Department News
A new academic year has begun in the Music Department, with all that it entails: an incoming group of first-year students, classes resuming, and the start of a new concert series. Instruments that grew lonely in storage over the summer, or benefitted from a trip to the repair shop, are now in the hands of students who play them in lessons and ensembles. Reunions have been happening all around Thatcher, where people are returning to the business of studying and making music together. This past summer witnessed three retirements in the department: Tom Flaherty, Cynthia Fogg, and Elizabeth Champion. We will miss having them as a constant presence but are glad they are all still here in Claremont!
Archiving work by Marissa Plati and Matthew Cook ’20 has recently led to some exciting discoveries in Thatcher, which you can read more about here in the Gazette. Music students did fascinating projects over the summer. The Department welcomes some new and familiar faces this fall, with Igor Santos, Kira Blumberg, and Audrey Dunne ’13 taking on new faculty and concert production manager roles. The concert season began with the sounds of two-piano and two-pianist music by Genevieve Feiwen Lee and Tian Tian, followed by Celliola and friends, a faculty mariachi ensemble, Rachmaninoff piano duos, and a panoply of faculty performances at our Fête Musicale. We look forward to more music this semester, which includes a residency by Meredith Monk and a range of wonderful concerts by students, faculty, community members, and guests.
– Joti Rockwell, Department Chair
Of Special Note
Igor Santos joins the department this academic year as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music, teaching courses in composition. Described as “otherworldly and mysteriously familiar” (Chicago Classical Review), his music has been performed internationally. His work is centered on mimetic relationships between found sounds, video, and acoustic instruments, creating narratives that explore timbre, personal identity, and musico-historical signs and symbols. Igor has earned degrees in Music Composition from the University of Chicago, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of South Florida. He has been awarded the Rome Prize (2022) from the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), and has won awards such as the International Ferruccio Busoni Competition, the Luigi Nono International Competition, the RED NOTE Competition, the Salvatore Martirano Award, and was also awarded Best Sound Design from Theater Tampa Bay (for his incidental music). Read more at www.igor-santos.com
Kira Blumberg begins a position this fall as Lecturer of Music, teaching viola. She holds a B.M. degree from Boston University, where she studied with Michael Zaretsky and Steven Ansell, and a M.M. degree from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Toby Appel. She is Principal Viola of the Redlands Symphony Orchestra and a member of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. She played with the Los Angeles Music Center Opera Orchestra for seven years and freelances extensively throughout the greater Los Angeles area. For ten years, she was a member of ensembleGREEN, a new music group that specialized in music written after 1980 by Los Angeles area composers. She is Artist Teacher of viola at the University of Redlands, is on the faculty at Cal Poly Pomona, and maintains a large private teaching studio at her home. Read more at www.pomona.edu/directory/people/kira-blumberg.
As of October, Audrey Dunne has been the department’s new Concert Production Manager. She is a Pomona College alumna (2013) with a major in Music and a minor in French. After graduation, she spent a year in France as an English language teaching assistant. For four years, she worked in concert production and as a music librarian for several performing arts organizations in Boston, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Landmarks Orchestra, Handel and Haydn Society, and Celebrity Series of Boston. Most recently, she transitioned from a production role to a marketing one at Sarasota Orchestra in Sarasota, FL, where she held the title of Director of Marketing Operations.
Welcome Igor, Kira, and Audrey!
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Old Items — New Finds!
While going through books and scores, Marissa Plati found a Universal Edition mini score of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony op. 9. As she was beginning to catalog it, she opened the score to find a letter written to Peter Hewitt from John Cage about preparing the piano for A Valentine Out of Season. Additionally, the score includes an inscription and signature by Schoenberg himself to Richard Buhlig.
Special Events
This semester we are enjoying guest performances with Richard Savino and El Mundo, the amazing Meredith Monk as well as the first solo recital with our College Organist Weicheng Zhao.
Performing Ensembles
The POMONA COLLEGE BAND, conducted by Graydon Beeks, is scheduled to perform concerts on November 8 and 10. The program will feature new compositions by Sergio Barer, Carol Brittin Chambers, and Shuying Li, as well as works by Gustav Holst, Karl Kohn, Frank Ticheli, and others.
This fall the POMONA COLLEGE CHOIR, led by Professor Donna M. Di Grazia, will be offering an exciting combination of early and modern music in its November concerts. Anchoring the program are Grammy® Award-winning composer Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands (2014) and the musical model on which it is based, Dieterich Buxtehude’s “Ad manus” (“To the hands”) from his seven-cantata work titled Membra Jesu nostri (1680). The 80-voice choir will be joined by a chamber ensemble of early and modern instruments, played by members of our faculty and other professionals from the Los Angeles area.
