News Archive from 2021-2022
July 2022
salt peanuts, July 18, 2022
salt peanuts reviews Just Justice, an album by Jones Jones, featuring UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Mark Dresser, saxophonist Larry Ochs and percussionist Vladimir Tarasov.
"The whimsical spirit that led to the anonymous name of this trio continues with the titles of the eight pieces. Each piece offers distinct, daring and deep listening dynamics that stress the strong individual voices of Jones Jones, their profound affinity and idiosyncratic and sometimes eccentric vocabularies, often spiced with humor and irony but with no attempt to attach themselves to familiar or conventional improvisation strategies. Just serving the music by keeping exploring possible modes of conversational dynamics and then letting go."
UC San Diego Music Professor David Borgo will be in France for the month of July teaching a Jazz in Paris course for UC San Diego Global Seminars.
About the course:
Paris (the home of revolutions in dress, politics, food, and wine) was the first country outside of the United States to embrace and promote American jazz in the 20th century. The Negro military bands serving abroad during World War I returned to Paris to create a "Second Harlem" in the Montmartre District.
We spend the summer following in their footsteps to understand how Jazz developed and why it was so enthusiastically received by the Parisians in the 1920s. In addition to historical lectures, films, and live music in class, we will capture the flavor of the period with excursions to the nightclubs, restaurants, concert venues, and cafes owned and frequented by these African American pioneers abroad.
The ability to speak French or read music is not necessary—a passion to learn about American jazz in Paris is required!
June 2022
Just Justice by Jones Jones featuring UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Mark Dresser
The New York City Jazz Record, June 2022
Robert Bush of The New York City Jazz Record reviews Just Justice, an album by Jones Jones, featuring UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Mark Dresser, saxophonist Larry Ochs and percussionist Vladimir Tarasov.
The album was recorded on January 12, 2020 at Studio B in Warren Lecture Hall by UC San Diego Music staff recording engineer Andrew Munsey.
"The album begins with an almost orchestral vibration, courtesy of deep drum tones. Dresser attacks his instrument from every direction other than what is expected and Ochs stokes the fire with a garrulous bellicosity.... Anyone who loves the work of a truly exploratory saxophone trio that extrapolates the revolutionary templates of the ‘60s would be wise to seek this out."
UC San Diego Music graduate student Sergey Kasich's "RIGHT" was published on the Imago Mundi Collection website. The piece was originally commissioned by the famous collection in 2018 and has since traveled around the world. The collection itself belongs to Luciano Benetton (founder of Benetton Group, famous for their "United Colors of Benetton" ad).
The original work is a sound art diptych, featuring copies of Sergey's LEFT and RIGHT ears, done with special silicone, which models human skin and gristle tangibility properties. Each ear-copy is mounted to a small frame, containing circuitry with inbuilt microphone and in-ear-phone piece. Anyone can switch it on and listen through a copy of his ear.
The RIGHT part is in Benetton's collection and LEFT is in the Moscow Sound Art Studio SA))_studio for permanent exposition.
The peculiar specialty of the LEFT piece is that it has a small switchable oscillator inside, which when activated, generates a frequency above 9 kHz with a low volume, modeling a permanent post-traumatic tinnitus that Sergey has in his left ear, which is partly deaf.
Bandcamp, June 15, 2022
Flutist/composer Wilfrido Terrazas releases My Shadow Leads The Way, a musical exploration of the poetry of Mexico City-based award winning poet Ricardo Cázares. In the album's 11 tracks, Terrazas alternates between playing flutes, percussion, and narrating a selection of poems from Cázares' yet unpublished book 'Latitud' in both Spanish and English. A flutist’s shadow come alive, a bell-driven invention, a rebellion of the spoken word aspiring to be music, this collection of pieces stems from --and wraps around-- the naked eloquence of Ricardo Cázares’ poems, transforming them into a musical glossary of the instability of meaning, memory, and thought.
BBC Radio 1 Takeover: Four Artists Pushing the Frontiers of Technology
King Britt is one of four artists featured in Resident Advisor's BBC Radio 1 Takeover series, where they learn about how technology inspires their music-making and expands the limits of their productions.
Listen to King Britt's mix for BBC Radio 1.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 8, 2022
The new Adam Sandler Philadelphia feature film Hustle, features "Runnin'" by New Zealand artist David Dallas that samples "New World in My View" from King Britt Presents Sister Gertrude Morgan!
"But probably the most creative, subtle nod to Philly is with 'Runnin,' a song by rapper David Dallas of New Zealand... So what’s so Philly about that? Just this: Dallas’ song is built on a sample of 'New World In My View,' from King Britt Presents Sister Gertrude Morgan, a ready-to-be-rediscovered 2005 classic by Philly DJ-producer King Britt in which he sampled late New Orleans street preacher and visual artist Sister Gertrude Morgan."
The world premiere of UC San Diego Chancellor's Distinguished Professor of Music Lei Liang's Mother's Songs, commissioned by Rockport Music, will be performed by Wu Man, one of the world's leading pipa players, and acclaimed violist Hsin-Yun Huang at the 41st Rockport Chamber Music Festival on Thursday, June 30th.
Review: Steven Schick’s final La Jolla Symphony concert a happy success
The San Diego Union-Tribune, June 6, 2022
Christian Hertzog of The San Diego Union-Tribune reviews Steven Schick's final La Jolla Symphony concert featuring violinist David Bowlin and a premiere by UC San Diego Music doctoral candidates Anthony Vine and Madison Greenstone.
"While Vine’s program notes may be whimsical, the music was anything but — 10 minutes of slowly changing harmonies and timbres in a continuity of sound with no discernable rhythms.... This was not music for impatient listeners, but for those willing to slow down and hear these slowly changing drones, it was a mysterious and rewarding sonic meditation."
Malcolm X and Hamlet Seize the Opera Stage
The New Yorker, June 6, 2022
"The most remarkable sections of the score are those in which Malcolm undergoes spiritual transformations: first his conversion to Islam, then his transcendent experience at Mecca. Hard-driving, jazz-inflected writing in the opening scenes gives way to episodes of entrancing stasis: sustained drones, intricately overlapping rhythmic cycles, choral chants of ritual simplicity." - Alex Ross
Wilfrido Terrazas – The Torres Cycle
Sequenza 21, June 6, 2022
Paul Muller of Sequenza 21 reviews Wilfrido Terrazas's new album The Torres Cycle, subtitled 'A Musical Ritual for the Seven Cardinal Directions.' "Using the concepts of direction and location, The Torres Cycle seeks to delineate the confluence of our cross-border cultures. Wilfrido Terrazas continues to build bridges of cultural understanding through the language of new music."
UC San Diego Music doctoral candidate David Aguila was selected for the 2022 - 2023 UC San Diego School of Arts and Humanities Community Connections Fellowship.
About his project:
As project lead for Creative Notation for Creative Performance, David Aguila will work with members of in^set to present a series of four sessions to groups within the San Diego Youth Symphony program. During the workshops, students will have the opportunity to develop a unique compositional concept, singular mode of graphic notation and explore deeply personal ideas/artistic content. in^set will help guide them through a process of experimentation and problem solving with the ultimate goal of providing a safe space to refine their scores and musical ideas for a final performance, held at UC San Diego.
UC San Diego Music graduate students will be joining a collaborative music educational program with the Media Arts Center in San Diego as tutors to provide free educational opportunities for young music/film creators interested in beatmaking, filming composing and podcasting.
LOCATION: City Heights Library IDEA Lab, 3795 Fairmount Ave, San Diego, CA 92105
BEATMAKING:
Interested in doing music production for hip ho, EDM, and other pop music? The first thing you’ll need is a solid beat! UCSD is bringing a beatmaking class in the City Heights Library’s new Idea Lab to teach an introductory course on the world of digital music production. The program is open to students 13+ and will include a $300 stipend for the 4 week course, No previous experience necessary and space is limited.
FILM COMPOSING:
Are you an emerging filmmaker who wants to learn how to fit music to your work? UCSD is teaching a film composition class in the City Heights Library’s new Idea Lab. Participants will learn beginning and advanced techniques for creating and setting music to film with experienced composers. No musical background necessary, and participation is free.
PODCASTING:
Anyone with a smart phone probably has a podcast that they are looking forward to listening to. Do you have a story? Do you want to learn about perhaps the most pervasive entertainment genre of our time? UCSD is teaching a podcasting class in the City Heights Library’s new Idea Lab. Any community members interested in leaning about podcasting are welcome, whether total beginners who want to get started or those with precious experience looking to take their skills to the next level. Participants will learn about story-boarding, basic recording and editing, setting music to narrative, and more. Applications are open to anyone 16+, but we are happy to work with people of all ages. Walk-in participants are welcome!
May 2022
KPBS, May 31, 2022
Julia Dixon Evans of KPBS interviews Steven Schick about his time as the music director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, teaching at UC San Diego, and the establishment of the Steven Schick Prize for Acts of Musical Imagination and Excellence.
Read or listen to the interview.
Ke Chen presented two research papers in the 2022 IEEE international conference on acoustics, speech and signal processing (ICASSP 2022) at Singapore from May 22 to May 27.
The first work is related to an audio classification task. Ke Chen proposed a model called HTS-AT: a hierarchical transformer model for audio classification and detection. This model adopted a downsampling transformer architecture into the audio classification task, leading to a currently highest performance of audio classification on three common evaluation datasets. By leveraging the structure of the transformer, HTS-AT can be further applied into sound event detection task and also achieve compatible performance.
The second work is related to singing melody extraction task, which aims to extract singing melody (fundamental frequency) contours of music tracks. Ke Chen presented TONet, a tone-octave deep learning network model for singing melody extraction. This model combined the human perceptions of tone (pitch-class) and octave for music pitches with a two-branch extraction model to improve the extraction performance. From various ablation studies, TONet has proved to be efficient in improving the extraction results based on the previous state-of-the-art models.
Both papers are presented orally by Ke Chen in ICASSP under the guidance of his advisors: professor Shlomo Dubnov and professor Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick.
The ‘Philosopher King’ of Percussion Starts His Next Chapter
The New York Times, May 23, 2022
Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times interviews percussionist and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Steven Schick, giving an inside look of the recording of "Weather Systems," a new multi-album project.
Keir GoGwilt, Ph.D. '21 receives the 2022 Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal
Keir GoGwilt, Ph.D. '21 receives the 2022 Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal for the School of Arts and Humanities.
Recipients of this prestigious award are chosen based upon the quality of academic research as determined by the impact of the research to the field and/or department; the insight, originality, and creativity shown by the author; the effectiveness of the writing, clarity, and organization of the thesis; and the soundness of the methodology and quality of the data (when applicable).
‘X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X’ Review: More Self-Empowering Than Radical
The Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2022
"Mr. Davis’s powerful, hugely varied score cements each vignette in its mood and purpose. Malcolm’s mother, Louise, expresses her terror about the racist assaults the family has experienced in a winding, blues-tinged, chromatic aria; the hustler Street seduces Malcolm into a life of crime with a jaunty swing; the hallucinatory chorus of prisoners chanting “Allahu-Akbar” as Malcolm is drawn toward Islam nods to free jazz and Middle Eastern melisma. In one of the most powerful scenes, as Elijah Muhammad chastises Malcolm for disobedience and for being “too big for the Nation,” the choral repetition of “Betrayal is on his lips” acts like an orchestral bass line, driving the split between the two men." - Heidi Waleson
Read The Wall Street Journal review.
