– Course of 2019

– Carmine Cella

– Graduate Educatee Notes from the Field

– In The News

Music Honors Class of Thirty-five Graduates in 2019 Commencement

Congrats to the class of 2019!

Rachel Colwell, Graduate Educatee Speaker

Xxx-five students were recognized as graduates of the UC Berkeley Section of Music class of 2019 on Dominicus, May 19 in Berkeley, CA. Commencement ceremonies took place in Hertz Hall on the UC Berkeley campus and recognized iv Ph.D, v M.A., and 20-six undergraduate degree recipients.  In the keynote speech, Professor and Chair Cindy Cox noted "I speak for the entire faculty when I say that we are genuinely proud of our students and their accomplishments. It is rewarding to sentinel students mature into performers, scholars, and composers over the course of their studies with u.s.. We all proceeds from the music they make, the exchange of ideas, and the fresh perspectives they bring."

26, 5, and 4: Number of Undergraduate, Masters of Art, and Doctoral degrees conferred.

37%: Percentage of Undergraduates who graduated with a second major other than Music. Majors paired with Music included Molecular and Cell Biological science, Political Science, Electric Engineering and Informatics (EECS), Practical Mathematics, Statistics, Neurobiology, and Business organisation Administration.

xviii students plan on continuing their education or careers in music all across the world. Professions and emphases include ethnomusicology, song operation, education, composition, and music therapy. Other grads will move on to careers in engineering, computer sciences, and medicine.

Destinations amidst graduates include Grinnell College in Iowa, YouTube in San Bruno, Castro Valley Unified Schoolhouse District, and our love UC Berkeley.

21: Undergraduate students who are California natives and stayed in-land to earn their caste.

24: Students who were recognized by department faculty, instructors, and peers for special awards and prizes.

PRIZES & AWARDS

Outstanding Graduate Educatee Instructors
Parkorn Wanpaiboonkit
Antonio Juan Marcos Cavazos
Rebecca Lomnicky

Nicholas C. Christofilos, Jr.Memorial Prize
Jon Turner
Rebecca Lomnicky

The Eisner Prize in Music
Maija Hynninen
Bethany Lee
Rebecca Lomnicky
Andrew Chao Han Chen
Zachary Thomas Elsasser

The David & Diana Menn Memorial Prize in the Performing Arts
Ann Deng
Grady Lai

Departmental Citation & Matthew William Fisher Memorial Accolade in Music
Mariah Ronningen

The Nicola DeLorenzo Prize in Music Composition
Selim Göncü
Maija Hynninen
Clara Olivares
James Stone
Jeremy Wexler

Austin F. Williams Prize in Piano Performance
Andrew Chao Han Chen

George Ladd Prix de Paris
Oren Boneh

Mary Nuñes Souza Prize
Amy Hong Liu

Bernece B. Lyon Memorial Prize
Kimberly Kang

Musical Theater Prize
Trevor Van De Velde

The Apgar Accolade
Alessandra Jones

Carmine Cella, Composer and Scholar of Music and Applied Mathematics Joins UC Berkeley Music Department

Where does musical noesis, signal processing, and artificial intelligence intersect?

Blood-red Cella

Information technology'southward an ambitious question, and new UC Berkeley Music Banana Professor Scarlet Emanuele Cella's research is at the centre of it. Cella joined the Section for the spring 2019 term, and is also working closely with the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT).

"I have been very excited in accepting the position of Banana Professor of Music Technology in the Department of Music at University of California – Berkeley," said Cella. "This position is extremely interesting for me: my commitment to education, my transversal vision spanning from mathematics to musical composition and my interdisciplinary inquiry background fit perfectly with CNMAT and I am honoured to collaborate with the faculty to expand its potential and to produce tools and algorithms freely available for the customs."

A native of Italia, Cella is both a researcher of applied mathematics equally well as a composer. Born with a curious ear, Cella wrote his first limerick at age half-dozen. The slice was made in 4/4 time, but contained rhythm for 5/four. Puzzled past why this could not be done, he developed his first plan on a Commodore 64 to generate all subdivisions of iv/4 in odd values. Cella was only 7 years old.

