Student Profile

Jonathan Minnick
Musicology, PhD 2022

Jonathan Minnick graduated in 2022 as a musicology PhD student at UC Davis. Jonathan also graduated with a bachelor of music in trombone performance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016. At UNC, he performed in many ensembles across the campus while also focusing on musicological studies, leading to an honors thesis exploring Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. This thesis explores the Alpine Symphony in terms of its historical origins, cultural influences, symphonic characteristics, and extensive tone painting. His research encompasses film soundtracks of the mid-twentieth century, examining the relationship between sound and setting, particularly in science fiction movies.

His article “Cyborgs and Cybernetics: Electroacoustic Characterization and Ecology in Forbidden Planet (1956)” was published in the Jahrbuch des Zentrums für Populäre Kultur und Musik in 2019. Presentation formats of this paper were presented at both the regional AMS NorCal meeting in April 2018 and at AMS/SMT San Antonio in November 2018. Jonathan is also the co-editor, along with D. Kern Holoman, of the digital second edition of the Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz, which can be found at California Digital Library.

Jonathan is an avid trombonist and performs regularly in the Greater Sacramento region with jazz ensembles, symphonies, and pit orchestras, and performed with the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra. Jonathan was the president of the Graduate Student Association.

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