Saltern, label run by Tashi Wada and distributed by Forced Exposure, publishes the first-ever release of "lost minimalist" Terry Jennings' visionary 1960 composition, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, as arranged in just intonation by legendary composer La Monte Young for renowned cellist and UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Charles Curtis.

The recording captures Curtis in a performance from 2016 reflecting more than twenty-five years of dedication to the piece, and it was mixed by UC San Diego Professor of Music Anthony Burr.

"As an interpreter, [Curtis] puts his own voice into the sound, letting it mingle with those of Young and Jennings to form something that builds off of each other rather than exemplifies a sole auteur.... Music is meant to be shaped and reshaped. Says Curtis: 'This piece isn’t a ghost, it isn’t a corpse, it’s a living composition that’s moving along, in the present, or at least in the very recent past, and into the future.'” - Vanessa Ague of Bandcamp

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."

The San Diego Symphony will perform music by from UC San Diego alumna Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ph.D. '11 and UC San Diego faculty Lei Liang and Rand Steiger, alongside works by Stravinsky and Barber. UC San Diego Distinguished Professor of Music Steven Schick will be conducting Rand Steiger’s Triton’s Rise and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s METACOSMOS.

The Blacktronika: Where I Stand Festival will bring together six innovative musical groups to create a full day of sonic cultural expression. The liberation-oriented free jazz of Irreversible Entanglements, Caribbean influenced multi-instrumentalism of Xenia Rubinos, the Grammy nominated cosmic funk from Georgia Ann Muldrow to the Zimbabwean hip hop of Chimurenga Renaissance, electro-acoustic time travelers Tyshawn Sorey and King Britt and UC San Diego's debut of multicultural supergroup, 5hz.

BECOMING, an interactive musical journey in VR, developed at the Qualcomm Institute's Sonic Arts Research and Development group will be shown at SIGGRAPH - Immersive Pavilion in Vancouver, Canada next week. The piece involves graduate and undergraduate students from the departments of Music and ECE at UC San Diego.

SIGGRAPH - Immersive Pavilion

Monday, August 8, 2022, 1:30p.m. - 5:30p.m. PDT

Tuesday, August 9, 2022, 10:00a.m. - 5:30p.m. PDT

Wednesday, August 10, 2022, 10:00a.m. - 5:30p.m. PDT

Thursday, August 11, 2022, 10:00a.m. - 3:30p.m. PDT

West Building, Ballroom A/B, Vancouver Convention Centre

1055 Canada Place, Vancouver, BC, Canada

John Burnett and Eito Murakami, '22: VR Infrastructure and Creative Design

Francesca Talenti: Graphic Design

Juliette Regimbal: Haptic Design and Programming

Yongjae Yoo: Haptic Design Adviser

Louis Pisha: GPU Programming

Shahrokh Yadegari: Direction and Composition

Featuring Recordings by Mahsa Vahdat on vocals, Jimmy Mahlis on Oud, Mammad Zadeh on tombak, and Satnam Ramgotra on percussion.

UC San Diego Professor of Music Shlomo Dubnov, Gerard Assayag and CSE graduate student Vignesh Gokul's paper "Switching Machine Improvisation Models by Latent Transfer Entropy Criteria" was accepted in the 41st MaxEnt2022 Conference.

Machine improvisation is a study of musical generative systems that interact with either another music agent or a human improviser. This is a challenging task, as it is not trivial to define a quantitative measure that evaluates the creativity of the musical agent. In this paper we consider the problem of controlling machine improvisation by switching between several pre-trained machine learning models of musical style by finding the best match to an external control signal coming from the musician or the music environment. We introduce a measure SymTE that chooses the "most communicative" improvisation model according to a measure of transfer entropy between the computer generated and human sound, thus allowing more meaningful creative interaction between human and the machine.

UC San Diego Music Associate Professor Amy Cimini releases new book Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life, where she explores Amacher's working methods with an interpretive style that emphasizes technical study, conceptual juxtaposition, intertextual play, and narrative transport.

The book illuminates Amacher's projects and working practices across a spectrum of realization and speculation, offers a provocative fusion of artist-centered study with historical and theoretical topics, and engages with concepts of life, biopolitics and feminist thought throughout.

The UC San Diego Department of Music is proud to announce that composer and UC San Diego Alumni Michelle Lou officially joined our faculty as an Assistant Professor of Composition this July 2022.

Michelle Lou composes mainly in the realm of electro-acoustic music, both in hardware and in computer based forms. She has also created large scale sound installations which are often performative and collaborative. She performs and improvises on acoustic and electric bass, electric guitar, and on laptop and various electronics.

Brad Rose of Foxy Digitalis reviews UC San Diego Music Assistant Professor Wilfrido Terrazas's new album My Shadow Leads The Way.

