EPSG:4326

University Baroque Ensemble

University of California, Berkeley

UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra

Piano students from the studio class, Music 168CS, perform a variety of solo works.

Noon Concert: Performance Class Piano Recital

UC Berkeley Wind Ensemble I

UC Berkeley Philharmonia Orchestra

UC Berkeley Chamber & University Chorus

The colloquium will consist of talks and concerts by visiting lecturers and CNMAT OpenLabs led by faculty, graduate and undergraduate students. In rotation, members of the class will be appointed as respondents for the presentations. The responsibility of the respondent is to facilitate the discussion during and after the talk; their names will be communicated later on. All the events will be hosted at CNMAT.

Composition Colloquium: OpenLab

Finding Bach’s Roots - Tracing Bach’s lineage through Tunder, Buxtehude, JC Bach and concluding with works by Johann Sebastian.

Noon Concert: Baroque Ensemble

Gamelan Sari Raras

Benjamin Ory is a musicologist interested in the intersection of early music and historiography. 

Music Studies Colloquium: Benjamin Ory

Experience the soulful and uplifting sounds of classic Black Gospel intertwined with contemporary crossover genres at this inspiring concert.

University Gospel Chorus

Students from the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra perform small ensemble works under the direction of Leighton Fong.

Noon Concert: Chamber Music for Piano and Winds

UC Berkeley Wind Ensemble II

African Music Ensemble

An evening of creative jazz by students in the Berkeley Nu Jazz Collective (Myra Melford, director), the Marty Ehrlich/Myra Melford Duo and the Goldberg-Melford Quintet.

Berkeley Nu Jazz Collective & Goldberg-Melford Quintet with special guest Marty Ehrlich

Marty Ehrlich is celebrating thirty-five years in the nexus of creative music centered in New York City. He began his musical career in St. Louis, Missouri, while in high school, performing and recording with the Human Arts Ensemble. He graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music with honors in 1977, where his teachers included George Russell, Jaki Byard, Joseph Allard, and Gunther Schuller.

Composition Colloquium: Marty Ehrlich

Musical theater’s greatest songs and scenes performed by students from the Vocal Studies program.

Noon Concert: Broadway Bound!

World premiere of “The Little Prince”, an opera composed by UC Berkeley student Chengrui “Tom” Pan in fulfillment of the Musical Theater Prize. 

Musical Theater Prize Concert

Alliance Theatre

The UC Berkeley Chamber & University Chorus


From Bumba Meu Boi to Burrinha: the Drama of Brazilian Identity in Brazil and Benin.


Music Studies Colloquium: Juan Diego Dias

The UC Berkeley Department of Music is committed to the health and safety of our students, staff, and patrons. Measures to protect concertgoers and musicians will be informed by state, local, and UC Berkeley Public Health policies and are subject to change. Social distancing, masks, and proof of COVID 19 vaccination may be required. UC Berkeley does not promise or guarantee that all patrons or employees on site are vaccinated. Unvaccinated individuals may be present as a result of exemptions, exceptions, fraudulent verification, or checker error. None of these precautions eliminate the risk of exposure to COVID-19. Registration is strongly encouraged for noon concerts at music.berkeley.edu/register.

Noon Concert: Balinese Gamelan

Anna Friz creates media art, sound and transmission art, working across platforms to present installations, broadcasts, films and performances. Her creative and scholarly works often reflect upon media ecologies, land use, infrastructures, time perception, radio and transmission art histories, and critical fictions. She specializes in self-reflexive radio for broadcast, installation or performance, where radio is the source, subject, and medium of the work. Currently her focus is on a series of audiovisual works under the title We Build Ruins, which expressively consider mining and industrial corridors in the high altitude desert in northern Chile; Useful Radio, a live performance and installation created with Jeff Kolar based on Rick Prelinger’s radio listening archives; and Water Line/Estuary Almanac, a 365-day composition based on the tidal patterns of the Fraser River in Vancouver created with Absolute Value of Noise for DeutschlandFunk Kultur and ORF Kunstradio, of the German and Austrian public radio.

Composition Colloquium: Anna Friz

Elevate your lunch break with The Loft Hour, a new year-long series that invites new arts faculty to riff on their work over lunch, in an informal conversation moderated by an ARC-affiliated faculty member. The March program features Iggy Cortez (Film & Media) and Juan David Rubio Restrepo (Music) in conversation with Salar Mameni (Ethnic Studies).

The Loft Hour: Iggy Cortez + Juan David Rubio Restrepo

Leçons de ténèbres pour le mercredi saint (Tenebrae Readings for Holy Wednesday), Couperin

Featuring David H. Miller on viola da gamba and Katherine Heater on harpsichord with guest sopranos Rita Lilly and Caroline Jou Armitage.

