Originally from Chicago and classically trained, Myra Melford is a composer with a singular, kinetic, and lyrical voice in piano improvisation. Chicago blues, architecture, jazz and experimental music inspire her work. She has released over 40 recordings, including more than 20 as a leader or co-leader, and maintains three bands: the celebrated quintet Snowy Egret, the collective Trio M, and the duo Dialogue with clarinetist Ben Goldberg. She is a Guggenheim Fellow for “Language of Dreams,” (2013), a Doris Duke Performing Artist (2013) an Alpert Award in the Arts...
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...
Ana M. Ochoa Gautier is a distinguished professor in the Department of Music at University of California, Berkeley. She has written on music, cultural policy and armed conflict; colonialism and histories of listening in Latin America and the Caribbean; and on music, sound and climate change. She has been a Distinguished Greenleaf Scholar in Residence at Tulane University (2016) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2007-2008). She has served on the advisory boards of the Society for Cultural Anthropology and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, among others. She is currently...
I am a musicologist who studies music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular interest in American vernacular music and the prospect of a materialist musicology. My research conceives of music in this period as bearing determinate forms of historical consciousness.
A current book project, "In Search of Ragtime," theorizes ragtime music and its afterlives as a musical mediation of American industrial capitalism. From the emergence of ragtime in the Gilded Age, to its revival in the economic turmoil of the 1970s, my book charts transformations in musical value and...
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...
AfroPneumatic composer and improviser Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor (1980) creates music that is inspired by community, time, and the human. His current practice is built upon AfroPneumaism, a liberatory framework for music composition, performance, and community building which connects musical action, musical timeframes, and audience witnessing to the breath. Emerging in part from the Black Lives Matter Movement, Dr. Taylor’s AfroPneumaism answers the urgent and poignant refrain “I can’t breathe!” with a defiant “I will breathe! I must breathe!”
A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer, vocalist, improviser, sound artist, and scholar.
Ueno's 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...
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...