"My Shadow Leads This Way is a forward crawl through the depths and brambles of our inner lives and monologues where the only sound are the words in our minds. There is a neverending search in these sounds and spoken word elements. Terrazas blurs the line between music and words, changing perceptions. My Shadow Leads This Way leaves me reconsidering if distinctions between the two matter and how that shapes our own understanding."

For the August issue of San Diego Magazine, editor Gillian Flynn and photographer Todd Glaser steps inside DJ, composer, producer and UC San Diego Music Assistant Teaching Professor King Britt's studio to talk to him about creating and teaching the Blacktronika: Afrofuturism in Electronic Music course, working with legends like Michael Mann, Ridley Scott and Digable Planets, curating Carnegie Hall's Afrofuturism Festival and the upcoming Blacktronika Festival at the new Epstein Family Amphitheater.

Cube Fest 2022 at Virginia Teach is taking place Friday, August 19 to Sunday, August 20. This year's festival celebrates immersive Afrofuturist music, featuring works from UC San Diego Music faculty King Britt, Yvette Janine Jackson, Ph.D. '17, Jupiter Blue, Sea Novaa, and an evening-long concert, The Other Wakanda, presented by Stephen James Taylor.

Composer and UC San Diego Music Ph.D. Candidate Anthony Vine and The Filomen M. D'Agostino Greenberg Music School (The Fil) was announced as recipients of the Artist Employment Program grant from Creatives Rebuild New York.

Anthony Vine will work with The Fil, a community music school serving students of all ages with vision loss, to share his skills and expertise as a composer with the students in their respective comprehensive music programs. As part of the collaboration, Anthony will compose a piece for the May 19, 2023 “The Fil at the Met” concert, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Anthony Vine was one of 18 laureates awarded a 2022-23 residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. During his 8-week residency, he will visit medieval churches in the south of France to study a peculiar acoustic treatment—earthen resonators cemented in the walls and vaults of ecclesastical structures. Recordings, photographs, writing, and other documentation will be used to create a multimedia album.

UC San Diego Music Ph.D. Candidate Sang Song has been recently awarded the 2022 Ilshin Composition Prize. Established by the Ilshin Foundation in Korea, the Ilshin Composition Prize is considered to be the nation’s most prestigious prize awarded to composers of Korean nationality or ancestry. The prize has traditionally been awarded to mid-career composers, but a panel of jury led by the internationally-acclaimed composer Unsuk Chin selected Sang, who is still a graduate student, as this year’s winner.

The award comes with a cash prize of 10 million Korean Won (approximately US$9,000), and Sang will be writing a new piece to be performed at the award ceremony by a group of musicians including Han Kim, the 2nd solo clarinetist of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Doomin Kim, the principal cellist of the Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra.

UC San Diego Music Graduate Student Marguerite Brown wins first place in the 6th International Microtonal Guitar Competition. The competition is organized by the Microtonal Guitar Institute, sponsored by Sala Muzik.

Music: Solo (Daisy)

Composer/Guitarist: Marguerite Brown

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

Interested in doing music production for hip hop, EDM, and other pop music? The first thing you’ll need is a solid beat! UC San Diego 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.

Are you an emerging filmmaker who wants to learn how to fit music to your work? UC San Diego 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.

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? UC San Diego 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!

UC San Diego Music Undergraduate Students Guy LaBorde and Lukas Ehlers releases debut collaboration "Restless EP" that stemmed from original ideas they used for class projects in King Britt's MUS 174 course.

“Restless EP” is inspired by the sounds of UK rave and club culture, Alternative Hip Hop, Pop and beyond. It explores themes of altruism, feeling lost across time zones, and seeking life value that goes beyond temporary satisfaction.

Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez, Ph.D. '22 was accepted as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Output Innovation Axis of the inter-institutional ACTOR project at McGill, performing and applying research in Timbre and Orchestration in contemporary music.

The album of compositions by Lydia Winsor Brindamour, Ph.D. '22 released by Sawyer Editions on July 1, was termed a "minimalist gem" with "carefully etched performances." The four pieces in "empty spaces" featured UC San Diego musicians including James Beauton, D.M.A. '20, Kyle Adam Blair, D.M.A. '18, UC San Diego Associate Professor of Music Erik Carlson, Madison Greenstone, Myra Hinrichs, Peter Ko, and Michael Matsuno. The review concludes that the "works all occupy a very specific space, but it's a very nice place to spend time."

Mark Yoon, '16 aka solgeekee's new album honestly is out now on all platforms. Honestly is a culmination of songs inspired by hip-hop, lo-fi, jazz, instrumental, and electronic music. The name of the album originates from the musical alias, “solgeekee,” which is a reinterpretation of the word honestly in Korean.

"Music has always touched me in spiritual ways and it is my mission to produce music with honesty, authenticity, and what speaks to my heart." - solgeekee