Featured Stories
Maker of Resonators: Ernest Yen
"Of the 34 accomplished violinists in UC Berkeley’s Symphony Orchestra, one has a day job for which he dons a Tyvek cap, coveralls and booties to fabricate MEMS resonators at the Marvell NanoLab in Sutardja Dai Hall. Most days (and nights), you’ll find Ernest Ting-Ta Yen, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. student, immersed in the complexities of his MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) research. The aluminum nitride resonators he builds, aimed at new cell phones and communications applications, are designed to help shrink mobile devices while increasing functionality." Click here to read more.
Marin Alsop Master Class for Student Conductors & Musicians
Marin Alsop, acclaimed conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, gave a master class to music students - 13 musicians and 2 conductors, on March 29 in Hertz Hall. Marin Alsop was in town for two Cal Performances concerts at Zellerbach on March 30 & 31. Thank you Cal Performances for making this possible. Hailed as one of the world's leading conductors for her artistic vision and commitment to accessibility in classical music, Marin Alsop made history with her appointment as the 12th music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. With her inaugural concerts in September 2007, she became the first woman to head a major American orchestra. She also holds the title of conductor emeritus at the Bournemouth Symphony in the United Kingdom, where she served as the principal conductor from 2002-2008. Her tenure as the BSO's music director has garnered national and international attention for her innovative programming and artistry. Musical America, who named Maestra Alsop the 2009 Conductor of the Year, recently said, "[Marin Alsop] connects to the public as few conductors today can."
The World According to One Musicologist
Department of Music professor Richard Taruskin speaks about his thoughts of musicology at the Princeton Conference: "After the End of Music History." Click here to read more.
Premieres of Berkeley Composers on Both Coasts
Mason Bates: In the March 29 American Maverick's concert in Carnegie Hall with Michael Tilson Thomas, Music alumnus Mason Bates (PhD Composition, 2008) is performing this weekend with the San Francisco Symphony in Carnegie Hall. Performances at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco took place March 15–17. The program includes the New York premiere of Mass Transmission—a piece for electronica, organ, and chorus by UC Berkeley Department of Music alumnus Mason Bates, the inspiration for which was a fascinating book that he discovered about early radio history. In the early 1920s a communication facility was built in Holland that made it possible for parents in Holland to talk with their children sent to work in the colonial Dutch East Indies (Java). What we now take for granted—people thousands of miles away able to communicate with one another—seemed like magic—the story of people coming together over vast distances. Hear Mason Bates interviewed by Cy Musiker on KQED on March 15: click here to read article.
Aaron Einbond: Closer at hand is Berkeley’s professional new music ensemble-in-residence Eco Ensemble, lead by David Milnes, performing in Hertz Hall Saturday March 24, in this last of a three-concert survey of the sounds of today and the future. It features a piece by Aaron Einbond (PhD, Composition, 2009). In addition to the powerful creations of Martin Matalon, Liza Lim, and Nico Muhly, composer Aaron Einbond’s What the Blind See takes as its point of departure the sonic and visual imagery of science: stars and particles, the infinitely small and infinitely large. The microscopic sounds of the instruments are amplified with contact microphones, as if captured by scientific instruments. The electronics are modeled on field recordings of rain and snow, diffracted and projected in space. These “concrete” sounds from instruments and natural sources are manipulated using tools developed at IRCAM in Paris and inspired by research in music cognition. The title, taken from an article by neurologist Oliver Sacks, suggests perception as the focus of the experience.
