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.

Read the OperaWire article.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

A paper by UC San Diego Professor of Music Shlomo Dubnov, Computer Music graduate student Ke Chen, and colleagues from France, including a live performance that imitates Toot Thieleman's tone and style, were accepted into the Symposium Toots Thielemans (1922-2016). A Century of Music across Europe and America.

The conference will take place in KBR (Royal Library of Brussels) from May 9-11, 2022. The conference is a part of the exhibition Toots 100. The Sound of a Belgian Legend organized at KBR from April 22 to August 31, 2022. 

Dubnov and Chen's work combines a novel method of audio source separation that allowed them to extract Toot's solos from mixed recording, which was then combined with a machine improvisation system that allows producing novel music from phrases that are learned by the Artificial Intelligence. This project is part of the REACH initiative on human-cyber co-improvisation. (learn more)

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 UC San Diego Department of Music will be opening our concerts to both internal and external audiences starting February 2022. All guests will be required to RSVP for all concerts that are both free and ticketed. RSVP information will be available at music.ucsd.edu/concerts.

As per University mandates, audiences will be required to wear masks at all times while indoors and will be subject to the following requirements:

UC San Diego students, staff and faculty must show their daily symptom screener:

All visitors and guests (non-affiliates) attending a UC San Diego onsite event must:

If you are unable to meet these requirements, please continue to tune-in to our concerts virtually at music.ucsd.edu/live.