UC San Diego Music graduate students Yongyun Zhang and Daniel Corral were awarded the Creator Development Fund Grant from New Music USA.
This year’s program supports twice as many creators as last year, awarding $335,000 in total funding to 112 creators, which is part of New Music USA’s commitment to supporting at least 100 creators and 100 organizations as part of their 10th anniversary year.
The San Diego Union-Tribune, May 16, 2022
"The cast and instrumentalists were champions for Davis’ music, none more so than Davóne Tines as Malcolm X. The gravity of Tines’ stage presence — boosted by Dede Ayite’s period costumes — is exceeded only by his powerful bass-baritone voice, an unwavering vocal prowess displayed in singing from the top of Act 2 until the penultimate scene of Act 3. He projected the serenity and wonder of Malcolm’s religious conversions as well as Malcolm’s rage at the plight of African Americans." - Christian Hertzog
Read The San Diego Union-Tribune review.
Anthony Davis: Any Means Necessary
NewMusic USA, May 16, 2022
Frank J. Oteri interviews Anthony Davis for New Music USA's SoundLives podcast, where they spoke about the world of jazz and opera and how for him they're not all that far apart, as well as the urgency for artists to challenge the status quo.
'"Nietzsche opened my mind to opera. It was through Birth of Tragedy and reading that, that I became interested in the idea of opera, and what opera could be. But I thought that what Nietzsche was writing about in terms of the Apollonian and Dionysian, and the kind of binary that he created was more applicable to American music than it was to German. Because we’re African and we’re European. The combination of the musical foundation in these two great cultures, I thought opera could have that. An American opera ideally would be that kind of expression.'" - Anthony Davis
Review: After 36 Years, a Malcolm X Opera Sings to the Future
The New York Times, May 15, 2022
"The music is varied and resourceful; Davis won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his most recent opera, “The Central Park Five,” but “X” is a deeper score. It begins in a mournful, noirish mood, the moments of anxiety flirting with blues and subtle swing. Guided sensitively by the conductor Kazem Abdullah, the music goes on to swerve from punchy modernism to lyrical lushness, from peaceful worship to nervous energy and stentorian forcefulness." - Zachary Woolfe
Read The New York Times review.
The San Diego Union-Tribune, May 15, 2022
"Schick has chosen to step down from his position with the orchestra and chorus to explore new musical horizons. He will also expand his percussive profile by recording a series of adventurous albums for Islandia Music Records, starting with “A Hard Rain,” which will be released Friday."
Review: Detroit Opera's 'X' delivers timely, haunting retelling of Malcolm X's life
The Detroit News, May 15, 2022
'"And anyone who had the great fortune of hearing the opera about Malcolm X performed 36 years ago would say they same thing," said [Detroit Opera Artist Director Yuval Sharon]. "They felt transformed by the voice, the music, the originality, the dazzling orchestrations, and, of course, the messages that this opera has to say. Tonight is an important corrective because it's taken 36 years for this opera to come back."'
The San Diego Union-Tribune, May 15, 2022
George Varga of The San Diego Union-Tribune writes about Steven Schick's new album "A Hard Rain," where Schick plays nearly 200 instruments on a piece by John Cage.
"Using recording technology that was never imagined by Cage, who died in 1992 at the age of 79, Schick and ace audio engineer Andrew Munsey — himself an accomplished jazz drummer — transform Cage’s work into something even more bold and multifaceted."
May 14, 2022
Throughout history, composers have been enamored with and inspired by birdsong, praising it as "nature's music". Recent scientific investigations of birdsong with musical methods, however, demonstrate that the connection between music and birdsong is far from trivial. In Jeffrey Xing's URC presentation, "Syntactic modulation of rhythm in Australian pied butcherbird song", he demonstrated the usage of musical rhythm analyses in analyzing Australian pied butcherbird songs, and show that the way their song is sequentially structured is strongly related to its rhythmic patterns. Such acoustic relationships have important cognitive consequences for music perception in humans, which prompt questions about if humans and songbirds share similar senses of musicality.
It's Anthony's Time': A Composer Gets His Dues
The New York Times, May 12, 2022
Seth Colter Walls of The New York Times feature UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Anthony Davis spotlighting his many works and the upcoming production of "X: The Life and Times of Malcom X" by the Detroit Opera House.
"With a new production of Anthony Davis’s pathbreaking Malcolm X opera opening in Detroit, we are on the cusp of a broader reappraisal of his work."
jazzahead! Conference Rebirths in Bremen
Downbeat, May 9, 2022
Josef Woodard of Downbeat reviews the jazzahead! Conference in Bremen, Germany, where UC San Diego Music Associate Professor Stephanie Richards premiered new works with UC San Diego Music staff recording engineer Andrew Munsey on drums.
"Richards is fast emerging as a trumpeter bringing a new energy and attitude to her instrument and to the business of jazz from the experimental and free improvisational perspective. A trumpeter with her own sensual voice, Richards artfully deploys extended techniques to musical ends, while her band (featuring potent young pianist Joshua White, with influences from Cecil Taylor and beyond) flexes and surges. She brings a vocabulary of melodic and riff-based ideas, mixed with abstraction and a palpable sense of searching. At this moment, her quartet is expanded by one — the being inside her very pregnant belly, whom she called “the special guest” of the show."
Navarro work a highlight amid didactic opening night at MATA Festival
New York Classical Review, May 5, 2022
George Grella of New York Classical Review praises the world premiere of Unnoticed Spectacles by Fernanda Aoki Navarro, Ph.D. '19 at MATA Festival.
The piece was performed by vocalist Alice Teyssier, D.M.A. '17, bassoonist Rebekah Heller, clarinetist Joshua Rubin, and flutist Laura Cocks.
"The combination of the beguiling sounds and the mysterious, dream-like logic made this suspenseful in the way of anticipating something new that would knock the listener marvelously askew. Skillful, personal, having no clear antecedents, this was what new music truly should be all about."
5 songs for right now: Serbian/Henshaw, Nomis, Kaye/Davis, The Inflorescence and Wilfrido Terrazas
KPBS, May 4, 2022
"The Ensenada-born flutist and UC San Diego music professor Wilfrido Terrazas released a new album of compositions, "The Torres Cycle," a collection of seven compositions anchored by four "torre" works, each representing a direction: del Norte, del Sur, del Este and del Oeste. Between each torre is an interstitial "tótem." Each track is so distinct, with unique instrumentation, though the recording as a whole feels fluidly epic. I was drawn to one of the tótems, the second track: "Tótem I, Camino sobre la tierra," which features an oboe and percussion. On this composition, Juliana Gaona plays oboe like it's something else entirely: flexing, splitting and bending its sound against the curious percussion of Rebecca Lloyd-Jones. The album was primarily recorded at UC San Diego, then mixed in Mexico City." - Julia Dixon Evans, KPBS
The San Diego Union-Tribune, May 1, 2022
The Metropolitan Opera's 2023 performance of UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Anthony Davis's "X: The Life and Times of Malcom X" is set to be filmed for an HD theatrical release.
"A bold fusion of contemporary classical and traditional opera, vintage and cutting-edge jazz styles, gospel music and Indonesian gamelan, meticulously notated scores and daring improvisations, “X” is nearly as revolutionary — on an artistic level — as the slain civil rights leader whose life inspired it."
Read The San Diego Union-Tribune article.
UC San Diego Music Professor Nancy Guy will be giving a research talk at the University of Zurich titled "Garbage, Music, and Environmental Sustainability in Contemporary Taiwan" on May 5, 2022.
This talk focuses on references to garbage and its pickup heard in popular music from the 1980s through the 2020s. These pieces demonstrate some of the ways in which the everyday practices aimed at managing household waste have seeped into a wide range of sensibilities. It will be argued that a pervasive awareness in Taiwan of garbage and its collection has contributed to a marked cognizance of environmental protection. The immediate physicality and musicality of Taiwan's garbage collection routine works to keep the long emergency of waste disposal in the public's imagination. The everyday engagement with waste, including aurally through garbage truck music, is no doubt partly responsible for Taiwan’s success at reducing household waste and for it being heralded by the New York Times as "an island of green in Asia" and for the Wall Street Journal declaring Taiwanese the "world's geniuses of garbage disposal."
April 2022
On the stage and the page with bassist Mark Dresser
San Diego Reader, April 28, 2022
Robert Bush of the San Diego Reader interviews UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Mark Dresser about how the pandemic affected him artistically, his recent Europe tours with Trio M and Jones Jones, and a new book in the making.
"Back in the USA, Dresser is teaching and working on a comprehensive book covering his sound and instrumental research. 'It’s a culmination of having taught for nearly 20 years. Everything I’ve learned about contemporary music and how it intersects with improvisation. This is all the stuff with the instrument and technique development that I’ve wanted to codify and make available for players, performers, and composers. It’s going to be comprehensive. It will exist in print form, it will have video files, [and] it will probably exist as an e-book. I want to find a format that’s as modern as our age.'”
UC San Diego Music Associate Professor Stephanie Richards was one of seven musicians representing Canada at the JazzAhead festival in Bremen, Germany on April 28, 2022, premiering new works with UC San Diego Music staff recording engineer Andrew Munsey on drums.
The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp: April 2022
Bandcamp, April 27, 2022
UC San Diego Music Assistant Professor Wilfrido Terrazas's new album, The Torres Cycle, was included in Bandcamp's list of the best contemporary classical music of April 2022.
"Mexican flutist and composer Wilfrido Terrazas conceived this epic work as a meditation on different sorts of perception, deftly embracing the four cardinal direction points as the focus in the primary movements. Naturally, what we see, hear, and feel depends on where we are: as Amy Cimini’s poetic liner note essay spells out, what we experience in one location could be totally different in another. It’s heady stuff, but Terrazas, a member of the superb Mexico City ensemble Liminar, has enlisted an impressive cast of interpreters fluent in both notated and improvised music to illuminate these notions. “Torre del Norte” features a shape-shifting brass sextet and electronics expertly warping loose written themes. The perpetually changing timbre, propulsion, and density indicate a certain mutability as the listener seeks to get their bearings straight. “Torre del Sur” employs double bass and a string quartet to sketch out a whispery upper register drift into chaotic mid-range density, rife with striated tones, twang, and delicious ambiguity. Interspersed within these four “Torre” movements are shorter but less substantive “totems,” such as “Tótem I, Camino sobre la tierra,” where Juliana Gaona’s elastic oboe threads the meditative percussive clangs of Rebecca Lloyd-Jones through an effectively arcing structure."
Pierre Kwenders Tells His Life Story Through Dance Music
Exclaim, April 27, 2022
Pierre Kwenders shares about his new album José Louis and the Paradox of Love, and his collaboration with UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt and Arcade Fire's Win Butler on the album's opening song, "L.E.S. (Liberté Égalité Sagacité)."
"More elements of Kwenders' Montreal community come through on the album. Known for his eccentric style, Kwenders channels the energy of late-night back-to-back DJ sets with Arcade Fire's Win Butler for the opening song 'L.E.S. (Liberté Égalité Sagacité).' The song also features legendary Philadelphia DJ-producer King Britt. Says Kwenders, 'I really wanted to approach the music from a DJ perspective, and I could not believe I had the chance to collaborate with artists I hold in such regard.'"