Eco Ensemble: Excitement Usually Reserved for Rock Shows
The Eco Ensemble concert on Saturday, February 11, showcased several exciting pieces of contemporary music. The pieces by Kaija Saariaho were stunning, but very different from one another. The first, Trois Rivières Delta was a piece for percussion ensemble and electronics. It used a unique map of sounds, including the voices of the percussionists, to create a very smooth landscape reminiscent of rushing water using a family of instruments traditionally known for their staccato qualities. Her other pieces—Ballade and Prelude—both employed haunting and unusual harmonies that made for moving solo piano music. The pianist, Gloria Cheng, was extremely expressive and introduced the pieces herself. Magnus Lindberg's Corrente was exciting and energetic, with musical lines and patterns interacting. At the end of the concert, it was a privilege to get to hear Swing, a piece by Berkeley professor Franck Bedrossian. Swing created a complex and musical texture. The instrumentation, which included an electric guitar, and an enormous array of percussion equipment covered in tin foil, was unique and highly effective at delivering a musical space, very unlike anything I had ever heard before. The Eco Ensemble concert was a great success. David Milnes and all the musicians performed flawlessly, and with a high amount of musicality. It was without a doubt one of the best contemporary music concerts I've attended. —Miriam Anderson (undergraduate student, Music)
Last Saturday's Eco Ensemble program was exciting and quite exhilarating. The commitment and energy of the performers was palpable, from the playful intensity of the opening Saariaho percussion quartet Trois Rivières, to the dynamic streams of Lindberg's Corrente, and finally to the manic tumult of Bedrossian's Swing. Gloria Cheng's gorgeous and singing renditions of Saariaho's piano pieces Ballade and Prelude provided a welcome respite in this whirlwind program. Bedrossian's Swing provided an appropriately unsettling and musically vigorous finale. The commitment of the players to present fresh and uninhibited performances of contemporary music has caused me to anticipate these concerts with a kind of excitement usually reserved for rock shows. —Amadeus Regucera (graduate student composer, Music)
Eco Ensemble in the New York Times
Kevin Berger, a reporter for The Bay Citizen, wrote about the first in a series of three concerts by Eco Ensemble. click here to read article. The story was published in the January 20 edition of the New York Times. Presented by Cal Performances, in cooperation with the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and the Department of Music at Berkeley, the first concert featured a piece by Music Department faculty composer and CNMAT co-director Edmund Campion. Please see the article in the "Looking Forward" section of this newsletter to learn more about Eco Ensemble's upcoming concerts.
Jane Michiko Imamura, of Music Department, 1920–2011
Jane Michiko Imamura, who was in charge of the music practice studios at UC Berkeley’s Department of Music during the late 1950s and 1960s, died December 26 at her Berkeley home of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. A memorial service was held January 7 at the Berkeley Buddhist Temple. She was married to the late Reverend Kanmo Imamura of the Berkeley Buddhist Temple. Reverend Imamura worked at the University’s Lowie Museum of Anthropology (now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology) from 1947 to 1967. He became the museum’s head curator. In 1940 Jane Imamura attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in music. But her university education was cut short in 1942, when she and her husband were relocated to the Gila River internment camp in Arizona. In 1958, Jane Imamura joined the staff of the UC Berkeley Music Department. She was in charge of publicity for concerts, supervising student staff, making posters and flyers for events. “The music faculty and students came to rely on her for the smooth and cooperative functioning of the department,” said Reverend Ryo Imamura, son of Jane Imamura. “She was loved by everyone.” (The black and white portrait of Jane Imamura was made in 1972 while the Imamuras were working in Hawaii. The color photograph below is of her at the practice desk in the late 1960s.)
16th Annual Elizabeth Elkus Memorial Noon Concert
Thanks to the generous support of the Elkus Family and many friends, the Department of Music continues to maintain its tradition of excellence and accessibility to a wide range of musical performances made possible through the Elizabeth Elkus Noon Concert Fund. Elizabeth Elkus was the wife of Albert Elkus, longtime University Orchestra conductor starting in in 1931 and department chair from 1937 to 1951. The inaugural concert took place in Hertz Hall on Wednesday, September 18, 1996, with a capacity performance by faculty pianist Barbara Shearer performing the twenty-four Chopin Preludes as a tribute to Elizabeth,who loved to see patronage flourish and youngsters succeed. This year marks the 16th Annual Elizabeth Elkus Noon Concert featuring Gamelan Music of Java and Bali on Wednesday, April 25, with student musicians performing on beautiful antique instruments directed by Midiyanto and I Dewa Putu Berata with Ben Brinner and Lisa Gold.