Noon Concert: Faculty Recital

Celeste Betancur is a multi-instrumentalist musician with a professional degree in guitar from Berklee College of Music and a Master’s in digital arts. She is currently doing her Ph.D. in Computer Music at Stanford University, CCRMA. For more than 10 years, Celeste has played in countries such as the USA, CANADA, MEXICO, ITALY, IRELAND, SPAIN, CHILE, COLOMBIA, PERÚ, and remotely in INDIA, NETHERLAND, BELGIUM, and ARGENTINA.

Composition Colloquium: Stanford Exchange

Noon Concert: Chamber Music for Piano and Strings

Daniel Walden (b. 1989 in Berkeley, California) is a pianist, harpsichordist, music theorist, and musicologist. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Yale University.

Music Studies Colloquium: Daniel Walden

Roger Reynolds: composer, writer, producer and mentor, pioneer in sound spatialization, intermedia, and algorithmic concepts, is an inveterate synthesizer of diverse capacities and perspectives. His notorious composition, “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (1961), uses graphic notation to depict performer location on a stage and was widely imitated. Reynolds’s work often arises out of a text or visual image. His Pulitzer prize-winning composition, “Whispers Out of Time,” for string orchestra, muses on a poem by John Ashbery. The FLiGHT project (2012-16) arose out of a collection of texts and images stretching from Plato to the astronauts. While “KNOWING / NOT KNOWING” explores how knowledge arises from communities. Projects with individual performers and ensembles, theater directors, choreographers, and scientists involve challenging interpersonal collaborations. He has been, for decades, a sought-after mentor at UC San Diego.

Composition Colloquium: Roger Reynolds

Students of George Emblom perform works from various musical periods.

Noon Concert: Organ Recital

David Monacchi (1970) is an eco-acoustics researcher, composer and interdisciplinary artist. He has been developing the project Fragments of Extinction since 1998, conducting field research in the world’s remaining areas of undisturbed primary equatorial forest. The recipient of multiple awards throughout Europe and North America, Monacchi is pioneering a new compositional and science dissemination approach based on 3D soundscape recordings of ecosystems to raise awareness on the biodiversity crisis through science-based sound art. His Eco-acoustic Theatre invention (a full-periphonic space dedicated to soundscape listening) has received the international patent in 2014 and is now being built in museums and public spaces as SONOSFERA®. He has worked extensively in cross-disciplinary contexts (contemporary music, cinema, video-art, site-specific public art, bioacoustics, natural history and science museums), and is founding member of artistic and scientific networks as the International Society of Ecoacoustics. A research fellow at Simon Fraser University – Vancouver in 1998 and a Fulbright scholar at University of California, Berkeley in 2007, Monacchi has taught at the University of Macerata since 2000, and is now professor of Electroacoustics at the Conservatorio “G. Rossini” of Pesaro (IT). A TEDx speaker in 2017, Artistic Research fellow at IRCAM-Paris in 2018, Monacchi is author of the multiawarded documentary film “Dusk Chorus – based on Fragments of Extinction”. Collaborations with ICCROM and IUCN to promote advocacy in primary forest soundscape conservation, culminated in a recent invited talk for the plenary session of the 2018 United Nations Biodiversity Conference, UN COP-14.

Composition Colloquium: David Monacchi

How is it that “the one rush of hearts”—that swirl of feelings and music and sweaty bodies on a crowded dancefloor—can thicken into something that feels like communion and community? In this talk, I turn to the nexus of sound, feeling, and togetherness to investigate how collective listening and dancing can give rise to a sense of inchoate sociality— that is, something like a “we” coalescing under the surface of shared musical experience. While the idea that “music brings people together” is a common trope that is especially pervasive in electronic dance music scenes (EDM), accounts vary as to how music exerts such socially binding force. In club cultures, partygoers often use the term “vibe” to describe how they understand music to work in these contexts, bringing dancers into a sort of synchronicity of feeling. By understanding “vibe” as a subcultural conceptualization of affect, I explore how music-driven emotional convergence intersects with scholarship on musical entrainment, emotional contagion, ritual practices, and resonance.

Music Studies Colloquium: Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta

For more than 70 years: The Noon Concert series at the Department of Music.


Noon Concert: Wind Ensemble

Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden is a historian of musical labor during the eighteenth century and Age of Revolutions. She specializes in France, its diaspora, and the French colonial empire. Her research is archival in nature, and most broadly examines the implications of music’s property status under nascent capitalism and democracy. An accomplished educator, Geoffroy-Schwinden teaches a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses from research methods to women’s studies and historical sound studies. She was the inaugural program coordinator of UNT’s BA in Critical Studies in Music and Society, an innovative interdisciplinary degree launched in 2022.

Music Studies Colloquium: Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden

Noon Concert: Piano Recital

New York based electro-acoustic composer / improviser Zeena Parkins is a pioneer of contemporary harp practices. Using expanded techniques, object preparations, and electronic processing she has re-defined the instrument’s capacities. Concurrently, Parkins self-designed a series of one-of-a kind electric instruments. She leans into the harp’s physical limitations pushing its boundaries and impossibilities. In her compositions, Parkins utilizes collections, recombination, historic proximities, geography, tactility, spatial configurations and movement. Sonic presence and personality is revealed in explorations of subtle frequency shifts, feedback, over and under tones, melodic fragments, timbral and gestural intervals, perception, and residues.

