I am an ethnomusicologist and popular music studies scholar who retired as Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2024. But my research projects are still ongoing.
Since 1980, I have done extensive fieldwork in the French Creole- and English-speaking islands of the Caribbean on both traditional and popular music. All of my intellectual projects are deeply informed by the distinctive history of the West Indies where colonial legacies of slavery and racism have loomed large in all arenas of musical discourse and practice. This has compelled...
Although I retired on July 1, 2021, I intend to continue to teach a few courses and work with my graduate advisees who are completing their dissertations, while completing my own book on expert musical memory.
Over more than thirty years as a professor at Berkeley I have enjoyed working with numerous graduate students in the Department of Music as well as from departments and programs such as Anthropology, Folklore, Performance Studies, South and Southeast Asia Studies, and Near Eastern Studies. I have taught several thousand undergraduates in the large-enrollment Music in American...
Transparent yet richly multifaceted, Cindy Cox’s compositions synthesize old and new musical designs through linked strands of association, timbral fluctuation, and cyclic temporal processes. The natural world, ecology, and the concept of emergence inspire many of the special harmonies and textural colorations in her compositions, as in her piano trio la mar amarga, the octet Cañon, and the string quartet Patagón. As Robert Carl notes in Fanfare, “Cox writes music that demonstrates an extremely refined and imaginative sense of...
Davitt Moroney was born in England in 1950. After studies at King’s College (University of London), he completed the Master’s program in musicology with a thesis on Italian music for the Roman Counter-Reformation: “Giovanni Animuccia, Missarum Liber Primus” (1972). He studied performance with the Austrian organist Susi Jeans, the Canadian harpsichordist Kenneth Gilbert and Dutch organist and harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, and holds concert performance and teaching diplomas from London’s Royal Academy of Music (1974) and Royal College of Music (1975). He entered the doctoral...
Karen Rosenak has spent all of her professional life in the Bay Area where she has divided her time between teaching and performing. As a graduate student at Stanford University she was introduced to the performance of early music and in particular, the fortepiano, an interest that she continues to pursue. As a (modern) pianist, she has specialized in the performance of new music, which presents constant and varied challenges, frustrations, and ultimately, many rewards. Probably the most challenging and rewarding aspect of her career, however, is the musicianship sequence she teaches at UC...
“My main goal in directing singers is to lead them into choral/vocal repertoire very deeply. I want them to become acquainted with their own individual voice and artistry while exploring the voice and creativity of the composer.” MK
Marika Kuzma has been the director of choirs at UC Berkeley since 1990. While in Berkeley, she has gained acclaim in the San Francisco Bay Area as a versatile conductor, leading her student choirs in works ranging from the Dufay to Mozart, Verdi, Messiaen, and premieres of new works. Under her direction, the University Chorus has been invited to...
PUBLICATIONS: Italian Music Incunabula; “The Psalter on the Way to the Reformation” in The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture in the Middle Ages; “Music in the Early Printed Missal, in The Dissemination of Music,” “Access to Sound and Image Databases,” in Studies in Multimedia; “Electronic Information and Applications in Musicology and Music Theory,” Early Music Printing in the Music Library of the University of California.
Christy Dana holds a Bachelor of Music in Brass from DePauw University, and two degrees from Indiana University: Master of Music in Theory, and Doctor of Music in Brass Literature and Pedagogy, with minors in jazz studies and music history. At Berkeley, Dr. Dana teaches Musicianship (49B, 50, 51) and Jazz Theory and Performance (116A-B). A master teacher, Dr. Dana delights in teaching such practical musical skills as sight singing, ear training, keyboard harmony, jazz improvisation, and small ensemble performance. A frequent supervisor of the graduate student assistants who teach Basic...