Using quotes from Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” (1883), itself inspired by another work of art—the Statue of Liberty—Shaw refashions Buxtehude’s original text and music to create a meditation on human immigration as both a hopeful act pursued by those needing refuge, and on society’s responsibility to uphold the historical ideals of liberty and freedom that ultimately should reflect a fulfillment of that promise. The concert will begin with Bach’s Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BWV 225; it will conclude in a more reflective mood with John Cameron’s Lux aeterna, an arrangement of the widely recognized “Nimrod” theme from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations.
Under the leadership of Professor Donna M. Di Grazia, the POMONA COLLEGE GLEE CLUB concerts in Berkeley, Palo Alto, Portland, and Seattle last May with the early music ensemble Harmonologia Pomona drew enthusiastic audiences of family and friends at each stop, including a strong turnout by alumni of the choral program, the Music Department, and the College more broadly. It was wonderful to see so many faces from the past, many of whom joined us at the end of each performance to sing Amazing Grace and Over the Years. The instrumental ensemble, which included professors Malachai Bandy and Alfred Cramer, as well as our beloved viola teacher, Cindy Fogg, was magnificent and supported the student soloists and full ensemble beautifully.
POMONA COLLEGE JAZZ ENSEMBLE, led by Barb Catlin, will present a dedication to Benny Golson and feature music from the Hard Bop Era on November 19. Mr. Golson, who composed iconic Hard Bop repertoire (“I Remember Clifford,” “Whisper Not,” and “Killer Joe”), played saxophone in the Jazz Messengers, and had a second career writing music for television, died on September 21, 2024. Pomona seniors Jeremy Martin and Ryan Caton will be featured on selections by Cedar Walton, Horace Silver, Bobby Timmons, and Thad Jones.
The POMONA COLLEGE ORCHESTRA, Eric Lindholm, conductor, is embarking on an ambitious season. Its October program included two showpieces written 110 years apart: the first by Mozart, his flashy “Paris” Symphony K. 297, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s beloved Scheherazade, last performed by the orchestra in February 2006. In November, the PCO will have the rare opportunity to perform with one of the principal players from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, cellist Robert deMaine. DeMaine will present the new concerto written for him by Professor Emeritus Tom Flaherty, in what will be the premiere performances with orchestra. Also on the November program will be Nielsen’s evocative and mysterious Pan and Syrinx, the delightful suite from Prokofiev’s film score Lieutenant Kijé, and Richard Strauss’s virtuosic and exhilarating Till Eulenspiegel.
POMONA COLLEGE BALINESE GAMELAN ENSEMBLE, Giri Kusuma, under the leadership of directors I Nyoman and Nanik Wenten, hosted a special visit in October by Made Agus Wardana (Bili Ciaaattt), demonstrating his unique vocal style of gamelan mulut. Giri Kusuma will perform on Monday, December 2 in Bridges Hall of Music.
POMONA COLLEGE WEST AFRICAN MUSIC ENSEMBLE, Nani Agbeli, director, has been busy with rehearsals preparing for their November 25th performance.
Faculty News
Assistant Professor Malachai Komanoff Bandy is beginning his third year on the full-time faculty after an energizing summer. He was fortunate to spend the month of June doing archival research pertaining to Dieterich Buxtehude’s vocal works at the Ritman Library (Amsterdam), the Stadtbibliothek Lübeck (Germany), and the Düben Collection (Uppsala, Sweden). The following month, he organized and chaired a panel on Musica Poetica at the 24th Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric in Vancouver. He was excited to present a related paper at October’s AMS Pacific Southwest Chapter meeting.
As a performer, Malachai’s semester began with TV season premieres featuring his string solos: The Serpent Queen and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. After presenting seventeenth-century solo lyra-viol works at Pomona’s 2024 Convocation ceremony, he performed Heinrich Biber’s complete Mystery Sonatas with violinist Andrew McIntosh in September at CSUN; other engagements through December include concerts with Cornucopia Baroque, Bach Collegium San Diego, Tesserae, and more. Malachai is especially excited to collaborate with PCC and Professor Di Grazia in “Ad Manus” from Membra Jesu nostri, the subject of his book project in early development. He is having a fabulous time teaching Engaging Music and Queer Voices in Music, and in reprising the department’s Writing Group (Fridays, 2:30 p.m., Victor Montgomery Music Library). All are welcome!