A Music Student recently had the opportunity to accompany Chancellor Birgeneau to Shanghai
During the fall of 2011, the Department of Music got a unique request from Chancellor Birgeneau's office. He was going to be traveling in China and did the Music Department have a student who could perform alongside him? Lawrence Chu, a double major in Music and Integrative Biology, jumped at the chance. Singing for Berkeley alumni living in Shanghai, Chu performed seven songs for his audience, including a Chinese classic pop song, Yue Liang Dai Biao Wo De Xin, and the Three Tenors' O Sole Mio. "I think the deepest impression left with the audience," wrote Chu, "was the idea that students at Berkeley are very versatile, and most attendees said the musical performance was the highlight of the evening's events. I think it was a clear indicator to everyone that UC Berkeley focuses not just on the hard sciences, but very much so on the arts."
Also in Shanghai, Professor Ken Ueno and graduate student Dan Van Hassel presented their own compositions at the Shanghai Conservatory Electronic Music Week.
Visiting Postdocs bring unique research interests and popular classes to the Music Department.
Every year the campus receives hundreds of applications for a handful of postdoctoral fellowships. Alongside UC's President's and Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowships, the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities attracts many applicants the American Council of Learned Societies added a new one three years ago to provide support for the most promising recent PhDs in a weak job market. The Department of Music has been particularly successful the past two years in these competitions, netting four postdoctoral fellows who broaden our intellectual community and expand the array of courses we offer: Holley Replogle-Wong, Griffith Rollefson, Deirdre Loughridge, and Jessica Bisset Perea. You can read about their research interests by visiting their bios in Visitors News.
Graduating student starts a musical theatre tradition
Max Weinbach (BA '10) had an interest in musical theater and an entrepreneurial spirit. In spring 2010, he staged a musical he wrote as a senior project and then donated the proceeds from tickets sales to the department to support future student musical productions. Weinbach's donation of $500 became the seed money for a fund for student-written, student-run productions. With Post-Doc Holley Replogle-Wong in an advisory role, the second musical theater production took place in fall 2011, with plans in the works for another in 2012. Weinbach was able to leverage his gift through the New Alumni Challenge (http://campaign.berkeley.edu/new-alumni-challenge/?), which matches gifts from recent graduates, and helped the department start an annual tradition at the same time.
The Music Department offers a wide array of performances on Cal Day
It's a day like no other. Spend it in Cal classrooms and labs, museums, libraries, and arenas. Or spend it in or around Hertz Hall and be treated to 6 hours of free music from the traditional to the eclectic. Cal Day 2011 was once again a big event for the Music Department, featuring a diverse repertoire and highlighting the work of department ensembles and student groups. In Hertz Hall on could hear the Symphony and Baroque ensemble concerts, while under the Hertz south patio and breezeway, and the inElkus Room in Morrison Hall there was Jazz, Gospel and African Drumming as well as two string quartets and a brass quintet. A graduate students composer put together a sound and video installation could be found at the Class of 1910 bridge over Strawberry Creek. If you couldn't make it to Hertz Hall, the Campanile could be heard anywhere on campus from noon to 4:00pm on the hour for ten-minute concerts. The 2012 Cal Day open house is scheduled for Saturday, April 21st. Get updates at the CalDay website.
Collections of the Hargrove Music Library were on display at the invitation of the Antiquarian Bookseller's Association of America
Early in 2011, at the invitation of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library mounted a major exhibition in San Francisco. The theme of the 44th California International Antiquarian Book Fair was music, so highlights from the special collections of Cal's Music Library greeted visitors at the 8th Street entrance of the Concourse Exhibition Center during the three days of the fair, 11-13 February. Thanks in part to publicity for the fair on KQED, hundreds of people looked at the Hargrove Library exhibition, and head librarian John Shepard answered scores of questions about items in the show. Among the items in the fourteen display cases were manuscripts from the 11th century (the Wolffheim Antiphonal) to 1947 (Stravinsky's autograph score for his ballet Orpheus), printed partbooks for 16th-century madrigals and motets, editions of French baroque operas and cantatas, and early treatises on music theory. Thirty-seven images from the exhibition may be seen at the Hargrove Music Library's website.
