Alumni E-Newsletter, Department of Music, UC Berkeley

Featured Stories
CK Ladzekpo Awarded an "Izzie" for Sustained Achievement Every year the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (Izzies) are held in San Francisco to honor achievements in performance for contributions to the dance community, exceptional performance, choreography, design, and musical composition. In this year's awards ceremony, held on March 25 at Z Space in San Francisco, the Department of Music's CK Ladzekpo was honored with a Sustained Achievement Award. Ladzekpo, founder and director of the African Music & Dance Ensemble, is a master of Ghanian music. He has been a lead drummer and instructor with the Ghana National Dance Ensemble, Insititute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, and the Art's Council of Ghana. In 1973 Ladzekpo took leave from his position at the University of Ghana to join the UC Berkeley faculty for one year. Generations of students have been privileged to experience the fusion of a music ensemble course and African dance course under the hand of Ladzekpo. For four decades he has remained director of the African Music Ensemble and has brought the program to new heights, with overflowing enrollments each semester. Read more »
UC Berkeley Faculty and Alumnus Awarded Guggenheims The Guggenheim Foundation could best be described as an organization eager to support and represent some of the most passionate, inspiring, bold, and intrepid creative artists in the realm of American arts. Enabling exploration and discovery, they annually award renowned and talented artists the Guggenheim Fellowship. A committee of experts in various scholarly and artistic fields convene annually to evaluate the work of applicants within their respective areas and subsequently choose to award 200 individual fellowships. Some years there are none awarded if the committee decides that the applicants are not strong enough. This year Guggenheims were presented to one UC Berkeley faculty member and a recent alumnus, both from the Department of Music. Myra Melford, pianist and composer, of the Jazz and Improvised Music Program and Associate Professor of contemporary improvised music has earned a fellowship for her work in music composition. For the past twenty years, she has evolved as an artist and cultivated a unique sound fusing blues piano of Chicago and Indian music. She has received global recognition for her original compositions and has made over thirty recordings. As the semester convenes, Melford will be traveling to Le Mans, Paris, and Amsterdam to perform her original compositions. Read more »
UC Berkeley Professor Richard Taruskin Honored at Oberlin Richard Taruskin, Professor of Musicology at UC Berkeley, will receive an honorary degree from Oberlin College & Conservatory for his significant contributions to music research and writing. As a music critic, professor, writer, and historian, his immensely remarkable career has been distinguished and multifaceted. He is no stranger to making waves in the classical music and arts community as he regularly writes for publications such as the New York Times and the New Republic. As a writer Taruskin is revered for creating the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music, but has also enjoyed success for numerous books and essays that have been published by Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press, and more. Read more »
Rio Vander Stahl Receives ARC Fellowship The Arts Research Center (ARC) at UC Berkeley, a think tank for the arts, has recently announced its 2013 Fellowship recipients. This year a new Undergraduate Fellows program was initiated to award seniors for exemplary arts-related honors research. Among them is music major Rio Vander Stahl, whose honors thesis explores audience responses to modern concert music, as well as broader questions of audience engagement with arts institutions. Vander Stahl, an undergraduate senior and cellist, is an accomplished chamber musician. Last year he assisted the Arts Research Center in developing the Opera at Berkeley program with Professor of Music Mary Ann Smart. This year, he launched Celli, an ensemble made up of 10 cellists from the University Symphony Orchestra that commissions new works for cellists from composers both at UC Berkeley and abroad. Read more »	_{Photo by Matt Lee}
Yo-Yo Ma visits UC Berkeley campus Proficiency, communication, and empathy—elements generally attributed to a successful group musical performance, all of which were but a few of the traits that appeared in brilliant abundance in cello virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma's latest visit to Berkeley. Besides gracing our own Zellerbach Hall again, sharing a double bill with British pianist Kathryn Stott, Ma also offered a master class to the students of Crowden elementary school and spent an additional afternoon in the International House for a campus-wide Q&A with Music Department chair Benjamin Brinner. Read more »
Upcoming: Why Do We Improvise? This weekend the UC Berkeley Department of Music hosts a series of events focused on improvisation, with renowned musicians and scholars convening for a symposium and two special performances. It begins on Friday afternoon, March 17, with distinguished Bloch Professor George E. Lewis (Columbia University) delivering his third lecture in a series of five, "Why Do We Want Our Machines to Improvise?" in music's composer's colloquium. An evening concert, "People are Machines Too: A Meeting of Mills College & UC Berkeley improvisers" follows at the Center for New Music in San Francisco. Performers include James Fei, Chris Brown, and Dana Reason. Read more »
Hector "Hecdog" Perez receives two Grammy nominations for Best Latin Rock, Urban Alternative Album Hector "Hecdog" Perez '94, who graduated with honors in music and audio technologies, is a rare composer who meshes the traditional music of Veracruz, Mexico, with the hip, chill beats of electronica. His debut album, Sistema Bomb Presenta Electro-Jarocho — a 21st-century re-imagining of the Afro-Mexican son jarocho style — oozes so much cross-genre cool that it grabbed a 2013 Grammy nomination for Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album. Read more »
Columbia professor George E. Lewis delivers the 2013 Bloch Lecture Series Scholars in fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology and linguistics are beginning to provide new perspectives on improvisation. "Many are now asserting the realization that the practice of improvisation is by no means limited to the artistic domain, but is a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life," says Columbia University composer and author George E. Lewis. Read more »
Music student Erin Alford sings at the Prestigious Shanghai Berkeley Ball Singing at the 2012 Shanghai Berkeley Ball as a recommended student representative for UC Berkeley’s Music Department was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. Marking my first time in Asia, my trip included a plethora of new experiences. Read more »
Helen Farnsworth, department manager from 1939-72 sighted at Berkeley Sunday Streets! This fall the Music Department took part in a new Berkeley festival in which they closed down a mile of Shattuck Avenue to make way for artists of all kinds to showcase and perform. And at a string quartet performance, a familiar face turned up. Read more »
UC Symphony on the road with Philharmonia Orchestra Members of the UC Berkeley Symphony were invited to form the Military Band in the Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck as performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra in Berkeley, LA and NY. Read on for student Francis Upton IV's recap of the tour and their performances. Read more »
Faculty Update: Myra Melford In September 2011, faculty composer Cindy Cox was honored by International Alliance of Women Composers at their conference in Flagstaff, Arizona. Pianist/composer Myra Melford is the winner of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music presented by The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). This is the 18th annual edition of the award, which recognizes the "past performance and future promise" of artists. More faculty news »
Alumni update: Mason Bates performs at Carnegie Hall Mason Bates recently performed in the NY premiere of his latest work, Alternative Energy, at Carnegie Hall with the Chicago Symphony under Riccardo Muti. His post of composer-in-residence at the CSO was recently extended for another two years, and he also serves as this year's Composer of the Year with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Read student updates»
Berkeley Nu Jazz Collective records first LP The album, comprised of all-original works written by the members of the band, will be sold at future JIM fundraising events to continue to allow the department to provide master classes for students interested in improvised music, to acquire much needed new equipment and instruments, as well as to offer additional performances featuring the greatest creative jazz and improvising musicians of our time. Read more »