Of Note

New Concert Manager: Quelani Penland

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce that the Department of Music has concluded its search for its Hertz Hall Concert Manager. Quelani Vo Penland was chosen out of a pool of competitive candidates and has accepted the position. She completed her term as our Interim Concert Manager on June 17th, and began in her new position on August 17th after a two month hiatus.

Quelani brings to Hertz Hall a wealth of strong relationships within the Bay Area music community. Apart from working for the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra as Orchestra Librarian since 2003 and librarian for the Berkeley Symphony, she has worked with the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Alexander String Quartet, the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, and has been the personal librarian of Maestro Kent Nagano and assistant to the librarian of Maestro Michael Tilson Thomas since 2008. She has demonstrated over the past three months both talent and finesse for getting the job done well - we are lucky to have her on board.

Please join me in welcoming Quelani as the newest staff member to the Department of Music.

Roia Ferrazares, Manager
UC Berkeley Department of Music

Andrew Imbrie Festival

To mark the ninetieth anniversary of Andrew Imbrie's birth a series of concerts and a symposium took place around the Bay Area in spring, 2011. A renowned composer, Imbrie (1921-2007) was a member of the Berkeley music faculty from 1947 to 1991. UC Berkeley events included a noon concert featuring the University Symphony Orchestra performing the Andrew Imbrie Violin Concerto, Ariana Kim, soloist on April 6 in Hertz Hall; and a symposium in the Elkus Room, 125 Morrison Hall, reception on the Hertz Hall terrace, and a concert in Hertz Hall on April 10. The symposium on the music of Andrew Imbrie was moderated by Olly Wilson and included talks by Robert Commanday, David Hoose, Joseph Kerman, Fredric Lehrdal, William O. Smith, and Richard Festinger, with the Borromeo String Quartet ending the program, followed by a visit to the Hargrove Music Library to view the Andrew Imbrie Exhibit hosted by John Shepard.The events of the Andrew Imbrie Festival coincided with the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library's inauguration of a new special collection of books, scores, manuscripts, and archival material from Andrew Imbrie's personal collection, donated to the library by the Imbrie family. A concert of Andrew Imbrie's music followed the symposium, with the department's Eco Ensemble, David Milnes, conductor; members of the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, Young Nam Kim, director; and the UC Chamber Chorus, Marika Kuzma, director, as well as special guest Aeri Ji, gayageum. The program included: Spring Fever (1996), Sextet for Six Friends (2006), Piano Quartet (1999), Choral Selections (1965), Melody for Gayageum (2006), and the world premiere of Cindy Cox's: Transfigurations of Grief.

In addition to UC Berkeley events, other events in this series honoring Andrew Imbrie included a chamber music concert presented by Composers, Inc at Old First Church in San Francisco on March 25. An Homage to great composers featuring the Borromeo String Quartet at the Recital Hall, Music Center, UC Santa Cruz on April 8, and on April 9, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music presented a chamber music concert featuring the Borromeo String Quartet and Blueprint, the SF Conservatory New Music Ensemble directed by Nicole Paiement. The Andrew Imbrie Festival was directed by Hi Kyung Kim.

Monetary contributions to the Andrew W. Imbrie Memorial Fund, which benefits the Bay Area Composers Archive are being used to facilitate adding material contributions to UC Berkeley's Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library.

Past Noon/Evening & Weekend Concerts

The Eco Ensemble performing Beat Furrer's "Percussion Quartet."

In Memoriam, Jane Hohfeld Galante, 1924-2010

Jane Hohfeld Galante, a leading chamber musician and prominent San Franciscan, died at her home in San Francisco Wednesday morning. She was 86. She had been a leader in San Francisco's chamber music scene for more than 60 years as a pianist, scholar, board member, and vigorous advocate of music and education.

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In Memoriam: Wye (Wendy) Jamison Allanbrook, 1943-2010

Wendy was born on March 15, 1943, in Hagerstown, Maryland, and passed away on July 15 from cancer. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in classics. She earned a Ph.D. in music history from Stanford University in 1974. Her doctoral dissertation became the basis for the book Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (University of Chicago Press, 1983), in which she demonstrated that Mozart's music integrated references to the social practices and dances of his period. She wrote that this is what gave the music its tremendous power to "move audiences through representations of its own humanity." Wendy's work has influenced stagings of Mozart operas and provides a standard critical tool for opera studies today. Her book The Secular Commedia: Comic Mimesis in Late 18th-Century Music is near completion, and will be published by the University of California Press.