Precious instruments donated to the department provide Berkeley students the chance of a lifetime
When graduate student Mary Anne Kidwell, also in the Symphony Orchestra, was told that she would be allowed to use the new the Haynes Handmade French Model gold flute, recently donated by Cal parents Daniel and Nancy Nossiter (parents of sophomore Eric), her eyes lit up with excitement. Kidwell, an accomplished flautist, understood that the Haynes flute was of the same vintage and model as the one played by the world famous flautist, Jean-Pierre Rampal.
The department's recently renovated Loft rehearsal space features another recent donation: a Baldwin R grand piano from James Lagier. Other instruments donated include a Lowery Spinet organ for the Gospel Chorus, and a Kawai GE 20 grand piano.
Operations Manager Jim Coates, who handles the instrument inventory, receives calls about instrument donations throughout the year, and cannot accept all of them since he needs to consider costs of tuning, repair and restoration of each instrument he accepts. Some donations, like the 19th century Weick piano donated in 2010, have required thousands of dollars in repairs in order to restore them to playing condition. Nevertheless, providing the opportunities to students to play on precious and period instruments is a highlight of his job. What is needed most badly are quality upright pianos for the department's practice rooms, as the pianos currently offered in those spaces are severely well-worn and in need of replacement. If you have a lightly used upright piano which you would like to offer to the department, or another instrument which you would like to place in the hands of students, please call Jim Coates 643-8723.
Student wins second place in national performance competition on a donated instrument—the 19th-century Ted Rex cello
March 2012, New York. The department received an update from undergraduate Mosa Tsay: "My audition for the MTNA national Young Artist string competition was yesterday—and the results were announced yesterday as well. I was fairly confident before the audition, after I entered the room and sat down in front of the judges, I knew something was off —I was so relaxed that I even thought about what to do after the competition while I was playing. One of judges turned out to be Bonnie Hampton, cello faculty at Juilliard, who I knew is from Berkeley and taught at Cal before. I had a couple rhythm issues and two memory slips, but despite all of these—I received second place!
Thank you for allowing me to play the department cello. I have been keeping it safe and within reach. I find that I have to keep comparing the cello to a baby when doormen and cab drivers try to help me with my belongings. They usually reach for the cello first, but I politely insist they take my luggage instead. "I'm sure you understand. The cello is like my baby…. And so they laugh and I avoid offending anyone."
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December 2011. Just 20 minutes after student and University Symphony Orchestra member Mosa Tsay auditioned at Music Teachers National Association Performance competition in Las Vegas, Nevada, this past month, she learned that she was the Southwest divisional champion. Her faithful companion on the trip to Las Vegas was the newly donated Ted Rex cello, a 19th century violoncello and built by Antonio Bertoletti along with a Dodd pernambuco wood bow, both gifted to the department by the Walter Rex III ("Ted") Estate. (See photograph at right with Ted Rex playing his beautiful old cello with friends at his Berkeley home in 2007.)
"Playing a good cello definitely made a difference in the outcome," wrote Tsay. The Ted Rex cello was one of several donated to the department in 2010, instruments that the department has striven to place in the hands of the accomplished musicians who make up the roster of department ensembles. Tsay received special permission to travel to Las Vegas with the Ted Rex cello, and even purchased a seat for the instrument, soliciting a few chuckles from the security check people, and causing the flight attendants to check the manual for cello seating policies.
Emeritus professors honored for their distinguished contributions to scholarship, and for their cherished activities over the years as teachers, mentors, and colleagues
Sessions at the 2011 national meeting of the American Musicological Society, held on 10-13 November at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in San Francisco, honored Richard L. Crocker and Daniel Heartz, two of our emeritus professors, for their distinguished contributions to scholarship, and for their cherished activities over the years as teachers, mentors, and colleagues. These were very happy occasions; the honorees, both healthy and active in their early eighties, were there to receive their plaudits and express their appreciation.