"More than thirty years later, I still compose music and write programs for information technology," noted Cella. "In other words, my whole life has been near music and how to utilise science to empathise information technology better."

Cella studied at the Conservatory of Music K. Rossini in Italian republic, receiving his master's degrees in piano, computer music, and limerick. He earned his PhD in musical limerick at the Accademia di South. Cecilia in Rome. He too studied philosophy and mathematics and earned his PhD in mathematical logic at the University of Bologna, with a thesis titled "On Symbolic Representations of Music." Cella served as composer in residence and held a inquiry position at Paris' famed Plant for Enquiry and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) from 2007-2008. He has equanimous numerous pieces including Gia' southward'ottenebra il giorno for orchestra and was deputed by IRCAM for a new work by the Orchestre Philarmonique de Radio France that premiered in June 2013 in Salle Pleyel. In 2015-2016, he conducted research in practical mathematics at École Normale Supérieure de Paris. In 2016, he served in residence at the American Academy in Rome, where he worked on his opera Pane, auction sabbia, that premiered in June 2017 at the National Opera of Kiev.

It is fitting that Cella would end up in Berkeley. Much of the research around the relations between music, science and cognition was pioneered by David Wessel (1942-2014), who taught at Cal for over 20 years and helped found CNMAT. "He has been a pioneer. The transversal approach of my research, moreover, resonates with Professor Wessel'due south legacy," said Cella.

Notes from the Field: Agreement Feminist Music and Organizing in Santiago, Chile

Christina Azahar
Ph.D. Candidate, Ethnomusicology

Christina Azahar

Since January 2018, I have been in Santiago, Chile on a Fulbright U.s. Student Fellowship conducting ethnographic research for my dissertation, titled "Noisy Women, Imagined Spaces: Mobility and the Emplacement of Feminist Politics in música pop chilena."

A scrap about this title. What offset interested me in studying feminist activism in Chilean popular music wasn't merely the ways women were "making dissonance" and speaking out more boldly nearly gender and sexual violence. I was also curious about the ways they were creating their own spaces to combat these problems. That'southward why in my fieldwork, I've been asking how Chilean women artists are creating and intervening in spaces similar music festivals and schools, political demonstrations, cities, and natural landscapes to re-sound and re-imagine colonial and patriarchal systems of power.

As a feminist ethnomusicologist and US American academic, ane of the most determinative challenges of fieldwork has been learning to negotiate my own identity and politics in relation to the multiple spaces and artists I've been working with. During my first several months here, I constitute myself asking on a daily basis, "How tin can I keep from projecting N American and European ideologies onto Chilean feminist practices? How practise I navigate participant observation and interviews with artists and organizations that have diverging or even contradictory feminist discourses?"

Pascuala Ilabaca, one of my initial contacts and artist collaborators, is a singer-songwriter who blends Chilean folk traditions with Hindustani music, jazz, rock, and other Latin American genres. In our interviews, she has expressed that her sonic travels are meant to vindicate women's role in traditional musics around the world, and that in her touring she uses her music to express feminine identities in their diversity and fluidity. For her, bringing women and women'due south music more centrally into public spaces is a fundamental attribute of her feminist practice.

Ilabaca's feminism, nonetheless, is very different from that of Coordinadora Femfest, a queer anti-backer feminist music commonage with whom I've been collaborating regularly since my first weeks of research. Formed 14 years ago, the collective holds annual festivals, concerts, and workshops to build safe spaces for women in underground stone scenes, and to promote sexual dissidence through counter-cultural expression. Less concerned with intervening directly in public spaces, Coordinadora Femfest develops a feminist musical practice from "under" – outside mainstream institutions and in solidarity with marginalized communities.

By dissimilarity, for Ruidosa Fest and La Matria Fest, two new feminist music festivals led respectively by star culling music singers Francisca Valenzuela and Mariel Mariel, mass communication most gender disparities and sexual harassment within pop music and cultural industries is the ultimate goal.

Finally, in my women's cueca classes, I've experienced immediate how women are re-appropriating the traditionally male-dominated national folk music and dance, and using it to help women through the process of "sacando la voz," which means to raise, elevator, or observe one'due south phonation, in a musical or political sense.

