Of Note
2009-2010
Three pieces by graduate composers from the composition seminar of
Franck Bedrossian were presented at the noon concert on November
18: Michael
Nicholas's Papeles (2004) performed by violinist Hrabba
Atladottier and percussionist
Loren Mach; Rama Gottfried's surface
tension performed by
percussionist
Loren Mach on snare drum; and Dan VanHassel's
Trade Clause performed by Stacey
Pelinka, flute, Darcy Rindt, viola, and Dan
Levitan,
harp.
On
Friday, November 6 at 8pm in Hertz Hall, the University
Chorus and
women singers from the Chamber
Chorus, under the direction
of Marika Kuzma, performed "Hearty Songs for the Fall
Season" featuring
the rarely performed Opus 17 for women's chorus, horns and harp by Brahms,
and selections from Mendelssohn's Lobgesang (Song of Praise),
as well as short choral works by Bernstein, Britten and Schubert. Accompanying
the choruses was pianist Jeffrey Sykes, organist Leon
Chisholm,
harpist Cynthia Cox and horn players Kathy
Canfield Shepard and Alicia Telford.
The Department of Music honored a Berkeley professor, composer and important figure in American music, Ernest Bloch (1880-1959), on the 50th anniversary of his death, with a series of events, including a symposium and concert of his works on October 10, 2009, and a performance competition on October 5, 2009.
The symposium featured scholars Davitt Moroney (UC Berkeley), speaking about
the history of the Department of Music, Klara Moricz (Amherst
University), who earned her PhD at Berkeley and gave the keynote address about
the composer's work "America," as well as graduate composer Nils
Bultmann (UC Berkeley)
performing a new piece in homage to Bloch, and Jonathan
Elkus (UC Davis) speaking
on "Growing up with Bloch." Elkus’s father Albert was a friend
of Bloch's, and chairman of the Department of Music for many years.
The concert in Hertz Hall on October 10 featured cellist Irene
Sharp and pianist
Betty Woo, as well as student performers, performing works
by Bloch, including his Piano Quintet No. 2, written for the opening of Hertz
Hall in 1958. In attendance at the symposium and concert was the composer’s
grandson, Ernest Bloch II.
The performance competition on October 5 featured music majors and other Berkeley
students performing works by Bloch. First prize winners were April
Paik (violin),
Jessica Ling (violin), Jeff Kuo (viola), Kevin
Yu (cello) and Tony Lin (piano)
performing the Piano Quintet No. 2. Second prize winner was pianist Elaine
Laguerta, performing Visions et Propheties, I & IV
for solo piano.
Premiering in October 2009, the just-released documentary film by Academy-Award-winning
filmmaker John Korty, Miracle in a Box/A Piano
Reborn documents the restoration of a 1927 Steinway Model M grand piano
by the Callahan Piano Service. Donated by Leone McGowan to the Music Department
with the stipulation that the winner of a student competition be awarded the
piano, the filmmaker financed the restoration and thereby made it possible
to hold the First Berkeley Piano
Competition in April 2008. The film weaves the story of the piano
restoration with the competition for the grand prize.
American
folk music: Each year Professor Ben Brinner hosts
featured performers from the Berkeley Old-Time Music Convention in the Dept.
of Music in the department colloquium series or as guests in Music 26AC:
Music in American Cultures. They sing, play, and speak about their music.
This year veteran folk singer and fiddler Alice Gerard appeared
with young ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle and her mother Sandy
LaPrelle before an audience of students, faculty, and community
members.
Tamara Roberts, who received a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern
University, joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor. Her dissertation, "Musicking
at the Crossroads of Diaspora: Afro Asian Musical Politics," considers
the relationships between black/Asian musical collaboration, interracial politics
in the U.S., and the international Third World movement. Her first course at
Berkeley concerns Afrofuturism.
Spring 2010
As the Bloch Professor, Pedro Memelsdorf,
a distinguished performer and scholar of early music, will teach a graduate
seminar and deliver a series of public lectures titled "The Music of
Theory: Theorist-composers in late medieval Italy."
Prof. Edwin Seroussi, a leading expert on Jewish
music on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, will deliver
a public lecture as the Diller Family Israeli Visiting Scholar. He will also
teach two courses in the Dept. of Music: an undergraduate class on “Intersections
of Judaism and Islam in Music” and a graduate seminar “Making
Folk Song: A New Appraisal of the Judeo-Spanish Heritage.”
On April 17, 2010, we present a Javanese shadow play in Hertz Hall, featuring Midiyanto, a prominent Javanese musician and shadow master (dhalang), accompanied by the Gamelan Sari Raras, the Department’s advanced Javanese music ensemble.