The tribute to Heartz took place on Friday, 11 November, at the annual lunchtime business meeting of the Mozart Society of America. Its pretext was the completion of Dan's gigantic "Norton trilogy" as it is often called, consisting of three comprehensive studies- Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 1740-1780 (1995); Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720-1780 (2003); and Mozart, Haydn and Early Beethoven, 1781-1802 (2009) -which embody the results of five decades of research and critical reflection. In a sense they represent the 2000-page redemption of a pledge that Dan made in 1967, when he published an explosive four-page, 2000-word article, "Approaching a History of Eighteenth-Century Music," which, in terms of impact per unit length, stands as perhaps the most influential single essay in the history of musicology, for it revolutionized the historiography of the century that began with Bach and Handel and ended with Haydn and Mozart. Dan clarified the relationship between that beginning and that ending. (His delineation of that relationship can be briefly summarized: none.) His work blew the whistle on a century of fruitless efforts at finding "missing links," and focused attention instead on the true sources of what we now call the "classical" style. The history of eighteenth century European art music as he formulated it, and as it is now conceptualized by almost everyone, is that of a stylistic evolution from early eighteenth-century Italian comic opera to the late eighteenth-century instrumental masterworks that still form the foundation of our performing repertory.
The Mozart Society billed its tribute as a study session, and the main business was indeed a pair of papers -on vocal genres by Mary Hunter, and by John A. Rice (one of Dan's Doktorkinder) on instrumental ones -that summarized and evaluated Dan's scholarly achievement, particularly with respect to Mozart. But the papers modulated from Mozartean reportage to warm appreciations of Dan's life, replete with memorabilia including his college yearbook photo (which no one would have recognized, and which some continue to doubt despite Dan's avowals) and reviews of his early piano performances, including Mozart's A-major concerto, K.488.
The Crocker event was held the next day, Saturday, 12 November, under the direct sponsorship of the UC music department, which provided refreshments, turning the occasion from a lunchtime meeting into an actual, elegant lunch. It was organized by Judith Peraino, now a professor at Cornell, who was one of Richard's last doctoral students, and who has edited a festschrift in his honor, on which the program was based. It was more of a working scholarly session than the Heartz event, with several prominent medievalists -Anna Maria Busse Berger (UC Davis), James Grier (University of Western Ontario), Lori Kruckenberg (University of Oregon)- joined Sean Curran, a current PhD candidate at Berkeley who is working closely, if informally, with Richard on his dissertation, and Hunter Hensley, a singer and plainchant specialist, in presenting work that was inspired or significantly informed by Richard's example.
They were preceded by the undersigned, who read part of what will be the introduction to the festschrift, titled "Ricardus Primus, Praeceptor et familiaris," so called because from 1987 to 1994 the music department boasted three Richards, among whom Crocker was definitely primus inter pares , and I was Richard III. In it, I tried to give an idea of the scope of Richard's work and its fundamental value in shaping the discipline, not only for medievalists, but for all currently practicing musicologists. His early articles, especially "Discant, Counterpoint, and Harmony" (1962) and "The Troping Hypothesis" (1965), have had an influence on musicological practice as fundamental as Dan Heartz's has been, not so much on conceptualizing a particular era, but rather at the most basic level of method and attitude. They are still, almost fifty years later, widely assigned to incoming graduate students, and still rank as lodestars for the profession. Ricardus Primus was also a pioneer in musical phenomenology and a strong voice against essentialist theories of style, long before these approaches or stipulations were adopted by those who, in the 1980s, described themselves as "new musicologists." And all of this before he established himself, with The Early Medieval Sequence (1977) and especially his editorship of the revised second volume of the New Oxford History of Music (1990), first as a major authority and then as the doyen within his specialty. I relished the opportunity to relate all of this, because it gave me a chance to sprinkle my talk with one-liners from the original texts, which kept my audience in stitches, Ricardus Primus being at once one of the most serious and one of the funniest writers in the history of our discipline: precious testimony that these qualities can (and should) be combined. I also took pleasure in regaling the audience with the tale of how Richard Crocker became perhaps the only musicologists ever to get his picture on the front page of the New York Times merely from the regular practice of his profession rather than, say, by winning the lottery or committing a spectacular crime (as you can see for yourself).
