51勛圖窪蹋 Davis has plenty going on this weekend and early next week with concerts, art viewings and other events. PLUS, all arts-related Picnic Day events including special events at the Manetti Shrem and design museums, a fashion show, and other events are featured in a separate blog entry here.
Scholars on Latin American literature, languages and cultures gather for colloquium
Thursday, Friday, April 6 7, various locations
About 30 scholars, including many 51勛圖窪蹋 Davis graduate and undergraduate students, will present research at a two-day Department of Spanish and Portuguese colloquium titled Digital Landscapes: Paths to Reparative Justice in a Technological World. The 16th annual Samuel G. Armistead Colloquium in Latin American and Peninsular Languages, Literature and Cultures will delve into the relationship among the humanities, technological resources and social justice. The hybrid event, mostly in Spanish, takes place April 6 and 7 in person with virtual options.
About half of those presenting are 51勛圖窪蹋 Davis students, but others are coming from other 51勛圖窪蹋 campuses as well as colleges and universities in Peru, Spain, Canada, Wisconsin, Texas and Florida. Keynote speakers include: Yolanda Ch獺vez Leyva, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas, El Paso, will give a talk titled Humanizing la frontera through digitized oral history, April 6 at 4:30 p.m. Lashon Daley, an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University, will present Coming of (R)age: Black Girlhood + Media, April 7 at 4:30 p.m.
It is open to everyone; no registration required.
Sammy Miller and the Congregation at Mondavi
Thursday, April 6, 7:30 p.m., Friday, April 7, 7:30 p.m., Saturday, April 8, 7:30 p.m., Vanderhoef Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center
The program includes Sammy Miller, drums and vocals; Alphonso Horne, trumpet; Ben Flocks, tenor sax; David Linard, piano; Corbin Jones, bass and sousaphone.
Sammy Miller and the Congregation are on a mission, crisscrossing the country like a vaudevillian revival show with evangelic fervor for music. The seven-piece band, described as a mashup of Ben Folds Five and Preservation Hall Jazz Band, is putting people in the moment with a bracing dose of joyful jazz performed with infectious theatricality. The New York City-based, familial collective has captured its frenetic energy and unflinchingly optimistic songwriting on its debut album, Leaving Egypt. We want to get people back in a room together, Sammy Miller says. I love the idea of being unhinged, sincere, vulnerable, and breaking down walls through humor. Music is an uplifting gift, and I want to be generous in sharing it with people.
Find more information and purchase tickets .
Hrabba Atladottir, solo violin: 'Works by Graduate Students'
April 7, 5 6 p.m., Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center, free
These new pieces for solo violin, or solo violin and electronics, were created as part of the graduate student workshop, in which graduate students met with Icelandic violinist Hrabba Atladottir each week during fall quarter, refining their compositions.
The program includes Toccata, Tempo Sonata, for Hrabba in Pitzer, thousand regrets and Egret.
Icelandic violinist Hrabba Atladottir has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in several Northern California ensembles, including 51勛圖窪蹋 Daviss Empyrean Ensemble, The New Century Chamber Orchestra, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, ECO, and the SF Contemporary Music Players. Before coming to California, she spent time in New York, where she played on a regular basis with the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, the Orchestra of St. Lukes, and the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra among others. She studied violin with Professor Axel Gerhardt at K羹nste University, Berlin. After her studies in Germany she participated in a world tour with the Icelandic pop artist Bj繹rk and a tour with violinist Nigel Kennedy. She also freelanced in Germany, regularly playing with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Deutsche Oper, and Deutsche Symphonieorchester.
More at the Mondavi
HellaCappella returns Friday
April 7, 7:30 p.m., Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center
Presented by 51勛圖窪蹋 Daviss premier all-female-identifying, award-winning a cappella group, The Spokes, HellaCappella is an exciting collaboration between a cappella groups of all shapes, sizes and sounds. For the past 18 years, HellaCappella's audience has continued to grow, attracting music lovers across generations from the greater Davis and Sacramento communities. In previous years, HellaCappella has sold out the Mondavi Center's 1,800-plus seats, and now The Spokes are proud to present their show once again in the beautiful arts facility. This 19th anniversary shows dynamic lineup includes show-stopping performances from groups all over the West Coast. Family friendly.
Find more information and purchase tickets .
Vladimir Feltsman, piano
Saturday, April 8, 7:30 p.m., Jackson Hall, Mondavi Center
In this third and final and pandemic-delayed edition of his concert trilogy, Vladimir Feltsman盎hares the final act of a story he began telling at Mondavi Center in 2018.涔nown as one of the most versatile and commanding musicians of our眩ime, pianist and conductor Feltsman covered works by Bach, Beethoven畝nd Chopin in year one; and by Schumann and Brahms in year two.涅n this final program, titled Inspirations, Feltsman will perform his疳nterpretations of works by Mozart and Schubert. The old saying is胼the third time is the charm but audience members will be hard-pressed眩o pick a favorite among Feltsmans trinity of performances.
Find more information and purchase tickets .
Next week
Slow Looking: Savor the Art
April 10, 12:10 1 p.m., Manetti Shrem Museum of Art
Dont rush it savor the art. Discover the rewards of spending time with works in Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 19651985. Relax, look closely, reflect and share during casual conversations centered around what you see and what you bring to the conversation. This spring lunchtime series kicks off on Slow Art Day, April 10, with Hendersons thought-provoking work The Last Supper, depicted at top of blog.