From 1969 to 1995, Wendy taught at St. John's College in Maryland. She served as assistant dean from 1987 to 1990 and again from 1992-1994. She joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 as the Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor of Music and was made a permanent member of the faculty in 1995. She was chair of the department from 1997 to 2003, during which time she oversaw the construction of the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library.

She received numerous awards and fellowships, including those from the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2008, Wendy received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship. She was elected president of the American Musicological Society in 2003, but had to resign during her first year in office because of the onset of cancer.

She is survived by a son, John Allanbrook of Oakland, a step-son, Timothy Allanbrook of New York, New York, and two sisters, Stephanie Jamison Watkins, of Los Angeles, and Martha Page Martineau of Shepherdstown, W.Va.

The Department of Music at Berkeley has established a fund in Wendy's honor as a way to remember her very special contributions to musicology and the department. Memorial contributions may be made to the Wendy Allanbrook Memorial Fund, c/o Roia Ferrazares, 104 Morrison Hall, Department of Music, University of California, Berkeley 94720-1200.

As the Bloch Professor, Pedro Memelsdorff, a distinguished performer and scholar of early music, taught a graduate seminar and delivered a series of public lectures titled "The Music of Theory: Theorist-composers in late medieval Italy." The opening lecture on February 8, titled Johannes Ciconia: "Inaudita imponere." Subsequent lectures were held in 125 Morrison on Fridays at 4:30. All events were free and open to the public.

Professor Edwin Seroussi, a leading expert on Jewish music on the faculty of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, delivered a public lecture as the Diller Family Israeli Visiting Scholar on March 4 entitled "Past and Present Musical Encounters between Islam and Jerusalem." He taught two courses in the Department 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.” Professor Edwin Seroussi, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Diller Family Visiting Israeli Scholar in the Dept. of Music, Spring 2010; e-mail: seroussi@berkeley.edu

On April 17, 2010, we presented 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.

Past events this academic year:

On March 10, pianist Sezi Seskir, a visitor from Cornell University, played the department's recently restored 1854 Erard piano to an appreciative noon concert audience. That evening she gave a masterclass in Hertz Hall for students studying piano.

"After The Magic Flute", an interdisciplinary conference on Mozart’s 1791 Singspiel, convened by PhD candidate Adeline Mueller, featured Professors Wye J. Allanbrook (Music, UCB) and Jane Brown (Germanics and Comparative Literature, University of Washington) along with other speakers on March 5-7, 2010.

Renowned pianist and scholar Malcolm Bilson played the Regier fortepiano in Hertz Hall on February 26 to an enthusiastic audience, followed by a reception. Earlier he gave a master class. Both events were free and open to the public, co-sponsored by the Department of Music and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

In his newly published book, Playing Across a Divide: Israeli-Palestinian Musical Encounters (2009, Oxford University Press), Ben Brinner, ethnomusicologist and chair of the Music Department, documents the coalescing of an altogether new musical scene in the Middle East that was the creative response by both Palestinian and Israeli musicians to the musical and political circumstances of their region. Read a review of the book and listen to sound clips.

The Biwa is an historical Japanese lute that has been used for centuries to recount stories from medieval times with themes of love, hardship, epic battles and the evanescence of life. Guest artist Yoko Hiraoka performed four of the classic biwa compositions, with projected images of scenes from a collection of these stories called The Tale of Heike, on February 8 at 5:15pm in 125 Morrison Hall. Free and open to the public.

Presenting a talk entitled "Toward an Ecology of Musical Practice," Professor Anthony Seeger from UCLA appeared at the colloquium series of musicologies on Friday, February 12, at 4:30pm in room 128 Morrison Hall. He is the author of Why Suyá Sing and former director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings at the Smithsonian Institute from 1988 to 2000.

American folk music: Each year Prof. Ben Brinner hosted 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. Fall semester, 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.

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.

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 Etemé, 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."

May 1, 2009, Morrison Hall, 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.

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.

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 came to 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 also 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 term as Regents' Lecturer was renowned soprano and contemporary music specialist Lucy Shelton. During her mid-April residency she worked with graduate students on new compositions for voice in a variety of mixed chamber ensembles. Her visit culminated in a concert on April 14th featuring premieres of these pieces and a new work by Professor Cindy Cox.

We had several other guest visitors to the department during the AY 2007-08. Directing the University Chorus while Professor Marika Kuzma was on leave was Aya Ueda. 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. Several guest artists joined her throughout the course of the year for special workshops among whom was Matt Oltman, director of the famed Chanticleer chorus of San Francisco, who worked with the Chorus on the Victoria Requiem in the fall term.