Composition Colloquium: Zeena Parkins

Performing one of his own compositions, a world premiere by professor Cindy Cox, and sonatas by Scarlatti and Soler.

Noon Concert: Solo Piano Recital featuring Jared Redmond

A double bill featuring an all-star UC Jazz Ensemble, directed by Ted Moore, and the Berkeley Nu Jazz Collective, directed by Myra Melford.

Noon Concert: Jazz X2

UC Berkeley’s ensemble in residence pays tribute to the work of Music Department faculty member and eminent composer Cindy Cox, whose compositions are inspired by the invisible laws of nature. The program presents a portrait of Cox’s chamber music over several decades, from 1989’s [Four Studies of Light and Dark] for piano and percussion to 2010’s Cañon for an octet of woodwinds and brass, to 2014’s Hishuk ish ts’ awalk (All things are One)—a piece for clarinet, strings, and piano, inspired by the rainforest and native inhabitants of Canada’s Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. The concert also features the world premiere of selections from Cox’s large new theatrical work for vocal soloists, chorus, and ensemble, The Road to Xibalba.

Eco Ensemble, The Music of Cindy Cox, David Milnes, Director

The past decade has seen the growth of a diverse movement in China toward the historically-informed performance of the music of the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). In the age of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, the revived music of the old Silk Road, far from the exclusive preserve of academics, invites the participation of tens of thousands of fans and critics. These 21st century performances of Tang music depart sharply from their 20th century predecessors in cohering around a new audiovisual aesthetic sporting period instruments, costumes, and stagings. But the methodologies of Tang music scholars and performers — what they believe we can know about the past and how they set out to produce that knowledge — are anything but uniform. How can a musical tradition which is so distant from us, and whose “fossils” remain so controversial, be brought back to life? And what role should living musical lineages play in this process? These questions put at stake not just historical truth, but the identity of Chinese music in this century.

Music of the Great Tang: Embodying Music History in Twenty-First Century China

Emanuele Senici studied musicology at the University of Pavia (Laurea 1993), at King’s College London, and at Cornell University, USA (MA 1996, PhD 1998). From 1998 to 2000 he was Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford University, and from 2000 to 2007 University Lecturer in Music and then Reader in Musicology in the Oxford Faculty of Music (where he was Director of Graduate Studies), as well as Fellow of St. Hugh’s College. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Music History at the University of Rome La Sapienza, and since 2009 Visiting Professor in the Music Department of King’s College London. In 2006 he was Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, USA. His research centres on Italian opera of the long nineteenth century, on the theory and historiography of opera, especially issues of genre and gender, and on opera on video. Among his publications are _‘La clemenza di Tito’ di Mozart: i primi trent’anni (1791-1821)_ (Brepols, 1997), _Donizetti a Casa Ricordi. Gli autografi teatrali_ (Fondazione Donizetti, 1998, with Alessandra Campana and Mary Ann Smart), _The Cambridge Companion to Rossini_ (Cambridge University Press, 2004, as editor), _Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini_ (Cambridge University Press, 2005), _Giacomo Puccini and His World_ (Princeton University Press, 2016, co-edited with Arman Schwartz) and _Music in the Present Tense: Rossini’s Italian Operas in Their Time_ (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Between 2003 and 2008 he was co-editor of the “Cambridge Opera Journal” (Cambridge University Press).

Music Studies Colloquium: Emanuele Senici

Arrangements by composers including Offenbach and Gershwin.

Noon Concert: Duet Recital for Piano and Organ

New works by UC Berkeley graduate student composers featuring the department’s resident new music ensemble, Eco Ensemble.

Berkeley New Music Project with Eco Ensemble

In 2001, Afrikaans rock musician Karen Zoid became the figurehead of a generation of Afrikaans-speaking South African lesbians, who deployed her music to find and define a community for themselves during South Africa’s post-apartheid transition years. In this talk I examine Zoid’s music from the perspective of her fan community, as a window into the process by which young, queer, white, Afrikaner women have navigated their citizenship in the New South Africa. I argue that the unique subject position of queer white South African women illuminates the impact of white supremacy in a manner that supports arguments for a collaborative dismantling of racist inequity. Queer white women both benefit from and are entrapped by the reliance on constructs of gendered and racialized vulnerability that uphold white supremacy. My examination of Karen Zoid fans’ navigation of their particular vulnerability through their experiences listening in queer community to Karen Zoid’s music highlights the ways that white supremacy demands the sacrifice of white women’s freedom. It also provides an example of how a community of women have used music to help them understand and begin to dismantle this tyrannical and isolating privilege. I offer a close analysis of several examples of the music that has both documented and guided these women’s transition from beneficiaries of apartheid to full citizens in a non-racial and democratic South Africa.

UC Berkeley Department of Music

May 5, 2024

University Baroque Ensemble

3 - 4 May, 2024

UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra

UC Berkeley Department of Music