San Martin Guest Faculty at New Music Program in Italy

Laurie San Martin

Professor Laurie San Martin (B.A., music, ‘91) was guest faculty at the 14th Cortona Sessions for New Music in Italy. In addition, three compositions by San Martin were performed in concert during her residency June 12-25. 

Announcement

Laurie San Martin and Josiah Catalan Compositions Performed in Sacramento

Laurie San Martin Josiah Tayag Catalan

Professor Laurie San Martin, music department chair, and alumnus Josiah Catalan (Ph.D., music, ‘21) will have compositions performed at the Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University on Nov. 9. Their works were commissioned and will be performed by Earplay, a Bay area-based chamber ensemble. 

Announcement

Laurie San Martin Receives Commission from Barlow Endowment for Music Composition

Laurie San Martin

Professor Laurie San Martin, music department chair, has received a commission from the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University. San Martin’s commission will be for Ensemble Ari, a group of Korean American musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Announcement

Laurie San Martin Work Performed in New York

Laurie San Martin

Professor Laurie San Martin’s Zepplin will have its New York premiere on October 27 at the National Opera Center in Manhattan. The performance will be performed live as well as livestreamed beginning at 7:30 p.m. (EST)/4:30 p.m (PST). For live stream access, visit the National Opera Center YouTube Channel.

Announcement

Remembering Michael Morgan
1957–2021

Laurie San Martin Christian Baldini Kurt Rohde

The renowned conductor Michael Morgan has died at the age of 63 from complications arising from a kidney transplant a few short months ago. Maestro Morgan guest conducted the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra several times, the most recent of which was a concert featuring Saint-Saëns’s “Organ” Symphony in 2018.

Announcement

“Zeppelin” by San Martin to be Performed
Heidi Keener, flute, with Ben Therrell, cello

Laurie San Martin

UC Davis professor of music Laurie San Martin’s duo Zeppelin, for flute and cello, will be performed via livestream on Monday, April 5, 2021, at 5:30 pm Pacific Time, from the Hamel Music Center at the Mead Witter School of Music, University of Wisconsin. The program also includes works by David Lang, Lou Harrison, and Astor Piazzolla.

Announcement

“Soft-Spoken” Features UC Davis Faculty Compositions, Performers
Left Coast Chamber Ensemble

Stacey Pelinka Laurie San Martin Kurt Rohde

The Left Coast Chamber Ensemble begins its all-online concert season with a program titled Soft-Spoken. It features flutist and UC Davis lecturer in music Stacey Pelinka in Soft-Spoken, a world premiere from the multi-talented artist David Dominique, Zeppelin, a flute and cello duo by UC Davis professor of music Laurie San Martin, and Kurt Rohde’s (also a UC Davis professor of music) remixes of songs by Hildegard (Ave Maria) and Joni Mitchell (Blue), as well as trios by Beethoven and Albert Roussel.

The event is available online only, beginning Monday, September 21, 2020, at 7:30 pm.

Announcement

“UC Davis Symphony Orchestra concert couples faculty premiere with Beethoven”
Davis Enterprise

Laurie San Martin Christian Baldini

The concert will include Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, with soloist and former Davis resident Andrei Baumann, and Christ on the Mount of Olives, and San Martin’s what remains, written for the UC Davis orchestra and chorus.

Announcement

Earplay performs San Martin’s “Fray”
Earplay

Laurie San Martin

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.

Announcement

“Quartet premieres professor’s music written against backdrop of gun violence”
Davis Enterprise

Laurie San Martin

“[Professor] San Martin started the piece during a quiet composing retreat at Lake Tahoe in 2016 that was interrupted by ongoing news of gun violence. That charted the course for the piece.”

“I kept reaching for joy and humor, but there was all this noise happening behind it.” … “What it sounds like is very much a part of the process.”

Announcement

Faculty and Student Works to Be Premiered in Bay Area

Laurie San Martin Addie Camsuzou

A work by UC Davis music department chair and professor Laurie San Martin with words by Lucy Corin, professor of English, will have its world premiere Nov. 18. “Witches” will be performed by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and the vocal ensemble Volti Nov. 18 in Berkeley and Nov. 19 in San Francisco.

Announcement

Laurie San Martin Receives Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
March 9, 2018

Laurie San Martin

Laurie San Martin, professor of music, will receive the Andrew Imbrie Award in music given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. San Martin is among the eighteen recipients of this year’s awards in music, which total $225,000.

 

News

“Camellia Symphony to premiere piece by prize-winning local composer”
April 22, 2016 (Davis Enterprise)

Christian Baldini Laurie San Martin

On Saturday, April 30, the Camellia Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of music director and conductor Christian Baldini, will close its 53rd season with a concert titled “Magnificent Spirit” at 7:30 p.m. at the Sacramento City College Performing Arts Center.

News

Laurie San Martin Receives A Guggenheim Fellowship

Laurie San Martin

Music professor Laurie San Martin has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. The fellowship will provide funding for San Martin, who has taught at UC Davis since 2001, to do research and compose works for the San Francisco vocal ensemble Volti and New York’s Cygnus Ensemble.

Click here to read the complete article on the College of Letters & Science news page.

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

San Martin’s “tiny fonts” Premiered at Magnetic South
March 25, 2015 (Charleston City Paper)

Laurie San Martin

News

Music Exploring the Human Condition Animates Project TenFourteen
February 24, 2015 (San Francisco Classical Voice)

Laurie San Martin

The program began with San Martin’s we turn in the night in a circle of fire. It is a four-movement double concerto for chamber ensemble and two exceptional violinists: Gabriela Diaz and Hrabba Atladottir. Steven Schick, the conductor and artistic director of SFCMP, describes the piece in terms of “textural and virtuosic rapport” between the violinists. Meanwhile, the composer herself explained that the title is a translation of a Latin palindrome.

News

Laurie San Martin receives Fromm and SFCMP commissions
November 22, 2011

Laurie San Martin

On November 22, 2011, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University announced Professor Laurie San Martin as one of twelve composers to receive commissions for a work to be performed in 2012–13.

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