UC San Diego Music Undergraduate Student Qui-Shawn Tran featured in the Rock Against Hate 2 event
AsAmNews, April 20, 2022
UC San Diego Music Undergraduate Student Qui-Shawn Tran performed his spoken word poetry in Rock Against Hate 2, an Asian American arts & activism special event supporting #StopAAPIHate on Thursday, April 28.
The virtual event was hosted by actor James Kyson, comedian Jiaoying Summers, and comedian Aidan Park, and also featured performances by Cometa, The Complements, Darro, Othertones and St. Lenox.
About Qui-Shawn Tran:
Qui-Shawn Tran (pronounced KEY-Shawn), 20, performs original spoken word poetry and creates audiovisual content. As a 3rd year student at UC San Diego studying Interdisciplinary Computing, Music, and Technology, he’s made music, poetry, and YouTube Videos about his first-generation, Asian-American college experience. In his live performances for UC San Diego's Department of Music, TEDx, and Alumni Association, he shares his lived experiences and ambition to contribute to the Asian-American community. In 2020, his entrepreneurial spirit led him to raise $1,500 for the East West Players, a Los Angeles based Asian-American theater. In 2022, his artistic journey continues through performances for the StopAAPIHate movement, the Vietnamese Boat People Story Slam, and the Creative Arts Fellowship at UC San Diego.
I Care If You Listen, April 15, 2022
Soprano Susan Narucki's iconic recording of “Bouchara” by Claude Vivier, with Asko/Schönberg Ensemble and the late Reinbert de Leeuw are included in composer Lisa Bielawa's shortlist of ten essential recordings on the I Care If You Listen (April 15, 2022). Narucki's and Asko/Schönberg's advocacy of the music of Vivier endured for over a decade, resulting in the award-winning recording on the Philips label. Rome Prize winning composer Bielawa and Narucki collaborated on the landmark piece Chance Encounter (2007) for soprano and ensemble performed in public spaces in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
New Multi-Album Series WEATHER SYSTEMS to Begin Releases on May 20th
Broadway World, April 13, 2022
Islandia Music Records announces a new multi-album series from "supreme living virtuoso" (The New Yorker) percussionist Steven Schick. The new series, called Weather Systems, is a set of recordings of the percussion music that has been most meaningful to Schick, which will span more than 100 years and feature a diverse set of composers.
Weather Systems I: A Hard Rain will be released on May 20, 2022, and includes foundational modernist works for solo percussion by John Cage (27'10.554"), Karlheinz Stockhausen (Zyklus), Morton Feldman (The King of Denmark), Charles Wuorinen (Janissary Music), Helmut Lachenmann (Intérieur I), William Hibbard (Parsons' Piece), and Kurt Schwitters (Ursonata) with Shakrokh Yadegari, electronics composer and performer. The 2-CD set includes an extensive personal essay written by Schick.
The next album in Schick's series, Weather Systems II-Radio Plays: Music for Speaking Percussionist, will be released in 2023, and will include music by George Lewis, Vivian Fung, Pamela Z, and Roger Reynolds.
The trio with UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Mark Dresser, saxophonist Larry Ochs and percussionist Vladimir Tarasov returns after a tour in Europe, playing concerts in Munich, St. Johann in Tirol, Ulrichsberg, Vilnius, Lithuania, Poitiers and Paris.
Article Translations:
Three professionals in the world of musical improvisation - US bassist Mark Dresser, saxophonist Larry Ochs and percussionist Vladimir Tarasov - met on stage as the band "Jones Jones", together to create performances of enchantingly sincere, meditative or stunningly explosive music. The trio first formed in 2006. for one concert in San Francisco, but that meeting became the beginning of a special joint musicianship. For more than 15 years, these artists have been searching for sounds together, the ability to listen and react to each other improvised right here.
BMOP/sound releases new album of violin concertos composed by Roger Reynolds
Bandcamp, April 12, 2022
Known as the nation’s foremost label launched by an orchestra and devoted exclusively to new music, Grammy Award-winning BMOP/sound announced the release of Roger Reynolds: Violin Works. Showcasing the composer’s omnivorous curiosity, the album comprises three violin concertos written over a 15-year span.
A Pulitzer Prize winner who pioneered sound spatialization, intermedia, and algorithmic concepts, Reynolds documents his evolving exploration of the voice, character, and circumstance through the inimitable violin. Conductor Gil Rose and his 25-year-old Boston Modern Orchestra Project are joined by the radiant sound of violinist Gabriela Díaz.
While Reynolds was a visiting professor at Harvard in 2012, he worked closely with contemporary-music champion and long-time BMOP violinist Gabriela Díaz. Attracted to her warmth, musicality, luminosity, and freshness, Reynolds hails her “open and relaxed approach…and projects the variable worlds of expression and sincerity that exist in these pieces. Everything sings.”
The album opens with the continuous 26-minute work Personae with both orchestra and computer tape shadowing the violin. Diaz takes on four roles: The Conjurer, The Dancer, The Meditator, and The Advocate. Each of the four presentations’ most direct shadows are heard from the ensemble, the more impressionistic ones in the computer’s realm. In contrast to Personae, the purely acoustic Aspiration allows the chamber ensemble to play a more essential, not ornamental role. In the middle is the Zen-inspired Kokoro, for solo violin, designed to challenge the soloist to assume “an entirely new psychological stance” for each of the work’s 12 sections.
Wild Up performed the world premiere of UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Nathaniel Haering's Spate III at the Walt Disney Concert Hall as a part of the LA Phil National Composers Intensive program at their Noon to Midnight event on Saturday, April 9.
UC San Diego Music Assistant Professor Wilfrido Terrazas releases new album The Torres Cycle
Bandcamp, April 8, 2022
UC San Diego Music Assistant Professor Wilfrido Terrazas's new album, The Torres Cycle, published by the NYC-based label New Focus Recordings will officially be released on April 8th. The album features Terrazas' most ambitious composition project to date, The Torres Cycle, comprising of seven of his compositions. In addition to Terrazas, the 22 musicians recorded in the album, including fellow UC San Diego Music faculty Anthony Burr, and UC San Diego Music graduate students Berk Schneider, Alexandria Smith, Michael Matsuno, Teresa Díaz de Cossío, Alexander Ishov, Madison Greenstone, Michael Jones, Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, Juliana Gaona Villamizar, Kathryn Schulmeister, Ilana Waniuk, Myra Hinrichs and Peter Ko.
The album was recorded by UC San Diego Music staff recording engineer Andrew Munsey and features liner notes by UC San Diego Music Associate Professor Amy Cimini.
Excerpt about the album from Dan Lippel, founder of New Focus Recordings:
"Composer Wilfrido Terrazas presents a seven part album length work, The Torres Cycle, which explores ritual, indigenous tradition from his native Mexico, alternative notation, structured improvisation, spatialized live performance techniques, and an evocative instrumentation layout to explore questions of social connection and the mysterious relationship between tradition, history, and the present. A virtuoso flutist, Terrazas presents a musical language in which the power of expression frames the palette of techniques, creating a fresh and urgent soundworld.
Ritual and collective experience lie at the heart of Wifrido Terrazas’s ambitious seven part work, The Torres Cycle. Structured around four movements invoking the four cardinal directions and three interstitial “tótems” for smaller forces, Terrazas draws on Mesoamerican conceptual traditions to examine the relationship between the absolute quality of direction and the relative nature of perception. Through a score that relies heavily on improvised elements and spatialized performance instructions, Terrazas delivers a powerful message — our understanding of a place, idea, or event is framed by where we stand in relation to it."
The album is available now for pre-order on Bandcamp.
UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt will be a panelist in Columbia University's Kitchen Table Praxis: Recipes for Belonging in Electronic Music Virtual Symposium on Friday, April 8, 2022.
About the symposium:
Though equity has modestly improved in technology-focused fields, striking inequities still remain. And in the realm of electronic music in particular, statistics still demonstrate a need to advocate for inclusivity. Indeed, electronic music’s many sub-genres still wrestle with toxic artifacts from military, cybernetic, and Western art music genealogies. In addition, diverse influences continue to struggle for legitimacy amid conditions that reify exclusion. In counterpoint, Kitchen Table Praxis: Recipes for Belonging in Electronic Music elevates a plurality of narratives and critical tactics, featuring them as ingredients that can ferment a sensibility of belonging, and possibly divergent trajectories, in technical fields.
10 classical concerts to enjoy this spring
WBUR, April 6, 2022
BMOP's production of "X: The Life and Times of Malcom X" at Strand Theatre on June 17, 2022 was included in WBUR's "10 classical concerts to enjoy this spring."
"If I had to pick one live opera to attend, it would be Gil Rose’s Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s production of this powerful if uneven work (though now revised) that had its Boston premiere in 1988, Anthony Davis’s 'X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.' There isn’t a lot of information just yet, but the title role will be played by the young bass-baritone Davóne Tines, who impressed me in the A.R.T. production of Matthew Aucoin’s Walt Whitman opera (which I wish had impressed me more), and is this year’s Musical America Vocalist of the Year. This production is the first of an ambitious BMOP project called 'As Told By: History, Race, and Justice on the Opera Stage,' a series of five operas by Black composers 'that depict vital figures of Black liberation and thought across 250 years of history.'" - Lloyd Schwartz
March 2022
Triton Women Leaders Share Four Secrets to Success
UC San Diego News Center, March 31, 2022
In recognition of Women's Herstory Month this March at UC San Diego, Erika Johnson and Michelle Franklin asked four women leaders to share their leadership journey as well as four tips for those who aspire to grow in their career.
UC San Diego Music Chief Administrative Officer Barbara Jackson shares her experiences dealing with self-doubt and encourages everyone to be confident and not let fear get in the way of your success.
Violinist Miranda Cuckson and composer Rand Steiger collaborate on three works for violin and spatialized electronics, exploring the dazzling, immersive sonic potential of National Sawdust’s 102-loudspeaker Meyer Sound Constellation system. The program will feature the world premiere of Steiger’s “Longing,” written for Miranda Cuckson, and a re-imagining of his work “Nimbus Violin,” originally created in 2016 as part of an installation at Disney Hall for the LA Philharmonic. These will be heard alongside Kaija Saariaho’s four-movement Frises (2011), which layers repeating and reverberating shimmering gestures, and her delicate acoustic violin piece Nocturne (1994).
The same program will be performed by Cuckson and Steiger at the UC San Diego Conrad Prebys Music Center Experimental Theater on April 16, 2022.
The Wire
In the wake of the Afrofuturism festival of arts and music at New York’s Carnegie Hall, DeForrest Brown, Jr. examines the liberating potential of the movement’s legacy for The Wire.
UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt served on the curatorial council for Carnegie Hall's Afrofuturism festival. Britt teaches the Blacktronika: Afrofuturism in Electronic Music course at UC San Diego and has been a part of many afrofuturism centered events such as the early-2000s Blacktronika monthly event series hosted in London by DJ and poet Charlie Dark.
"Back then, the movement was 'about fighting major labels', and 'covers the entire history of Black music, early jazz, house, broken beat, African stuff, from Coltrane to Carl Craig. Everything that comes from the diaspora.' Blacktronika is a platform to research and develop a greater understanding of technology’s impact on the Black musical continuum, which he plans to compile into a book. Afrofuturism brings Britt and Black electronic music to the concert hall."
