David Milnes presently serves as music director of the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and conductor of the Berkeley Contemporary Chamber Players. Following early musical studies on the clarinet, piano, organ, cello and voice, he earned degrees from SUNY Stony Book and Yale University His conducting teachers have included Leonard Bernstein, Erich Leinsdorf, Max Rudolf, Herbert Blomstedt and Otto-Werner Mueller.
After winning the prestigious Exxon Conductor position with the San Francisco Symphony in 1984, David Milnes was hailed as “one of the major new conducting talents of our day...
I am an artist/scholar focusing on Latin American popular musics and global experimental practices. My book project considers Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo (1935-1978). Using a transnational and comparative lens, the book analyses Jaramillo’s vocality, prolific discography, mediatized figure, and Pan-American career to query how alterity, media capitalism, sound technologies, and power intertwined in the Spanish-speaking Americas of the second half of the 20th century. Following the politics of circulation of Jaramillo’s voice and figure, I analyze a heterogenous archive to unearth...
Much of my research has focused on social dimensions of opera in nineteenth-century Europe. My first book, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (2004), drew on textual sources (treatises on acting, staging manuals) and musical evidence to suggest close ties between musical patterns and physical gesture in repertory stretching from the first French grand operas of the 1830s to Verdi’s Aida and Wagner’s Ring. Both of these inquiries were stimulated partly by archival finds made while I was...
Ken Ueno, is a composer, vocalist, improviser, sound artist, and scholar. His music celebrates artistic possibilities which are liberated through a Whitmanesque consideration of the embodied practice of unique musical personalities. Much of Ueno’s music is “person-specific” wherein the intricacies of performance practice is brought into focus in the technical achievements of a specific individual fused, inextricably, with that performer’s aura. His artistic mission is to champion sounds that have been overlooked or denied so that audiences reevaluate their musical...
My research focuses on Medieval and Renaissance music—in particular, the intersection of musical style, complex notation, and intellectual history. My first book, Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing (Oxford, 2021), is a wide-ranging study of notational aesthetics in polyphonic music, ca. 1340–1510. For fifteenth-century composers, musical notation assumed a significance that would not be matched until the 20th century. In telling this story, I account for changes in thinking about music theory that made possible later modes of composition so invested in...
