From powerful vocal performance to jazz to percussion-only music, the UC Davis Department of Music shows off its range at the end of the year. Some tickets are free. Many are available virtually.

Jazz Bands of UC Davis

The Jazz Bands of UC Davis, led by Otto Lee, take the stage of the Ann E. Pitzer Center on Nov. 30, 7-9 p.m. The bands will perform music from the great American jazz tradition, including tunes by Chick Corea, Benny Golson, Count Basie, Thad Jones and others. 

$12 Students and Children / $24 Adults (Open Seating). Find a direct link to the livestream here.

UC Davis Concert Band

The UC Davis Concert Band returns to Mondavi Center’s Jackson Hall on Dec. 1, 7-9 p.m. Under the direction of Pete Nowlen, the band will perform works by film composer Alan Silvestri, from the animated “Polar Express”; Alton Adams, the first African American U.S. Navy Bandmaster; noted American bandleader Helen May Butler; British-Sierra-Leonean composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; and Chinese and Chinese American composers Jack Loh and Yan Pang.

$12 Students and Children / $24 Adults (General Admission)

Shinkoskey Noon Concert Thursday, Dec. 2

The popular and free Shinkoskey Noon Concert series at the Pitzer Center on Dec. 2, 12:05-1 p.m., showcases music department lecturers Jolán Friedhoff (violin) and Kerstin Allvin (harp), performing works by J.S. Bach, Gaetano Donizetti and Camille Saint-Saëns.

The performance is free. Find a direct link to the livestream here. 

'Loose Ends' on Friday, Dec. 3

The Percussion Ensemble concert on Dec. 3, 3-4 p.m. titled “Loose Ends” takes place at the Pitzer Center. Directed by Chris Froh, students will perform works by Andy Akiho, John Cage, Emmanuel Sejourné and others. 

This performance is free. Find a direct link to the livestream here.

'A World Anew' at Jackson Hall

On Dec. 3, 7-9 p.m. at Jackson Hall in the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, the choirs of UC Davis perform a repertoire that spans five centuries and includes several works by living composers of diverse backgrounds. Titled “A World Anew,” the concert is Erik Peregrine’s debut as the new director of choirs. Peregrine, also a lecturer in the music department, has held a variety of conducting and teaching positions across North America, including with the University of Arizona Collegium Musicum, Tucson Masterworks Chorale, the Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists and the University of British Columbia Choirs.

Peregrine says the concert “celebrates the joy, resilience and healing power of singing together,” which has been difficult in particular for singers during the pandemic. The concert features all three of UC Davis’s choirs: the University Chorus (a medium-large ensemble), the Chamber Singers (a treble choir) and the Early Music Vocal Ensemble. The program includes works by living American composers Rosephanye Powell, Melissa Dunphy and Sydney Guillaume, as well as the English Renaissance composer William Byrd. 

$12 Students and Children / $24 Adults. Find a direct link to the livestream here.

‘Location and Listening’ is site-specific sound installation at UC Davis

The UC Davis campus will come alive with sound through an installation of six audio works responding to specific locations created by students. “Location and Listening,” presented by the Department of Theatre and Dance will be accessible at noon on Dec. 3 until 7 p.m. on Dec. 10.  

The artists include doctoral, graduate and undergraduate students from performance studies, dramatic art, design and theatre and dance have assembled site-specific sound experiences in and around Shields Library, Mrak Hall, the Arboretum, Lake Spafford and other campus locations. The project, overseen by Granada Artist-in-Residence Annie Saunders, reflects a variety of themes including connectivity, synchronicity, recycling and reclamation. 

To experience “Location and Listening” participants will need headphones and a cell phone or tablet with internet access to follow an online map of the sites. The installation is free and open to all. Details can be accessed here.

Talks in the Sound Lab: Zachary James Watkins gives performance and talk

Nov. 30, 4-5 p.m., Room 101 (“Sound Lab”), Art Annex

Zachary James Watkins is a composer and electronic music artist. He will be visiting UC Davis’s music department several times over the 2021–22 school year, including a May 2022 performance of his piece Affirmative Action with The Living Earth Show (an artist-in-residence guitar and percussion duo), and working with graduate students in composition and creative writing for their collaborative performance work in late May 2022, titled “See / Hear / Say,” which is funded by the Davis Humanities Institute Research and Arts Clusters Grant.

This event is free. This performance and talk will not be recorded or livestreamed.

Ghostly Empires: A Conversation with Rajkamal Kahlon and Bakirathi Mani

Dec. 1, 12-1:30 p.m.

Free, via Zoom, facilitated by Susette Min, UC Davis professor of Asian American Studies

This UC Davis event will focus on the ways artist Rajkamal Kahlon and scholar Bakirathi Mani engage visual, ethnographic, historical and literary archives in ways that are absent in recent discussions about the archive and the archival impulse.

Both Kahlon and Mani share an interest in the histories and representations of the colonial and racialized other, interrogating the archive in multivalent ways that reconfigure it as more than a storage of artifacts and documents, and technology of rule and surveillance. On another level, they explore how these archives are haunted, and how the role of art indexes the oppression that underpins this haunting. Specifically, Kahlon will present her research and art practice in relation to artworks included in her mid-career retrospective,

And Still I Rise is currently on view at the University Library Gallery at CSU Sacramento. Mani will discuss select artworks by South Asian American artists that she incisively analyzes in her acclaimed book, Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (Duke University Press, 2020).

The conversation will be facilitated by Susette Min, UC Davis professor of Asian American Studies, independent curator and author of Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art (NYU, 2018).

Rajkamal Kahlon is a Berlin-based American artist and professor of painting at University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. She graduated with B.A. in Studio Art from UC Davis in 1996. Her paintings, drawings, and performances have been exhibited internationally in museums, foundations, and galleries in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Bakirathi Mani is Professor in the Department of English Literature, and Coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America(Stanford University Press, 2012). Her scholarship focuses on Asian American studies, visual culture, art history, postcolonial theory and feminist and queer of color studies.

Register here.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian American Studies, Department of Art and Art History, Middle East/South Asian Studies, the Manetti Shrem Museum, and the University Galleries, CSU Sacramento.

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