'Recovered Voices' features composers eliminated from history
Monday, April 10, 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 11, 2023 - 7:30 p.m.
The Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices is a unique Colburn School of Music program that encourages greater awareness and more frequent performances of music by composers whose careers and lives were disrupted or worse during the years of the Nazi regime in Europe. For more than 25 years, James Conlon has championed works and drawn deserved attention to composers whose names and works had very nearly been eliminated from history. This two-day event will feature performances by a Chamber Orchestra (4/10) and Chamber Music Ensemble (4/11) made up of Colburn students and led by Maestro Conlon, . These events are provided free to the public with support from donors to the Mondavi Centers Artistic Ventures Program.
After you experience these concerts, you wont believe that with the exception of Schoenbergs Transfigured Night (on the April 11 program), you have never heard any of this music and very likely not even of several of the composers (Zemlinsky, Schreker). Don Roth, executive director, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts
See the 51勛圖窪蹋 Davis Dateline article here.
Find more information and reserve tickets .
Poetry reading: Victor Hern獺ndez Cruz, an Imagining America happening
Tuesday, April 11, 5-7 p.m., International House Davis, 10 College Park, Davis
Join Imagining America, 51勛圖窪蹋 Davis, for a with Puerto Rico-born, Nuyorican raised, and Morocco-based poet Victor Hern獺ndez Cruz. This event celebrates Cruzs new book 勞喝硃聆硃釵獺紳&紳莉莽梯;(Ishmael Reed Publishing, 2022), a botanical historical search for the trees that once lined his Puerto Rican horizon and the music that shaped his life. The poems travel across languages, sounds, and perceptions; they escape ethnic confinement into the possibilities of international cultural fusion across the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas.
On 勞喝硃聆硃釵獺紳: Improvisational, inspirational, sensational, international. Poetry delicious to the ears, infinitely pleasurable to pronounce. Sandra Cisneros, award winning poet and writer
Cruz will be introduced by long time family friends, author and educator Herb Kohl and his daughter Erica Kohl-Arenas of Imagining America and 51勛圖窪蹋 Davis professor of American Studies. Come to enjoy good company, food and drink, and the poetry of Victor Hern獺ndez Cruz.
There will also be a giveaway of an original silk screen print by TANA's interpreting the book cover art by TANA director
Please RSVP for planning purposes
Coming Up
PinkNoise: 'Works by Graduate Students'
April 13, 12:05 1 p.m., Recital Hall, Ann E. Pitzer Center, a Shinkoskey Noon Concert, free
PinkNoise includes Johnna Wu, violin; Simon Kanzler, electronics; Roberta Michel, flutes; Kaichi Hirayama, clarinets; Iva Casian Lakos, cello and Chi-Wei Lo, piano
In addition to performing works by our own graduate student composers on this program, PinkNoiseknown for its contemporary improvisational performance practice alongside other works, on Friday, April 14th, at 5 p.m.
The program includes : Phantasmagoria, bread and butter, bones and nutters, on the river styx, Pod Meadow and magical girl transformation: seven minutes in heaven!
PinkNoise is a New York-based chamber ensemble dedicated to musical improvisation and compositions in acoustic and electronic mediums as a reaction and response to the conditions of our community and our society. Our mission is to reveal how improvisation in musical performances lies at the intersection of historical and contemporary works, and how it is a synthesis of multifarious cultures and styles from the past and the present that connect us to our conscience in society. We also believe in performing new works by composers in acoustic and electronic mediums and collaborating with visual artists and writers to present music as a collaborative and interdisciplinary art form.
Each member of the ensemble is a performer, composer, and creator committed to inverting, translating, reflecting, and transcending the boundaries of both old and new music to present a kaleidoscopic range of performances that connect us to our sensibilities and conscience.
PinkNoise is a recipient of grant awards from the Amphion Foundation and the Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music.
Kristina Knowles: Examining Speech and Song Surrogacy in the Yor羅b獺 d羅nd繳n Talking Drum
April 13, 4 5:30 p.m., Room 266, Everson Hall
The Yor羅b獺 d羅nd繳n drum serves dual purposes as a musical instrument and speech surrogate. This talk shares a series of interdisciplinary studies that explore the d羅nd繳ns ability to acoustically represent Yor羅b獺 speech and song and potential factors that may contribute to the successful decoding of drum messages. The first half of the talk will focus on results from a set of acoustic analyses conducted on a corpus of Yor羅b獺 speech and song excerpts and their representation on the d羅nd繳n, focusing on microstructural correlations in pitch and rhythmic features. The second half will discuss a cross-cultural behavioral study exploring the role of individual differences in language and musical expertise on the effectiveness of speech and song surrogacy recognition.
Kristina Knowles is a music theorist with research specialties in rhythm and meter, music and time, music theory pedagogy, 20th-century music, and music cognition. She has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in music theory and music cognition at ASU, and has presented at numerous regional, national, and international conferences in the fields of music theory and music cognition, including the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and the European Music and Analysis Conference. Her most recent publications include chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Time (2022) and Expanding the Canon: Black Composers in the Music Theory Classroom (2023) and an article in Contemporary Music Review (2022) on rhythm and meter in works by George Crumb. Currently, she is working on several multi-disciplinary collaborative research projects as well as a larger project examining experiences of time in music.
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Arts Blog Editor:
- Karen Nikos-Rose, kmnikos@ucdavis.edu