Associate Professor Alfred Cramer published a chapter, “The Romantic Melodic Code: What Stenography Tells Us About Mid-Nineteenth-Century Music,” in the New Approaches to Shorthand: Studies of a Writing Technology, edited by Kelly McCay and Hannah Boeddeker, and published by De Gruyter. In September he performed as a violinist on campus in two Friday Noon Concerts. One was a concert of music by Krieger and Handel with the Cornucopia Baroque Ensemble, a group of Pomona colleagues. The other was a concert by the newly reconstituted Claremont Colleges Faculty Mariachi. He also gave a short presentation on Klangfarbenmelodie (tone-color melody) in Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin and Piano, op. 47 at a gathering celebrating Schoenberg’s 150th birthday at the Westside Music Conservatory and enjoyed catching up with former Pomona German Department colleague Barbara Schoenberg, the composer’s daughter-in-law.
Professor Donna M. Di Grazia continues her work as the conductor of the Pomona College Choir and Glee Club, committee service for the American Choral Directors Association, and several other professional service efforts for other academic institutions. She is also teaching a music history seminar for music majors on concert life in the nineteenth century.
Assistant Professor Melissa Givens continued her performing on campus this fall as a featured soloist with guitarist/director Richard Savino and the period instrument chamber ensemble El Mundo, along with other appearances.
Last April Genevieve Feiwen Lee performed piano quartets by Alberto Colla, Caroline Shaw, and Robert Schumann as a member of the Manzanita Quartet. The concert will be repeated at the University of Redlands. Her Mojave Trio (with sisters Maggie and Sara Parkins) was in residence at UC Davis in mid-May where they coached undergraduates and chamber ensembles, premiered graduate composer works, and performed a concert of works by Muhly, Diáz, Gao Ping, and Rebecca Clarke. The concert was repeated at Pomona.
Genevieve’s March solo concert for Piano Spheres was recently posted on YouTube. The San Francisco Classical Voice gave her a glowing review, writing that “the work’s musical language is technically demanding, neatly compassed by Lee, replete with intense flurries and suspended at the evocatively unfinished finish.” Continuing a busy month, she was a judge at Oakland University’s (Michigan) 2024 Piano Day Competition for young pianists, returning to Oakland this fall to play with pianist Tian Tian in a repeat of their program of solo and duo works.
Over the summer, Genevieve returned to New York’s Chamber Music Conference to coach high-level amateur musicians and perform with other faculty, participated in the Redfish Music Festival (Crescent City, CA), and traveled to the Garth Newel Music Center where she coached student groups as well as played the 2-piano works of Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saëns, and Brahms.
This fall she collaborated with the Eclipse Quartet, and to her solo recital during Family Weekend that includes pieces for French harpsichord and new piano works.
Professor Eric Lindholm‘s summer projects included serving on the search committee for the college’s new Vice President and Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid. He has worked to get a better understanding of the lighting issues in Bridges Hall of Music, partnering with other faculty and staff to identify persistent problems and brainstorm paths to improvement. The music publisher G. Schirmer has expressed interest in his orchestrations of songs by Florence Price, and other musicians and scholars familiar with Price’s music have also requested scores and/or recordings. Prof. Lindholm’s preparation for the 2024-25 season of the Pomona College Orchestra has included consulting with Tom Flaherty about some of the finer details of his Cello Concerto. As a member of the Manzanita Piano Quartet, he gave an October performance at the University of Redlands, featuring music by Alberto Colla, Caroline Shaw, and Robert Schumann.
In May, Joti Rockwell, Associate Professor, gave a talk entitled “Music in Motion, Music as Motion” at UC Irvine, as the keynote lecture for the joint meeting of the regional music theory and musicology societies. It contained research and performance on the pedal steel guitar, some of which will be featured in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Music Theory. In June, he spent a week at the Library of Congress studying historical sheet music by the mandolinist, xylophonist, and composer Carlos Curti. This fall, he is teaching an ID1 course entitled Music and Food. In September, he joined Celliola on mandola and mandolin, playing music by Tom Flaherty and Michael Abels, and performs on vihuela with the Claremont Colleges Faculty Mariachi group.
Associate Professor Gibb Schreffler is awaiting the publication of several finished writings, including the third and final piece of his previous sabbatical research project on the co-development of sailors’ work-songs and sailing ships’ anchor-raising technologies. “‘A Very Ingenious Invention’: Sailing Ship Windlass Technology and the Burgeoning of Sailors’ Chanties” will be published in the Fall issue of American Music.
With that project wrapped up, Professor Schreffler has begun drafting a book on the African American heritage of the chanty genre, covering its roots in Black Americans’ canoe paddling, corn shucking, steamboat, and firefighting songs, along with the persistence of the genre’s form through blues, rock, and rap.