"After The Magic Flute", an interdisciplinary conference on Mozart’s 1791 Singspiel, convened by PhD candidate Adeline
Mueller, will feature Profs. Wye J. Allanbrook (Music, UCB) and Jane Brown (Germanics and Comparative Literature, University of Washington) along with other speakers on March 5-7, 2010.
2008-2009
Composers Franck Bedrossian and Ken Ueno joined the faculty as Assistant Professors.
Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld was in residence in Spring 2009 as the distinguished Bloch Professor. He taught a graduate seminar on acoustemology and gave a series of public lectures titled "Jazz Cosmopolitanism: A View from Accra, Ghana" interleaved with three films he had just completed. Screenings of the films were co-sponsored by the Department of Film Studies, the Center for African Studies and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
On
April 22 in Zellerbach Auditorium, Marika Kuzma led a chorus
of 200 singers -- the University
Chorus and Chamber Chorus and
the UC Alumni Chorus (Mark Sumner, director)—as well as the Piedmont East
Bay Children's Choir (Robert Geary, director) and large orchestra in Benjamin
Britten's War Requiem. It was in fact the Berkeley premiere of this
epic, anti-war masterpiece. The soloists were Janice Chandler
Eteme, soprano;
Brian Staufenbiel, tenor: and Christopheren
Nomura, baritone. Praising the
performance, the critic from San Francisco Classical Voice wrote: "UC's
Marika Kuzma, who conducted, got it splendidly right. She and a supporting
cast of hundreds... thoroughly vitalized the 90-minute work."
Nuria Schoenberg Nono (Arnold Schoenberg's daughter and the widow of Luigi Nono) presented a Composition Colloquium to the Music Department. She also visited Professor Ken Ueno’s graduate seminar on the music of Luigi Nono.
2007-2008
In November Cal Performances honored UC Berkeley professor and distinguished composer Jorge Liderman on his 50th birthday. Some of Liderman's favorite collaborators, including Cuarteto Latinoamericano, the award-winning leading proponent of Latin American music for string quartet, classical guitarist David Tanenbaum, and Brazilian pianist Sonia Rubinsky, performed.
Professor Martha Feldman, University of Chicago, was the Bloch Professor last fall. Feldman taught a graduate seminar, hosted a mini-conference in addition to delivering six public lectures titled "The Castrato in Nature."
Also in a departmental residency last fall as a Townsend Center for the Humanities Resident Fellow by joint invitation from the Townsend Center and the Music Department was the renowned jazz singer, pianist, and composer Patricia Barber. She and her quartet performed a concert last month in Wheeler Hall. Barber's most recent release is Mythologies, a song cycle based on characters from Greek mythology.
Aya Ueda directed the University Chorus while Professor Marika Kuzma was on
leave. A DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts, 2006) from the Indiana University School
of Music, Ueda is a specialist in contemporary choral works and opera stage
direction. Guest artist Matt Oltman, director of the famed Chanticleer chorus
of San Francisco, joined her to work with the Chorus on the Victoria Requiem
in the fall.
Also in fall 2007 CNMAT and the Department of Music hosted Regents' Lecturer, composer Martin Matalon, who was in residence in November. Maestro Matalon is well known for his work that features new acoustic and electronic music for silent film classics, most notably the Fritz Lang masterpiece, Metropolis, as well as the collected films of Luis Buñuel.
Renowned Czech composer Michal Rataj visited the department and CNMAT for the 2007-08 year on a Fulbright grant. He is affiliated with New York University, Prague, and Seniors' University, Prague.
Professor Sergio Durante, distinguished musicologist from the University of Padua in Italy, was a resident Fulbright exchange scholar in the Department of Music for the month of September.
Composer, sound artist and researcher in acoustic ecology David Monacchi was in residence at CNMAT during the fall semester. His primary research activity is recording natural sonic environments throughout the world. Monacchi, with naturalist and bio-acoustician Bernie Krause, presented a colloquium and concert in October titled "Soundscapes: new perspectives on the original source of music and culture" and "Fragments of Extinction: portraits of acoustic bio-diversity from equatorial primary rainforest".
During the spring semester, the department welcomed composer, performer
Steve Mackey as Bloch Professor. Mackey has composed chamber
music, opera, orchestral music, music for dance, as well as two concertos and
numerous chamber and solo works for the electric guitar which he has performed
with musicians such as Michael Tilson Thomas, David Robertson, Peter Eotvos,
the Kronos and Arditti Quartets, The London Sinfonietta, Bill Frisell, Joey
Baron, and many others. A member of the Princeton University composition
faculty since 1985, Mackey won the first-ever distinguished teaching award
from Princeton University in 1991.
In residence spring 2008 as Regents' Lecturer is renowned soprano and
contemporary music specialist Lucy Shelton. During her
residency she worked with graduate students on new compositions for voice
in a variety of mixed chamber ensembles. Her visit culminated in a concert
in April featuring premieres of these pieces and a new work by Professor
Cindy Cox.