A Vivid Opera Recreates Hounding, Exoneration Of The Central Park Five
Classical Voice North America, March 24, 2022
James Bash of Classical Voice North America reviews Portland Opera's production of 'The Central Park Five.'
"All of the singers representing the accused youths excelled, transitioning from joking around to confused and defiant."
The appalling miscarriage of justice: ‘Central Park Five’ at Portland Opera
Oregon ArtsWatch, March 23, 2022
On March 23, 2022 The Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) announced their 2022/23 season in celebration of the Orchestra's 100th anniversary.
As a way to further celebrate the TSO’s relationship with Toronto, Gustavo Gimeno, Music Director of TSO, commissioned ten three-minute “Celebration Preludes” from composers across the GTA, representing the diversity of voices in the community. Continuing on from the Celebration Preludes that were presented over the 2021/22 season, five more composers will have their works premiered in 2022/23 including UC San Diego Music graduate student Janet Sit.
The Philharmonic Plans Its Return to Geffen Hall, With Fanfare
The New York Times, March 21, 2022
The New York Philharmonic announced its 2022-23 season, a celebratory slate of about 150 concerts to inaugurate its newly renovated home, Geffen Hall.
Opening festivities include the world premiere of “Oyá,” a work for light, electronics and orchestra by UC San Diego Professor of Music Marcos Balter.
Portland Opera’s ‘The Central Park Five’ dramatizes two worlds in collision
Oregon ArtsWatch, March 21, 2022
Musician Brendan Nguyen has kept busy during the pandemic with Project [Blank]
The San Diego Union-Tribune, March 20, 2022
Pianist Brendan Nguyen, D.M.A. '15 speaks with Beth Wood of The San Diego Union-Tribune about his journey as a musician and the establishment of Project [Blank], a local arts nonprofit he co-founded with fellow UC San Diego alum Leslie Ann Leythan, D.M.A. '15.
On the last weekend of May, Project [Blank] will present “Paradise TBD” at Bread & Salt. The world-premiere chamber-music opera features electronics and five singers, including Leytham. Nguyen will perform and serve as producer and music director.
King Britt on the Gear of Blacktronika History
Reverb, March 17, 2022
UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt sits down with John Morrison for Reverb to discuss a handful of tracks that illustrate how Black musicians have used electronic technology in exciting and innovative ways.
The interview features the discussion of music by Sun Ra and His Arkestra, Stevie Wonder, Phuture, Jeff Mills, and Soul Dhamma.
‘The Central Park Five’: Art as a tool for justice
Oregon ArtsWatch, March 17, 2022
Students in UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt's Music 174B class presents their final class projects, featuring all original productions.
The Sound Barrier, March 13, 2022
Soprano Susan Narucki was a featured guest on the March 13, 2022 episode of The Sound Barrier with Ian Parsons, on Melbourne's PBS FM station, speaking about the music of the late Louis Andriessen, with whom she worked closely, and about creating the role of Catherina Bolnes in Andriessen's opera Writing to Vermeer, which was performed at the Netherlands Opera, the Lincoln Center Festival and the Adelaide International Festival, and recorded for Nonesuch Records.
New World Symphony - Sounds of the Times: Songs of Hope - Saturday, April 2, 2022 at 7:30 p.m.
The New World Symphony conducted by Matthia Pintscher will be premiering a new work by Balter titled "Orun" for orchestra on Saturday, April 2, 2022 at 7:30 p.m. at the New World Center in Miami Beach, Florida.
February 2022
Hydra Nightingale features premiere recordings of recent works for solo contrabass by Caroline Louise Miller, Ph.D. '19, Jessie Cox, UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Anqi Liu, and Asher Tobin Chodos, Ph.D. '19, performed with vivid clarity by Kyle Motl, D.M.A. '18.
Miller’s "Hydra Nightingale" weaves melodic threads, rattly string noise, and multiphonic noise as a living organism. Liu’s "Light Beams Through Dusts, Through a Mist of Moistures" views the bass through a post-spectral lens where hazy clouds of barely audible harmonics give way to grinding multiphonic textures. Cox’ "Nachklang" employs multiphonics and pressure techniques on prepared strings, bringing the bass to speak with a fragile whisper that resonates with glistening tones. Motl’s own "Phosphene" conjures a hallucinatory polyphony of light by way of oscillating harmonics. The only work with electronic media, Chodos’ "Trickle Town" brings loopy rhythms in dialogue with Ronald Reagan speeches. Together, these works present a multitudinous yet cohesive view into the possibilities of solo bass.
"Trickle Town" was recorded and mixed by UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Alexandria Smith.
Watch the video for Motl's "Phosphene".
February 25, 2022
UC San Diego Music faculty and sitar virtuoso Kartik Seshadri was featured as a panelist on sitarist Subhranil Sarkar's prestigious "Sitar & Us" series to speak about the sitar and Indian Classical Music.
The "Sitar & Us" series is a part of the "Strings & Us" project ideated around 15-16 years ago by Subhranil Sarkar. It all started out during Orkut times and subsequently a Facebook group named "Strings & Us" was formed in 2020 to engage musicians in discussion with an aim to demystify Indian Classical Music.
The New York Times Review: At Rothko Chapel, a Composer Is Haunted by a Hero
The New York Times, February 21, 2022
Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times reviews the premiere of Tyshawn Sorey's "Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)" that was performed at Rothko Chapel in Houston for the space's 50th anniversary.
Tyshawn Sorey led the Houston Chamber Choir, the keyboardist Sarah Rothenberg, the violist Kim Kashkashian, the bass-baritone Davóne Tines and the percussionist and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Steven Schick in this premiere.
"...bathed in natural light, the canvases were more serene in their looming brooding, and “Monochromatic Light” felt calmer, too, a touch more fragile. The sensitive percussionist Steven Schick played the opening shimmer of bells with even profounder quiet, and there were more flickers in Kashkashian’s tone."
OperaWire, February 16, 2022
Grammy Award-winning Soprano and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Susan Narucki announced her plans to record and perform “This Island’ an album comprised of a collection of rare art songs.
The album will be released in 2022 through AVIE Records and Narucki will record the songs with her longtime collaborator pianist Donald Berman in March and June of 2022.
Hear an exclusive performance of these songs at her concert on Wednesday, March 2nd at 7:00 p.m. in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall. RSVP is required to attend in person. Livestream will be available in real time and will not be up for replay.
American Academy of Arts and Letters, February 15, 2022
The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced 18 recipients for this year’s awards in music, which total $205,000. The winners were selected by a committee of Academy members: Chen Yi (chair), John Corigliano, Stephen Hartke, George Lewis, Augusta Read Thomas, Chinary Ung, and Julia Wolfe.
Composer and UC San Diego Professor of Music Marcos Balter was selected for the Arts and Letters Awards in Music, which honor outstanding artistic achievement and acknowledge composers who have arrived at their own voice.
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to present Composers In Focus: Mary Kouyoumdjian, '05
Broadway World, February 14, 2022
On Wednesday, March 30, 2022 at 6:30pm, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will present Composers In Focus, a digital event celebrating Armenian-American composer and documentarian Mary Kouyoumdjian, '05.
After a discussion with the composer, violinist Jesse Mills, cellist Mihai Marica, double bassist Brendan Kane, clarinetist Todd Palmer, and trumpeter Gareth Flowers will perform Kouyoumdjian's 30-minute to open myself, to scream (2017) with visuals by artist Kevork Mourad.
Kouyoumdjian received her B.A. in Music Composition from the University of California San Diego in 2005, where she studied with Chaya Czernowin, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Anthony Davis, Steven Schick, and Chinary Ung.
The revised edition of Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age by UC San Diego Professor of Music David Borgo was published in February by Bloomsbury Academic.
The revised edition of Sync or Swarm promotes an ecological view of musicking, moving us from a subject-centered to a system-centered view of improvisation. It explores cycles of organismic self-regulation, cycles of sensorimotor coupling between organism and environment, and cycles of intersubjective interaction mediated via socio-technological networks. Chapters funnel outward, from the solo improviser (Evan Parker), to nonlinear group dynamics (Sam Rivers trio), to networks that comprise improvisational communities, to pedagogical dynamics that affect how individuals learn, completing the hermeneutic circle. Winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology's Alan Merriam prize in its first edition, the revised edition features new sections that highlight electro-acoustic and transcultural improvisation, and concomitant issues of human-machine interaction and postcolonial studies.
UC San Diego Music Associate Professor Stephanie Richards will be premiering a new project called Vibrations to Infinity in Italy with pianist Wayne Horovitz in celebration of the memories of J.A. Dino Deane as well as joining the Orchestra Creativa dell’Emilia-Romagna as soloist for a Conduction concert honoring Butch Morris.
UC San Diego Music faculty and world-famous sitar player Kartik Seshadri was featured on UC San Diego ITS’s podcast The Current, where he discusses learning the sitar and performing at a young age, the basics of Indian classical music, his career touring the globe and his experience teaching music at UC San Diego.
Billboard, February 3, 2022
UC San Diego Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt was featured on Detroit electronic music icon Carl Craig's Black History Month virtual conversations and performances series All Black Digital to speak about Afrofuturism.
Read the article on Billboard.
the WholeNote Review: Zephyr - Steph Richards
the WholeNote, February 2, 2022
Ken Waxman of the WholeNote reviews UC San Diego Music Associate Professor Stephanie Richards' latest album Zephyr.
"In the form of three multi-track suites, the two explore visceral episodes that go beyond brass, wood, strings, air and pressure."
January 2022
Bandcamp, January 28, 2022
Final Embers of Sunlight by Necking, a trio featuring UC San Diego Associate Professor of Music Amy Cimini, Nick Lesley (visual arts staff), and Scott Nielson, included in Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music of January 2022 list.
Pitchfork, January 26, 2022
Congolese-born and Montreal-based musician and songwriter Pierre Kwenders announces new album, José Louis and the Paradox of Love will be released on April 29th, featuring contributions by UC San Diego Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt.
UC San Diego Music graduate student Marguerite Brown was awarded the 2021 Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Composition Prize. Mivos Quartet will be working with Marguerite during their 2022/23 season on her string quartet work, chroi: tetrachords.
Learn more about Marguerite Brown.
The Washington Post, January 22, 2022
Composer and UC San Diego Professor of Music Marcos Balter was included in The Washington Post's "22 for '22: Composers and performers to watch this year."
"Nominator Nadia Sirota describes the San Diego-based Balter, 47, as a composer with an 'uncanny ear for timbre and [who] makes music that really doesn’t sound like anyone else’s.'"
Ross Karre, D.M.A. '09 Named Percussion Professor at Oberlin Conservatory
Oberlin Conservatory, January 21, 2022
Ross Karre, D.M.A. '09, a percussionist, educator, and artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, has been named Associate Professor of Percussion at Oberlin Conservatory. He will begin his new role in the fall 2022 semester.
The appointment follows the retirement of Professor of Percussion Michael Rosen, a 2019 inductee into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame, who concluded his 50-year Oberlin teaching career in May 2021. Karre was an undergraduate percussion student in Rosen’s studio and then went on to complete his master's degree and doctorate in percussion under the tutelage of Steven Schick at UC San Diego.