Initially, I was and then focused on understanding and fitting in with each of these artists and organizations, that I often discussed very petty about the total telescopic of my work when I was with one group or some other. For example, why would I share with my punk rock musician friends and collaborators that I'g learning to sing folk music, or interviewing artists in mainstream festivals? I was and then preoccupied with not losing people'due south trust that I failed to recognize the uniquely multi-faceted perspectives I was developing.

It wasn't until August, when I was invited to teach an M.A. class on Music, Gender, and Sexuality at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, that I began to step back and appreciate the potential I had for fostering meaningful dialogue across each field site. Though I understood this intellectually, writing a syllabus grounded in intersectional and decolonial feminisms and music throughout the Américas helped me remember in practice that feminist art and politics are built through coalition, not homogeneity. Equally a feminist researcher, I must not but recognize my role, but actively have responsibility for shaping the feminist musical coalitions in which I've been involved throughout this year.

As I come towards the cease of my time in Chile, I tin only hope that by continuing to learn from each space, share questions, and offering reflections, I tin can more fully support the loving labor and art existence created by so many women I accept come up to know, respect, and admire.

Scholars In The News

Latest of faculty and students at UC Berkeley Music

John Kapusta

RADIO MEYDAN

In January 2019, Assistant Professor Maria Sonevytsky's commodity "Radio Meydan: 'Eastern' Music and the Liminal Sovereign Imaginaries of Crimea" was published in Public Civilization 31(1):93-116.

KAPUSTA TO EASTMAN

John Kapusta (PhD UC Berkeley, 2017) has recently been appointed to Assistant Professor of Musicology in the tenure track, Eastman School of Music.

MELFORD AT SFJAZZ

Myra Melford premiered her piece for improvising pianoforte soloist, bedroom ensemble and fixed media: "Homogenous Infiltration," with the San Francisco Gimmicky Music Players on May eleven, 2019 at SFJazz.

Melissa J. Scott

SCOTT PRESENTS IN CAIRO

Doctoral student Melissa J. Scott, graduate student in ethnomusicology, presented at ICTM'southward Music of the Arab World Study Grouping conference in Cairo, Egypt in January 2019. In her paper, "Rethinking Jordanian Music: Perspectives on the Politics of Mode," she assessed the extent to which histories of Iraqi and Palestinian forced migration to Jordan inform local musical practices as well as musicians' attitudes towards Syrian refugees.

OUT OF PROPORTION

Banana Professor Emily Zazulia's commodity "Out of Proportion: Nuper rosarum flores and the Danger of Imitation Exceptionalism" was recently published in The Journal of Musicology 31 (1), 2019.

COX &  ST. PAUL Bedroom ORCHESTRA

Cindy Cox has been deputed to compose a new work for the St. Paul Sleeping room Orchestra.

SUSTAINABLE SOUNDS

Doctoral educatee Jonathan Turner presented "Exploring Shifts in the Material Product of Sustainable Instrument Manufacturing at Blackbird Guitar" at the conference titled "Sustainable Sounds: Interrogating The Materials of Music Making Technologies," held on Saturday, May 11, 2019, at St. Cecilia'southward Hall Concert Room and Music Museum, University of Edinburgh.

MENSCHENDARSTELLERIN

Melanie Gudesblatt has won the prestigious 2019 William F. Holmes / Frank D'Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies, awarded past the American Musicological Social club.

HER HOLINESS, THE WINTER DOG

New opera by Graduate Student composer Curtis Rumrill titled "Her Holiness, The Winter Dog," to premieres at the in May at the New Hazlett theatre in Pittsburgh, PA.

LISTENING ACTS

Doctoral student Rachel Colwell delivered a public lecture on "Listening Acts," co-sponsored by the departments of Arabic, Music, and the Rohatyn Eye for Global Studies at Middlebury College, on February 20, 2019.

Inaugural APGAR AWARD
 Alessandra Jones has been awarded the inaugural Apgar Award. The award, made possible by the generosity of the Apgar Family, is made annually to a graduate student in Music Scholarship at UC Berkeley. The aim of the award is to encourage the development of skills and/or specific accomplishments outside the recipient'due south primary area of expertise. Alessandra'south project is a pedagogical initiative entitled "Feminist Listening."