Student

Rubina Mazurka Hovhannisyan is a PhD student in Musicology, with interest in Venetian and Ottoman cross-cultural interactions in the 16th and 17th centuries, as evident through musical performance-practice influence on one another. In addition, she is interested in modern transcriptions of 16th and 17th century Venetian vocal music. Her master’s research project included several musical transcriptions of Barbara Strozzi’s music (opus 8) directly from the facsimiles, with full keyboard realization versions created from the unfigured bassline as well as unrealized, figured versions for...

Max Jefferson (she/hers) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Berkeley and a 2025 recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies. Her work, broadly, examines histories of Black music in which the narrative pen has been held by Black hands: insider stories. In her 2023 long review for The Opera Quarterly, “Hearing Real Magic in … Iphigenia” she addresses “a growing body of work that honors Blackness...

Alfred was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, with a Ukrainian mother and a Cuban father. The family moved to Sweden when he was 4 years old, where he started his musical journey by playing the trombone. After two years of bachelor studies with the trombone as his primary subject, he was admitted to study composition with Prof. Jan Sandström at Piteå Academy of Music. After accomplishing his bachelor’s exam in composition, Alfred continued with master studies in Malmö Academy of Music with Prof. Luca Francesconi. Alfred received his master’s degree in spring 2015 after graduating with his second...