Article by UC San Diego Ph.D. candidate Alex Stephenson accepted for publication by Music Theory Online
UC San Diego Ph.D. candidate Alex Stephenson's recent article on hybrid harmonic structures in contemporary music has been accepted for publication by Music Theory Online, a journal of the Society for Music Theory. The article—entitled "The Poetics and Politics of Ambiguity: Overtone Structures and Equal Temperament in Works by Julian Anderson and Rand Steiger"—explores shifting interactions between seemingly conflicting harmonic paradigms in two contemporary works. It also puts these findings into dialogue with the broader sociopolitical contexts in which the pieces were created. The project began as a personal exploration into the work of two composers with whom Alex has had close working relationships over several years; after growing into a qualifying exam paper, it was further developed into a journal article with the generous support of Professor Nancy Guy and her Spring 2021 writing seminar. The article is scheduled to be published in June as part of Volume 28, no. 2, of MTO.
Learn more about Alex Stephenson.
Computers in a Jazz Ensemble? Inventing Improvisational AI
UC San Diego News Center, January 13, 2022
UC San Diego Professor of Music Shlomo Dubnov, who also has appointments in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and UC San Diego's Qualcomm Institute, and Gérard Assayag, a researcher at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music in Paris, recently received a €2.4 million (around $2.8 million) European Research Council Advanced Grant.
Dubnov and Assayag will be working with other international partners on Project REACH: Raising Co-creativity in Cyber-Human Musicianship, which is teaching computers how to improvise, musically.
Music by UC San Diego Professor of Music Marcos Balter to be performed at the Philips Collection, Carnegie Hall and Julliard
On Saturday, January 8, 2022, Omolu composed by Marcos Balter was performed by harpist Parker Ramsay in a collaboration with visual artist Sanford Biggers, poet Sheldon Scott, and multidisciplinary collective Moon Medicin at the Philips Collection as part of its centenary season. (Learn more)
On Thursday, February 17, 2022, AXIOM ensemble will be performing Balter's Bladed Stance at Julliard as a part of Carnegie Hall's citywide Afrofuturism Festival. The performance will be live streamed during the scheduled date and time and open to an in person audience. (Learn more)
On Monday, February 28, 2022, the Contemporaneous Ensemble will be performing Balter's Bladed Stance for the Songs for the Earth Chamber Music Concert at Carnegie Hall. (Learn more)
UC San Diego Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt was featured on episode 4 of Dada Strain Radio hosted by Piotr Orlov. In this episode, Britt discusses electronic music's improvised history, and how music and community have been guided by machines.
UC San Diego researchers develop a method to make AI-generated voices more expressive
Tech Xplore, January 5, 2022
Computer scientists and electrical engineers from UC San Diego CSE and ECE have developed a method to make AI-generated voices sound more expressive with minimal training, even for voices it had never encountered before. The framework can be used for personal assistants for digital devices, improve voice-overs in animated movies, create personalized speech interfaces for individuals who have lost the ability to speak, and it can be used for high quality singing synthesis of new vocalists since music requires expressive and controllable voice synthesis.
Shlomo Dubnov, professor in the departments of music, and computer science and engineering, is the advisor of Paarth Neekhara, one of the lead authors of this research paper, “Expressive Neural Voice Cloning,” that was presented at the ACML 2021 conference. Other contributors of the paper include lead author Shehzeen Hussain and contributors Farinaz Koushanfar, and Julian McAuley.
Alarm Will Sound to perform music by UC San Diego Music faculty Marcos Balter and King Britt in the premiere of Post-Acoustica
Alarm Will Sound will perform music by UC San Diego Music faculty Marcos Balter and King Britt in the premiere of Post-Acoustica, the follow-up to 2005's groundbreaking project Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound performs Aphex Twin.
Alarm Will Sound worked directly with electronica artists to create acoustic reworkings of music originally intended to be performed by machines. The result sees the musicians of AWS using helium, bicycle pumps, Dremel tools, and more to bring these tracks to life.
More Information:
Saturday, April 9 at .ZACK in St. Louis.
Monday, April 11 at Thalia Hall in Chicago.
Ensemble Musikfabrik, one of the leading new music ensembles, recently published a video recording of UC San Diego Ph.D. candidate Sang Song’s brass quartet Vier Todesmomente
(“Four Moments of Death”) on the ensemble’s website as well as its YouTube channel. Since its premiere on January 3, 2022, the video recording attracted close to 37,000 views. The brass players of Ensemble Musikfabrik have previously performed the work in Cologne, Germany and at the Biennale Koper in Koper, Slovenia.
December 2021
The San Diego Union-Tribune, December 24, 2021
UC San Diego Music Associate Professor Stephanie Richards's album "Zephyr" with pianist Joshua White was included in George Varga's round-up of the best jazz albums of 2021 for The San Diego Union-Tribune.
"As bold and fearless as it is moving and entrancing, the album teams Richards — who sometimes performs with the bell of her horn submerged in water — with nationally celebrated El Cajon pianist Joshua White. The two listen to each other as intently as they play and their exceptionally empathetic music seems both carefully planned and largely spontaneous."
A few years ago, the Reynolds contracted with Routledge publishers to issue Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House. They had worked for years on the notion that the multifarious materials they had gathered over four decades could be shape-shifted into a coherent collection of chapters. The book is now published and provides an intimate window into Xenakis’s ways and capacities as they had experienced them.
R. and K. Reynolds ... captivate an intellectual clairvoyance that resonates strongly not only in music but also in architecture, painting, food and all other forms of art they choose to describe … There is so much more information and feeling transmitted in this book that goes far beyond the disciplines of music or architecture alone. [It] will not only benefit students and professionals of music department but will be considered a “must read” for architecture schools for the reasons stated in the following pages.
Iannis and Françoise came to UC San Diego at the Department of Music’s invitation for a 1990 festival in his honor.. While they were in Southern California, they visited the land that had been purchased in the Anza-Borrego Desert—a deeply ravined site on which to realize Xenakis’s design that he had offered to them during a dinner at their Paris Chaptal apartment in 1984.
After several representative chapters were drafted, they were submitted them to Routledge, who in turn sent them to the required external reviewers. A particularly thoughtful remark by one clinched the deal:
This is a very unique proposal of the highest quality on a topic that is greatly underdeveloped: the links between musical, architectural and literary creativity in Xenakis’s work. …Historical, musical, architectural, aesthetic and creative issues are all interwoven into a fascinating tale that unfolds along many dimensions from the intimately personal to the public, from the creative impulse to compositional/architectural realization, from direct quotes from the main characters to the personal reflections on their meaning and importance...
Purchase the book on Routledge.
UC San Diego Music Associate Professor Stephanie Richards will be featured at NYC's famed Winter Jazzfest in January 2022 with her band featuring Ravi Coltrane and San Diego local Joshua White.
The 2022 NYC Winter Jazzfest, celebrating the feel good, will take place for 10 days from January 13-22 with over 500+ musicians performing at 12 different venues.
Composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Anahita Abbasi will be featured in Rooted in Iran at the HilbertRaum in Berlin. The exhibition, curated by Ruth Wiesenfeld as part of her project TOWARDS SOUND, features sketches by fourteen Iranian composers associated with the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA) that will provide insight into their artistic practice.
The exhibition opens Friday, December 17, 2021 and will remain until January 9, 2022.
Pitchfork, December 17, 2021
"Untitled One" in UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt's collaborative album with Tyshawn Sorey was included in Pitchfork's "The Best Jazz and Experimental Music of 2021."
Matthew Strauss writes, “'Untitled One' ... is a hypnotic highwire act that careens towards improvisatory chaos yet ultimately keeps its balance."
The New York Times, December 15, 2021
Anna Thorvaldsdottir's, Ph.D. '11 "Enigma" performed by the Spektral Quartet was included in The New York Times' "The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2021" by Joshua Barone
"Listening to Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music, I often feel like I’m hearing the earth through a stethoscope. But her debut string quartet more resembles dispatches emerging from the white noise of another world. It’s a masterly entrance to the genre, and a deceptively vast soundscape conjured with just four acoustic instruments."
Works by composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Nathaniel Haering performed in Switzerland and Italy
Three pieces composed by UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Nathaniel Haering was featured in the Sonic Matter Festival in Zürich, Switzerland as part of the SONIC MATTER-Listening-Lounge in December 2021. (Learn more)
Haering's piece for voice and electronics, Medical Text p.57, was performed in Venice, Italy in the historical walls of the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello di Venezia having received an honorable mention in the CONFINI electroacoustic chamber music call for works. (Learn more)
Composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Anahita Abbasi was selected as one of 21 composers to receive the music composition fellowship from Civitella Ranieri for their 2022 & 2023 seasons.
Located in a 15th century castle in the Umbrian region of Italy, Civitella is a residency program for international writers, composers, and visual artists. Civitella Ranieri Fellowships are awarded through a careful nomination and jury process by a rotating group of distinguished artists, academics, and critics that ensures access to a highly diverse group of emerging and accomplished candidates from around the world.
Composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Anahita Abbasi receives the 2021 ASCAP Plus Award
Composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Anahita Abbasi received the ASCAP Plus Award of 2021 for the second time, first time in 2020, from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.
"THE ASCAP PLUS AWARDS" program recognizes writer members whose works are substantially performed in media not surveyed by ASCAP, or whose works have a unique prestige value for which adequate compensation would not otherwise be received. The awards are determined by an independent panel of distinguished music experts who are neither members nor employees or ASCAP. The Plus Awards are not a competition. The panel bases its decisions solely on the merit of the information provided in the application in the context of all others applying.
University of Canterbury, December 9, 2021
University of Canterbury Senior Lecturer in Music Performance, percussionist Dr Justin DeHart, D.M.A. ’10 rewarded a $74,000 grant by Creative New Zealand to commission five New Zealand composers to write new solo percussion works. One of the five commissioned composers include current UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Celeste Oram.
“I was drawn to these particular composers for their innovative approach to sound and I’m excited about how they might produce works that challenge me to find new capabilities as a percussionist,” DeHart says.
Learn more about the commission.
UC San Diego Professor of Music Lei Liang gave a lecture at the University of Minnesota Institute of Advanced Studies titled "Art and Science in the Age of Convergence."
Lei Liang discussed his most recent project, in which he collaborated with cultural heritage engineers, robotic engineers, data scientists, and software developers to explore the sonification of landscape paintings through a multimodal approach. This exploration led to creative efforts to preserve and reimagine our cultural and environmental heritage.
December 8, 2021
Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ph.D. '11 receives the award for Large Scale Composition with her piece CATAMORPHOSIS at The Ivor's Composer Award.
Learn more: Ivors Academy | Classical Music | OperaWire
Read her interview with Planet Hugill.
NPR, December 8, 2021
Tom Huizenga of NPR chose Anna Thorvaldsdottir's, Ph.D. '11 "Enigma" as one of "The Top 10 Classical Albums of 2021"
"Enigma is Thorvaldsdottir's first string quartet and it sounds unlike any other. As I noted in August when the album was released, describing the music is challenging: 'Imagine you're suspended in a primordial gas cloud where matter is transforming, regenerating, building toward the birth of a planet. Long arcs of shifting sound deliver melodies in slow motion, while the composer's extended techniques for the players can make a violin sound like a woodwind or a synthesizer. Percussive creaks and snaps collide with slippery glissandos that flash across the score like tails of cosmic particles in the black nothingness. The performance, by the Spektral Quartet, makes the music feel vast and intimate at once.'"