Putting these sessions alongside the many appearances by current faculty, recent graduates, and now-enrolled graduate students at the AMS this year, the meeting was a proud and cheery weekend for our department- past, present, and future. -Richard Taruskin (Class of 1955 Professor of Music)
Morrison Hall gains a new rehearsal space
Over the summer the second floor of Morrison Hall underwent a transformation as the stacks of the old Music Library were removed, the floor renewed, the walls painted and new lighting hung to create a large, airy, well-lit space for rehearsals, meetings, classes, and other activities. This is a stopgap measure, but it has already changed the life of the department dramatically. The "loft" was inaugurated with a glorious concert of choral music conducted by Matthew Oltman, who has taken a sabbatical from Chanticleer to direct our two choruses while Marika Kuzma is on sabbatical. We await further funding to finish remodeling this space by separating it acoustically from the foyer, gamelan room, and staff offices, and subdividing part of it into offices. The ever-present need for offices has grown more urgent as the department has become home to an unprecedented number of postdoctoral fellows - Holley Replogle-Wong, Griffith Rollefson, Deirdre Loughridge, and Jessica Bisset Perea - who are enriching our intellectual life with their research and teaching. All of these activities have been enabled or enhanced due to the generosity of donors, particularly to the Chair's Discretionary Fund, which has been tapped for conferences, guest lecturers, performances, and many other purposes for which University funding does not suffice. We deeply appreciate the contributions we have received, both large and small, that support the hard work of our faculty, staff, and students.
Eight recent Ethnomusicology PhDs were convened at the Philadelphia Society for Ethnomusicology meeting to discuss their transition from grad student to new professor
At the annual national Society for Ethnomusicology meeting in Philadelphia Bonnie Wade convened eight recent PhDs in ethnomusicology who now hold tenure-track Assistant Professorships at other universities. Marie' Abe, Boston University, Shalini Ayyagari, American University, Donna Kwon, University of Kentucky, Jeff Packman, University of Toronto, Matt Rahaim, University of Minnesota, Francesca Rivera, University of San Francisco, Christina Sunardi, University of Washington, and by Skype, John-Carlos Perea, San Francisco State University. Joining them were Eliot Bates, in his second year as an ACLS post-doc at Cornell, and Rebecca Bodenheimer, in her second year as a post-doc at Hamilton College. The gathering was a mentoring session in a forum for discussion about being a new faculty member, how to deal with the institution and department, how to develop a new program, and to provide each other advice on various aspects of their new role and transition from graduate student to faculty.
The group convened at SEM have already accomplished a presence with their publishing. Donna Kwon has just had published her book Music in Korea (Oxford University Press) for the Global Music Series. She is also working on articles for publication. Jeff Packman's article "Musicians' Performances and Performances of "Musician" in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil," in Fall 2011 Ethnomusicology and Christina Sunardi's article "Negotiating Authority and Articulating Gender: Performer Interaction in Malang, East Java," appeared in winter 2011 Ethnomusicology. Both are writing other articles and preparing book manuscripts.
Visit Alumni & Student News to read more updates on Music Department Graduates.
Gospel Chorus Sings at Occupy Cal
Shortly after noon, a crowd estimated at as many as 2,000 gathered on Sproul Plaza, where the University Gospel Chorus sang church music with lyrics adapted to the spirit of the Occupy movement. The choir is part of a Department of Music class taught by D. Mark Wilson, who served as conductor... click here to read more!
Students learn from audio engineers, composers and performers how to hear music in new ways
A new course, Music Now (Music 29) debuted in spring 2010 and will be offered again in spring 2012. Exploring new forms of hearing that can be practiced and tested in a lab setting, students learn with the aid of interactive computer tools which they can take home for their own use along with the free on-line textbook. Through attending Cal Performances shows and experiencing live performances in class, students are exposed to many forms of music with an emphasis on current day practices in performance and composition.
Music Now is most interested in the common set of features that bind all music making. It explores the most adventurous kinds of music made, but all for the purpose of expanding the listening capacity. Ultimately, Music Now (Music 29) is proposing that hearing can be a powerful form of learning. We are informed by sound, and engagement with sound in new ways is very beneficial both for enjoyment and mind.
Undergrads hear from recent grads as they explore research topics
In October a showcase for undergraduate research provided music majors the opportunity to hear recent Department of Music alumni speak about their honors theses on topics as disparate as French harpsichord music and the involvement of Ethiopian immigrants in Israeli popular music.