Articles by UC San Diego Music Alumni Tracy McMullen, Ph.D. '07, James Gordon Williams, Ph.D. '13, and Asher Tobin Chodos, Ph.D. '19 were published in Vol. 4, No. 2, 2021 edition of Jazz & Culture, "Jazz in the Present Tense".
Jazz Education after 2017: The Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice and the Pedagogical Lineage (pp. 27-55)
By Tracy McMullen
Black Birdanity (pp. 85-104)
By James Gordon Williams
Simultaneity, Synchrony, and Liveness: Jazz Confronts the Pandemic (pp. 121-133)
By Asher Tobin Chodos
The Arts Fuse Concert/Stream Review: A Far Cry’s “Emergence” — Typically Eclectic
The Arts Fuse, December 1, 2021
Jonathan Blumhofer of The Arts Fuse reviews chamber orchestra A Far Cry's concert "Emergence" that was originally presented live on November 5 at New England Conservatory's Jordan Hall and now available to stream through December 19th on the ensemble's website.
The concert began with composer and UC San Diego Professor of Music Lei Liang's "Verge" (for 18 solo strings) that was originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic.
"Liang’s Verge is the concert’s breathtaking opener. Written around the time of the birth of the composer’s son, Albert, in 2009, the piece is at once a tribute to the newborn — there’s a heartbeat motive as well as a melodic line based on a musical transcription of his name — as well as a fascinating study in contemporary string techniques."
Justin DeHart, D.M.A. ’10 was named as a Te Kaipuoro Inamata Toa | Best Classical Artist finalist in the 2021 Aotearoa Music Awards for his album Landfall: NZ Percussion Volume 1.
November 2021
Composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. Candidate Sang Song announced as one of fourteen composers selected to receive 2021 Fromm commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University.
The Fromm is one of the most prestigious commission programs in the U.S., and its previous winners include UC San Diego faculty members Roger Reynolds, Chinary Ung, Rand Steiger, Lei Liang and Marcos Balter.
Each Fromm Commission recipient is awarded $12,000 for the creation of a new work and the group performing the premiere of the commissioned work is entitled to receive up to $4,000. Sang's new work (tentatively entitled Collyers' Mansion) will be premiered by Argento Chamber Ensemble in New York City during one of their future concert seasons.
Carnegie Hall announces the lineup for their Afrofuturism Festival in February 2022
Tickets are now on sale for Carnegie Hall's Afrofuturism Festival taking place from February-March 2022. UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt served on the curatorial council for this festival along with Louis Chude-Sokei, Reynaldo Anderson, Sheree Renée Thomas, and Ytasha L. Womack.
Explore Afrofuturism’s boundless sonic essence in concerts that feature Flying Lotus, Sun Ra Arkestra with Kelsey Lu and Moor Mother, Nicole Mitchell and Angel Bat Dawid, Chimurenga Renaissance and Fatoumata Diawara, Carl Craig Synthesizer Ensemble, and Theo Croker.
The New York Times, November 23, 2021
Pianist Stewart Goodyear's album Phoenix, featuring "Middle Passage" composed by UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Anthony Davis, included in The New York Times' "5 Classical Music Albums to Hear Right Now."
"When approaching Davis’s 'Middle Passage' — after the poem of the same name by Robert Hayden — he handles the more improvisatory sections with a pugilistic force indebted to Davis’s own 1980s reading on the Gramavision label. But Goodyear also treats Davis with a meditative touch that calls to mind the lush rendition of 'Middle Passage' recorded by Ursula Oppens, who commissioned the piece."
The San Diego Union-Tribune, November 21, 2021
Christian Hertzog of The San Diego Union-Tribune reviews percussionist and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Steven Schick's performance at the final concert of Bonnie Wright's Fresh Sound series. The evening's program included a piece titled "Here And There" by composer Roger Reynolds.
"You’ll find no more persuasive interpreter for the combination of spoken words and music than Schick. Playing percussion is inherently theatrical, and Schick is one of the greats. He is also a fine actor with a good rapport with audiences."
UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Chinary Ung will be a Keynote Speaker for the Asia-Pacific Society for Ethnomusicology (APSE) 2021 Online Conference: "Integrities and Identities of Asia-Pacific Traditional Expressive Cultures".
This year's APSE Conference will be held online, each Saturday of November 2021. The conference will address current issues covering topics such as: identity and meaning, performance, creation, research, production and re- re/ production, popular and commercial media, boundaries (geographic, cultural, social, economic), resilience (strategic practices of indigenous communities for survival, adaptation, fusion, etc.), gender, fluidity of identity, and pedagogy and transmission.
Learn more about the APSE Conference.
November 19, 2021
Composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Nasim Khorassani's piece Unknown (2018), performed by UC San Diego Music graduate students Teresa Diaz de Cossio (bass flute), David Aguila (trumpet), and Ilana Waniuk (violin), was published through Score Follower.
Music by Composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Anahita Abbasi performed by Guerilla Opera
November 17, 2021
Distorted Attitudes III / Scattered composed by UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Anahita Abbasi was performed by Guerilla Opera as a part of their concert titled FRACTURED at the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts.
UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Mark Dresser performs in Europe with Trio M
UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Mark Dresser performed in Europe with Trio M, featuring pianist and UC Berkeley Professor Myra Melford, and celebrated drummer Matt Wilson. They performed in Munich, Geneva, Bologna, San Sebastian, and London from November 13-20.
Check out some photos from the Bologna Jazz Festival.
UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Steven Schick, graduate student Yongyun Zhang, and alumni Christopher Clarino, D.M.A. ’19 performed at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Indianapolis this Thursday, November 11.
Schick performed Here and There by Roger Reynolds, Zhang performed November Moon 辜月 by Rachel C. Walker, and Clarino performed VEDITZ by Larry Polansky as a part of the New Music/Research Presents session.
The University of London, Centre of Taiwan Studies, hosted a book launch event for UC San Diego Professor of Music Nancy Guy’s recently published edited volume, Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island
November 12, 2021
The University of London, Centre of Taiwan Studies, hosted a book launch event for UC San Diego Professor of Music Nancy Guy’s recently published edited volume, Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island.
Speakers of the event included Nancy Guy, Meredith Schweig, and Jennifer C. Hsieh.
Jazz Weekly Review: KaiBorg + Kjell Nordeson: IntraAction
Jazz Weekly, November 11, 2021
George W. Harris of Jazz Weekly reviews IntraAction, an album by UC San Diego Professor of Music David Borgo, Jeff Kaiser, and Kjell Nordeson.
Borgo plays "a National Geographic collection of woodwinds" and there are more "electronic noodles...than a soup kitchen in Little Tokyo.”
Anna Thorvaldsdottir's, Ph.D. '11 nominated for this year's Ivors Composer Awards
Classical Music, November 10, 2021
Anna Thorvaldsdottir's, Ph.D. '11 composition Catamorphosis was nominated for this year's Ivors Composer Awards, celebrating the best new works in classical music, jazz and sound art. Her work was nominated in the Large Scale Composition for orchestra category.
November 7, 2021
Synchromy presents the world premiere of Daniel Corral’s 5 for 40 on Sunday, November 7. Picnic in a hidden park while enjoying a brand new sound.
Program Note:
Serene and poignant, Daniel Corral’s 5 for 40 creates a soundscape for our disquieted times using repurposed organ pipes. From a church decades-since demolished, these pipes have been retrofitted to be human-powered, changing the nature and source of their sound. Synchromy has set 5 for 40 amongst the Tabebuia trees of a quiet terraced garden.
KPBS, November 4, 2021
‘Sacred Sea: Zephyr’ by UC San Diego Music Associate Professor Stephanie Richards is included in KPBS’s “5 songs to discover in San Diego in November."
"Richards' trumpet performance is wild in and of itself — the UC San Diego professor of music is known for her experimental sound and complex, brainy composition — but some of these tracks have a moody restraint. It feels no less wild, just maybe enshrouded in misty fog or a blanket of night."
UC San Diego Professor of Music Lei Liang's piece "A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams" was featured in the "Music 4 Climate Justice" program at the COP-26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland. They also interviewed Liang about his work responding to climate change, and the critical role that music can play in today's collaboration between arts and sciences.
Learn more about Music 4 Climate Justice.
UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt was featured on Sono's Radio's Black is Black show hosted by DJ Lindsey in an episode focused on Afrofuturism. They discuss Afrofuturism’s risk of commodification and how it will always remain a force for cross-cultural connection, before curating a mix showcasing tracks from across the Diaspora that represent its intersections with technology.
Listen to the episode on Mixcloud.
October 2021
Downbeat Review: Steph Richards Zephyr
Downbeat, October 2021
Daniel Margolis of Downbeat reviews UC San Diego Associate Professor of Music Stephanie Richards's latest album Zephyr.
"Richards may have sought to avoid letting her gender be the focus of how her music is seen and considered, but, in steering into it as a result of her at-the-time unborn daughter, she arrived at an approach, and an album, so strong and innovative that the end results settle any question."
Works by UC San Diego Professor of Music Marcos Balter performed at the Ear Taxi Festival, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's New Milestones concert series, and the Phillips Collection
On October 4th, UC San Diego Professor of Music Marcos Balter's "Meltdown Upshot" was performed by the Northwestern University New Music Ensemble, with conductor Alan Pierson at Chicago's Ear Taxi Festival. (Learn more and watch the livestream)
On October 28th, Balter's "delete/control/option" was performed at the inaugural concert of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's new series "New Milestones." (Learn more and watch the livestream)
On December 5th, Harpist Parker Ramsay will perform the World Premiere of a new work by Balter that was commissioned by the Miller Theatre at Columbia University titled "Omolu" at the Phillips Collection. (Learn more and buy tickets)
Composer Roger Reynolds featured in the OffBeat Festival in Copenhagen
Offbeat, October 27-30, 2021
Composer Roger Reynolds will be featured in the OffBeat Festival taking place in Cophenhagen from October 27-30. The festival is organized by percussionist and conductor Mathias Reumert, M.A. ’05.
Reynolds is the primary guest of the festival and 6 of his compositions will be performed. Compositions include The Promises of Darkness, Positings, Dionysus, VOICESPACE III: Eclipse, Watershed V, and a selection of Piano Etudes.
The event will be broadcasted nationally by Danish Radio and attended by the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark.
On Thursday, October 28, Reynolds will also do a short residency at the Royal Danish Academy of Music that includes master classes for students and a lecture that will begin with the showing of FOR A REASON, a documentary by Kyle Johnson, Ph.D. ‘20 that explores Reynolds’s life as a contemporary composer, his thoughts about music, and his interactions with various performers including UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Steven Schick.
Learn more about the OffBeat Festival.
Boston Globe, October 28, 2021'
The Life and Times of Malcom X' by Pulitzer Prize winning Composer and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Anthony Davis is going to New England for the first time as a part of Boston Modern Orchestra Project's new multiyear initiative with Odyssey Opera titled "As Told By: History, Race and Justice on the Opera Stage." "X" is scheduled for June 17, 2022 at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester.
October 28, 2021
Pulitzer Prize winning Composer and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Anthony Davis will be giving a lecture titled “Black lives in the operas of Anthony Davis” for the “Poetics and Politics of Twenty-First Century Music” online lecture series organized by the University of Bern, McGill University and Université de Montréal on Thursday, October 28.
Learn more about the lecture series.
UC San Diego Music Integrative Studies graduate student AM Medina’s project “Listening to the Internet: Cultural Discourses, Vicente Fernández, and Hearing YouTube Comments” was published in the Sonic Scope: New Approaches to Audiovisual Culture journal!
Abstract:
In the digital age, the possibility for interlocutors to engage with one another across time and space has increased dramatically. My project focuses on public discourse, specifically YouTube comments, surrounding the music video for Vicente Fernández’s song “Por Tu Maldito Amor.” The comments (along with thinking about YouTube in general) add to and complicate Christopher Small’s conceptualisation of musicking in that they exist beyond their direct involvement in the musical process; they serve no necessary part in the composition, distribution, or formal critique of Fernández’s musicking and yet provide context for critical engagement. Part of this project explores the unique characteristics and complications that come with listening to the internet and engaging with it as a site (literally as a website and metaphorically as a place of interaction) of cultural discourse. I employ the term performance-politics to show how in the discursive and digital interactions of social media, there is a unique structure of cultural politics in action that circulates discourses of nationalism and masculinity between the music video and the comment section. While this project is situated around a music video by the famous ranchera singer, I am more interested in the quotidian interactions in the comment section and the scholarly potential of thinking about listening to the internet. I use music as a point of departure more than an object of analysis, as a way to understand how people interact and engage in cultural politics. I focus on the comments on Fernández’ music video to be able to center the agents who make his music culture.
Bassist and UC San Diego Music D.M.A. candidate Kathryn Schulmeister was selected as one of the 2021-2022 fellows for the UC San Diego Arts and Community Engagement initiative.
About her project:
Inspired by the San Diego Coastkeeper Six Cleanup Challenge, Kathryn will compose for and create "Sounds for Sustainability: A Live Creation Series" that will feature public, musical events in six different coastal, inland and urban environments in San Diego County. All live creation events will involve a neighborhood cleanup, removing litter and debris from the site and creating music out of the trash that undoubtedly takes a toll on the city and its natural habitats.
I Care If You Listen: 5 Questions to Tina Tallon, Ph.D. '20 (creative technologist, sound artist)
I Care If You Listen, October 25, 2021
I Care If You Listen interviews Tina Tallon, Ph.D. '20 about her plans in Rome, how digital hybridity may change live performance, how she became interested in research about gendered voices and technological bias, her relationship with music growing up, and the impact the pandemic has made and will make on the live performance experience.
Read the I Care If You Listen interview.
Review: Steph Richards & Joshua White - Zephyr (Relative Pitch, 2021) ****½
The Free Jazz Collective, October 24, 2021
Stef Gijssels of The Free Jazz Collective reviews UC San Diego Associate Professor of Music Stephanie Richards's latest album Zephyr.
"Richards surprised us with all her albums so far. It is really a treat that she keeps pushing the boundaries of her art, demonstrating incredible skills on her horn that are equalled by her creativity and sense of perfection."
An audiovisual collaboration between UC San Diego Music doctoral candidates Nasim Khorassani and Berk Schneider titled, “He merely told…” was presented at the Tehran Contemporary Sounds Festival in Berlin on October 22-24 as a part of IFCA (Iranian Female Composers Association)
The Buddy System Label, October 21, 2021
Synthesist, producer and UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt releases new collaborative album with dummer and composer Tyshawn Sorey.
This album was recorded in the UC San Diego Music studios right before the world went into lockdown in 2019. With no rehearsals, direction or plan, armed with drums & synths, these two did what they do best and created a sonic documentation of fearless exploration into polyrhythmic time travel. They were channeling and conjuring sounds from an alternate universe, releasing whatever emotions were in the moment. They were focused on the journey leaving the destination in the listener’s mind.
Produced & Written by: King Britt & Tyshawn Sorey
Mixed by: Andrew Munsey
Artwork by: UC San Diego Alumni Esther Wang
UC San Diego Professor of Music David Borgo spotlighted in the San Diego Reader and The San Diego Union-Tribune
The San Diego Reader writes, "Saxophonist, educator, ethnomusicologist, and [UC San Diego] professor David Borgo is an internationally acclaimed saxophonist who can tear it up on tenor, soprano, and a slew of instruments from all over the globe. He is conversant in a wide variety of styles, but he is exceptionally adept at free improvisation." (Read the San Diego Reader article)
David L. Coddon of The San Diego Union-Tribune tuned-in to Borgo's livestreamed WEDS@7 concert and said, "The choice piece in the suite was 'Chrysalism,' which a livestream caption rightfully likened to the feeling of being wrapped in a blanket.... There was no audience in the theater, but this cohesive show definitely didn’t sound like a rehearsal." (Read The San Diego Union-Tribune article)
88.3 fm WBGO.org, October 13, 2021
The Checkout interviews UC San Diego Associate Professor of Music Stephanie Richards about her groundbreaking album Supersense, the jazz world's first scratch-and-sniff listening experience, and her latest release Zephyr in collaboration with pianist Joshua White.
Modulisme, October 13, 2021
Modulisme interviews UC San Diego Music Associate Teaching Professor Tom Erbe and Make Noise founder Tony Rolando for their “Inventors Talking About Their Instruments Or Modules (I.T.A.T.I.O.M.)” series.
UC San Diego Music Graduate Student Sergey Kasich's spatial sound installation exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
UC San Diego Music Graduate Student Sergey Kasich's spatial sound installation "fFlower" was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on October 2.
fFlower is a new interface that features the FingerRing (FrR), a simple, cheap, intuitive and easy way to play with electronically mediated multi-channel sound, published by Kasich in 2016.
fFlower is one of many possible interfaces in which the fingerRing technique can be implemented. It uses spline exponential curved contact surfaces to connect natural kinematics of a performer with the spatial sound distribution.
The installation was produced by Harvestworks Center for Digital Media Arts and supported by The New York Public Library for Performing Arts. The production of this show was possible thanks to the essential help of Carol Parkinson and Seth Cluett.
Learn more about the installation.
Learn more about FingerRing (FrR).
Schott EAM, October 1, 2021
On October 23, the East Carolina University (ECU) Symphonic Wind Ensemble and vocalists, under the direction of Dr. William Staub performed the world premiere of Lei Liang's Close your eyes, a work for soprano and alto voices and mixed ensemble.
Lei Liang notes:
"Close your eyes explores the idea of “the living score” in which the notation serves as a reference for possible interpretation and a point of departure. After the notation is internalized through rehearsals and group discussions, the piece is to be performed at least twice, first from the score, second from memory with changes made to the notated version.
The piece Close your eyes is named after a phrase my then 5-year-old son Albert said, before he handed me a surprise present. It evokes a condition of aural communication – a world illuminated by sounds."
"Machine Improvisation in Music: Information-Theoretical Approach" by UC San Diego Professor of Music Shlomo Dubnov introduces the methods and techniques of machine improvisation based on information-theoretical modeling of music, starting from the first 1998 universal classification modeling of music as an information source, style mixing using joint information source, variable-length motif dictionary improvisation based on universal prediction, and use of information dynamics for symbolic approximation in the factor oracle machine improvisation algorithm. Later developments include query-guided machine improvisation, free-energy modeling of music cognition, and reformulating of variational generative neural music models in terms of rate-distortion theory. This information-theoretical framework offers a novel view of man–machine creative music interaction as a communication problem between an artificial agent and a musician, seeking optimal trade-off between novelty and stylistic imitation under scarcity constraints.
UC San Diego Music Faculty Mark Dresser and King Britt performed in the Other Minds Festival 25
UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Mark Dresser performed in the Other Minds Festival 25 on Thursday, October 14. (Watch the stream)
UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt performed with Tyshawn Sorey in the Other Minds Festival 25 on Friday, October 15. (Watch the stream)
UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Celeste Oram composes a new piece for the Royal Danish Theatre
UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Celeste Oram composes a new piece titled Pierre for the Royal Danish Theatre's Giant Steps contemporary dance event featuring dancers from the Royal Danish Ballet and Corpus, the theatre's experimental dance company. Giant Steps is dedicated to three of the most innovative choreographers - three women who have all made their work within contemporary dance, enriching it with unique step design.
Choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith will be choreographing a piece to Oram's composition Pierre for Corpus.
UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Jacob Sundstrom's article on spatial sound presented at I3DA
UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Jacob Sundstrom's article on spatial sound titled "Speaker Placement Agnosticism: Improving the Distance-based Amplitude Panning Algorithm" was presented at I3DA in September and is now pre-print at arXiv.
About:
Lossius et. al introduced the distance-based amplitude panning algorithm, or DBAP, to enable flexibility of loudspeaker placement in artistic and scientific contexts. The algorithm allows for arbitrary loudspeaker locations in a 2D plane so that a virtual sound source may navigate the 2D space. The gains for each speaker are calculated as a function of the source's distance to each loudspeaker, thus creating a sound field. This gives the listener the impression of a source moving through the field of loudspeakers. This paper introduces a heuristically developed robust variation of DBAP that corrects for faulty assumptions in the implementation of Lossius. Specifically, this paper develops a method for working with sound sources outside the field of loudspeakers in which the Lossius version produces distorted aural impressions and wildly undulating amplitudes caused by spatial discontinuities in the gains of the various loudspeakers. In smoothing the spatial impression of the virtual source, we are also able to eliminate the calculation of the convex hull entirely, a necessary component of the original implementation. This significantly simplifies and reduces the calculations required for any space in either two or three dimensions.
Music by Composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. candidate Anahita Abbasi performed in various cities around the World
On September 1, Olivia del Prato performed Anahita Abbasi's "Situation IV - Io E iO" for solo violin at the International Academy of Contemporary Music for Ensembles and Composers in Croatia. (Watch the concert)
On September 17, Mahan Esfahani performed Abbasi's "Intertwined Distances" for solo harpsichord and electronics at the Frederiksberg Festspil in Copenhagen. (Learn more)
On October 11, The Ensemble for New Music Tallinn performs Abbasi's "Faab IV (A femme fatale)" at the MusicOlomouc festival in the Czech Republic. The MusikOlomouc festival takes place for the 13th time and this time the main part of the festival's program is dedicated to the music of female composers. (Learn more)
On October 14, Noise à Noise interviewed Abbasi for their Noise conference podcast series in Farsi. (Listen to the podcast)
The world premiere of Abbasi's "Paradigm" (for bass clarinet and voice) was presented at Regarding Festival’s A Message from Gaia event on October 21-23 in different locations across Tel Aviv and Old Jaffa. (Learn more)
September 2021
UC San Diego News Center, September 30, 2021
UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt addresses UC San Diego students at the 2021 New Student Convocation.
"During his keynote, Britt shared his sentiments on the importance of balance. As students begin their college experience—often with a mix of excitement, nervousness and curiosity—he reminded them to take time for themselves and bask in the joy of this journey. Britt also recommended that students try new things they never thought they could do, as it might become something they excel at and enjoy. He emphasized, 'right now, the opportunity is in your hands to shine.'"
Read the UC San Diego News Center article.
Check out King Britt's Convocation playlist.
Kamau Kenyatta YouTube, September 24, 2021
The Kris Johnson Big Band releases their performance video of "December In Monterey" composed by UC San Diego Music Teaching Professor Kamau Kenyatta. This composition was originally performed in quintet format for A Night of Jazz and Dance in 2018 with the San Diego Ballet. Kris Johnson has once again used his masterful arranging gifts to create a compelling version of this piece for large ensemble.
Sequenza 21, September 23, 2021
Sequenza 21 chooses the Spektral Quartet's performance of Anna Thorvaldsdottir's, Ph.D. '11 Enigma as their first Best of 2021 pick, saying that "The Spektral Quartet performs both the micro and macro levels of the piece with an admirable sense of pacing and keen attention to detail."
KPBS, September 22, 2021
KPBS interviews Martin Luther King Jr. Community Choir San Diego Founder and UC San Diego Music Faculty Ken Anderson for their last installment of the KPBS Summer Music Series focused on the world of gospel music and the history of African American spirituals, and the way it's seeded in popular American music.
Read/Listen/Watch the KPBS interview.
DJ Mag, September 21, 2021
UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt revealed the list of upcoming guests for his Blacktronika: Afrofuturism In Electronic Music course. He will be joined by Flying Lotus, Theo Parrish, Amp Fiddler, Ron Trent, Masters At Work, Mad Professor, Elsa M'Bala, Computer Jay, Colloboh, Dave Davis and Yaw Evans.
The music-focused course, which is available to all UC San Diego students, looks at "the lineage of many of the groundbreaking Black, electronic artists who have been integral but overlooked in the development and commodification of house, techno, drum & bass and experimental music," says King Britt.
Related: Resident Advisor
Jazzwise, September 21, 2021
UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt's collaboration with Tyshawn Sorey will be premiering at Other Minds Festival 25: Moment's Notice on October 15, 2021.
The festival will take place in person at the Dianne and Tad Taube Atrium Theater in San Francisco, CA and livestreamed online.
Learn more and purchase tickets.
Related: Jazzwise
Bedroom Beethovens, September 21, 2021
Bedroom Beethovens podcast interviews UC San Diego Undergraduate Music Student Timothy “Ill Poetic” Gmeiner "about his life and times in music, which include his latest, where we see Ill Po use as versatile a palette as ever to articulate these deeper nuances in a record that reflects explorations of hip-hop, jazz, fusion, 70s electronic music and film scores."
The San Diego Union-Tribune, September 19, 2021
UC San Diego Music faculty Anthony Davis and Ken Anderson, and alumni Jonathan Nussman, D.M.A. '20, Brendan Nguyen, D.M.A. '15, and Leslie Ann Leytham, D.M.A. ’15 will be performing in Bodhi Tree Concerts' 10th Anniversary Concert on Saturday, September 25th.
Read The San Diego Union-Tribune article.
September 17, 2021
UC San Diego Music D.M.A. candidate Kathryn Schulmeister, and Matt Kline, D.M.A. '21 performed in the Ojai Music Festival conducted by John Adams on Friday, September 17.
Watch the performance on the Ojai Music Festival website.
The New York Times, September 16, 2021
The Metropolitan Opera to present Pulitzer Prize winning composer and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Anthony Davis' “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X" in their 2023-24 season. This will be the Metropolitan Opera's second time presenting a work by a Black composer, just two years after its first, since the company began in 1883.
“Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz) is an even more relevant figure today,” Davis said in a statement. “His vision is as prescient today as it was in 1986. He is an inspiration for Black Lives Matter and the movement for social justice. As a composer, I am thrilled to help create ‘X’ as an opera for today that speaks to the future as well as the past.”
Read The New York Times article.
Related: Associated Press | OperaWire | Playbill | The San Diego Union Tribune | Billboard
Steph Richards with Joshua White, “Zephyr” (2021): Something Else! video premiere
Something Else!, September 15, 2021
The video of trumpeter and UC San Diego Associate Professor of Music Stephanie Richards' "Zephyr," the opening track for Richards' upcoming album of the same name, created by Vipal Monga is now available for viewing on Youtube!"Steph Richards is an exceptional trumpet player who belongs in a rare company of trumpeters like Wadada Leo Smith and Lina Allemano who have a vision that goes way beyond what’s been done and reaches out toward what can be made possible."
Zephyr will be released on October 15, 2021 from Relative Pitch Records.
Read the Something Else! review.
Review: Anthony Davis’ ‘Restless Mourning’ boldly ventures where other composers fear to go
Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2021
Mark Swed of The Los Angeles Times reviews Anthony Davis' "Restless Mourning," performed at the Santa Monica new music series Jacaranda's 9/11 tribute concert.
"Davis’ harmonic vocabulary is elaborate, unpredictable, his own. Instrumental colors, bright or dim, are made of many hues. There are electronics used for their mystery-making. The vocal writing can be declarative and songful at the same time. Solo singers and grouped voices do not dramatize text but rather take it to other realms. Davis ends not somberly but with the glorious hope that mingled ghosts might illuminate the skies in a manner far different than what the terrorists produced. Blue has become, once more, cerulean."
Read The Los Angeles Times review.
Related: San Francisco Classical Voice | Violinist
Broadway World, September 14, 2021
Alice Teyssier, D.M.A. '17 along with Olivia De Prato, Zosha Di Castri, and Allison Loggins-Hull launch Matricalis, a project and community hub that reflects on the impact of motherhood on individual musicians. Through podcast episodes, collaborative pieces, and open discussions, Matricalis seeks to tackle one of the final “taboos” in the professional music world. Matricalis hope to openly explore the transformative nature of becoming a mother as an artist, considering both the logistical challenges, as well as the profound ways creativity can change, encouraging us towards new ways of thinking and doing.
Read the Broadway World Article.
The Creative Independent, September 13, 2021
UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt discusses building and maintaining a community everywhere you go, teaching as a way of learning, and finding and keeping a rhythm for your creative work with The Creative Independent.
Read The Creative Independent interview.
Fall arts preview 2021: Musician David Borgo on how ‘music always touches us’
The San Diego Union-Tribune, September 12, 2021
George Varga of The San Diego Union-Tribune interviews UC San Diego Professor of Music David Borgo about his 12th album "Suite of Uncommon Sorrows" that is inspired by COVID and Black Lives Matter. A majority of the 11 compositions are named after words from John Koenig's “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” that Borgo found while googling for a word to describe the emotions he felt driving by the empty University Towne Center when the stay-at-home order first came out.
'the finely wrought work on “Suite of Uncommon Sorrows” is deeper and more nuanced. What results is thoughtful, melodically inviting music that is rich in atmosphere, texture and expressiveness. “Music gets directly to our emotions,” Borgo said. “I’m proud that the emotions explored on this album are not the most obvious ones people experience, such as anger, frustration and sadness.”'
Saxophonist David Borgo, guitarist Peter Sprague, pianist Tobin Chodos, Ph.D. '19, bassist Mackenzie Leighton and drummer Mark Ferber will be performing the album live on Wednesday, October 6th. Due to the pandemic, the performance will be livestreamed online without an in-person audience.
Watch the livestream at music.ucsd.edu/livestream.
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May 06, 2022
WEDS@7 presents Mark Dresser - In the Shadow of a Mad King - An Evening of Solos and Duets, live and virtual - May 11 at 7:00 p.m.WEDS@7 presents Mark Dresser - In the Shadow of a Mad King - An Evening of Solos and Duets, live and virtual, featuring Jerome Rothenberg, Matthias Ziegler, and Michael Dessen
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May 03, 2022
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April 27, 2022
Soprano Susan Narucki and violinist Curtis Macomber presents György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments - Monday, May 2 at 7:00 p.m.Soprano Susan Narucki and violinist Curtis Macomber presents György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments on Monday, May 2nd at 7:00 p.m. in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall.
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April 13, 2022
Pianist Aleck Karis plays Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata in a live concert on Wednesday, April 13thPianist Aleck Karis plays Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata in a live concert on Wednesday, April 13th at 7:00 p.m. in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall.
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April 06, 2022
Miranda Cuckson, violin, and Rand Steiger, electronics - Monday, April 11th at 7:00 p.m.Miranda Cuckson, violin, and Rand Steiger, electronics to perform on Monday, April 11th at 7:00 p.m. in the Conrad Prebys Music Center Experimental Theater.
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February 24, 2022
WEDS@7 presents Susan Narucki, soprano and Donald Berman, piano - March 2 at 7:00 p.m.WEDS@7 presents Susan Narucki, soprano and Donald Berman, piano on March 2 at 7:00 p.m. in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall.
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November 30, 2021
In the News: UC San Diego MusicThe latest news featuring UC San Diego Department of Music faculty, students, and alumni.
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November 29, 2021
This Week at UC San Diego Music: November 29 - December 5, 2021Check out events happening this week at UC San Diego Music: November 29 - December 5, 2021
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November 22, 2021
This Week at UC San Diego Music: November 22 - 28, 2021Check out events happening this week at UC San Diego Music: November 22 - 28, 2021
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November 15, 2021
This Week at UC San Diego Music: November 15 - 21, 2021Check out events happening this week at UC San Diego Music: November 15 - 21, 2021
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November 12, 2021
WEDS@7 presents An Evening of Indian Classical Music with World Renowned Sitar Virtuoso Pandit Kartik Seshadri on November 17Wednesdays@7 presents An Evening of Indian Classical Music with World Renowned Sitar Virtuoso Pandit Kartik Seshadri on November 17. Watch Livestream at music.ucsd.edu/live
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November 09, 2021
This Week at UC San Diego Music: November 9 - 14, 2021Check out events happening this week at UC San Diego Music: November 9-14, 2021
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November 05, 2021
Watch the red fish blue fish Concert LIVE: Saturday, November 6th at 5PM!The red fish blue fish ensemble featuring Mitchell Carlstrom, Michael Jones, Kosuke Matsuda, Roberto Maqueda, Steven Schick and Yongyun Zhang will be performing live on Saturday, November 6th at 5PM. Watch at music.ucsd.edu/live
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November 03, 2021
Watch the Jury Concert featuring the Palimpsest Ensemble LIVE: Thursday, November 4th at 5PM!Tune-in to the livestream of the Jury Concert featuring the Palimpsest Ensemble on Thursday, November 4th at music.ucsd.edu/live.
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November 01, 2021
The *NEW High Note NewsletterA message from Advising for Fall 2021 Week 6
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October 27, 2021
In the News: UC San Diego MusicThe latest news featuring UC San Diego Department of Music faculty, students, and alumni.
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October 21, 2021
Tune-in to a free online viewing of Camera Lucida on Monday, October 25 at 7:30PM!camera lucida featuring Charles Curtis, Anthony Burr, Jeff Thayer and Reiko Uchida will be performing works by Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven.
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October 04, 2021
Correction: WEDS@7 concert series kicks off with Professor David Borgo on October 6!Saxophonist and Professor of Music David Borgo will perform his new album "Suite of Uncommon Sorrows" this Wednesday, October 6th. Tune-in at music.ucsd.edu/live
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September 20, 2021
In the News: UC San Diego MusicThe latest news featuring UC San Diego Department of Music faculty, students, and alumni.
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September 13, 2021
Meet the Incoming 2021 UC San Diego Music Graduate StudentsLearn more about the 2021 incoming UC San Diego Music graduate students and upcoming Welcome Week events.
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