In March, Professor Schreffler arranged the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Southern California and Hawai’i Chapter at Pomona. He has begun a two-year term as President of that organization.
Emeritus Faculty
In addition to conducting the Pomona College Band, Graydon Beeks jjoined his Cornucopia Baroque Ensemble colleagues in March as harpsichordist for a program of music by Handel and Telemann. In May, he participated in the Editorial Board Meeting of the Hallische-Händel-Ausgabe and as one of three Vice-Presidents of the International Georg-Friedrich-Händel Gesellschaft at its annual Board Meeting. His article “Coriolano Transformed: The Early History of Aristi’s First Royal Academy Opera” was published in the 2024 Händel-Jahrbuch.
Tom Flaherty has been busy composing and performing since his retirement. He has already presented his Celliola concert and has been working closely with Eric Lindholm on the upcoming orchestral premiere of his Cello Concerto later in the semester.
William Peterson, in addition to other projects, presented a recital of organ music by J.S. Bach on September 29 this year.
Student Happenings
Music major Willa Albrecht ’25 worked as Professor Bandy’s SURP-funded research assistant in June and July, remotely processing images of Dieterich Buxtehude’s seventeenth-century manuscript sources as Professor Bandy collected them. Willa’s editorial tasks lay groundwork for eventual critical editions of works that Artifex Consort plans to perform and record in the coming years: her duties included proofing manuscript details against those concordant sources in other library archives, as well as interpreting and entering musical and textual material from these sources into professional engraving software.
Also participating in SURP projects, guided by Professor Rockwell, were Matthew Cheong ’27 who explored the idea of translation in American roots music, and Melinda Yang ’25 whose independent project entitled Setting Math to Music brought together mathematics and musical composition.
Ella Tzeng ‘27 participated last summer as a student member of the Redfish Music Festival through a McCord/Lindstrom Music Department grant.
Nick Payton ’25, with the support of a McCord/Lindstrom grant and the Department of German and Russian’s Brueckner Summer Travel Grant, spent part of the summer in Berlin taking a course in studio recording and studying electroacoustic music.
Alumni Spotlight
The Music Department’s Outside the Box fund supports occasional presentations by individuals who have pursued musical careers outside the usual avenues. Just such a person will be on campus on November 21 to share her thoughts about careers: Whitney Henderson, Pomona class of 2004.
As a high-school senior, Whitney was planning to play Division I tennis in the Ivy League but happened to visit Pomona during a vacation. Classes were not in session and few people were around, but Whitney liked the campus and changed her plan. She first studied physics at Pomona but gravitated more and more to the Music Department, taking guitar lessons and playing trombone in the band, then taking music theory and finding a way to spend a semester abroad studying only music in Edinburgh. As a music major, she enjoyed composition assignments, ear-training labs, learning about the history of American music, and even playing percussion with the Pomona College Orchestra. On top of all that, Whitney was selected as an All-American tennis player three times!
After graduation, Whitney soon settled in Seattle, where she has found interesting and unexpected ways to make a living. While earning a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Washington, Whitney became expert at teaching and designing online music-history courses. There was also a four-year stint as Program Manager for Amazon’s Consumer Space Team. (No, it didn’t involve rocket ships. The job was to find and furnish workspaces for teams of Amazon employees.) Whitney also operates side businesses as a real-estate analyst and an editor.
Whitney’s doctoral research focused on the early-twentieth-century history of the Ladies Music Club of Seattle, an important organization for the promotion of music by women. Eventually the LMC hired her to organize and digitize its archives—an experience that led to a master’s degree in library science. Whitney is now Executive Director of the LMC, overseeing programs that include sponsorship of over 50 concerts per season, placement of musical artists in elementary schools, and an annual competition for early-career performers.
Whitney’s research continues. An illustrated book on the history of the LMC is forthcoming, and she’ll give a presentation at the annual Society for American Music conference in the spring. She is the proud owner of a baroque guitar built by long-time Pomona guitar teacher Jack Sanders, and she still practices. “Since I’m around performers all the time, I’m inspired to continue tinkering.” Whitney’s career has taken several turns that no one could have predicted, but, she says, “Everything I did at Pomona really set the stage for what I’ve been doing ever since.”
Alumni News
Ava Tiller (’23) is a new member of the Arlington Chorale located in Virginia.
Rozy Falzon (’23) joined the Pacific Chorale in Orange County, California in spring 2024.
Shaheed Muhammad (’21) is in his fourth year at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. During his time there, he has worked with the school’s narrative medicine curriculum to build a session that uses music to teach active listening, leadership styles, communication skills, and empathy to providers. In doing so, he brought together two student ensembles to perform and record a jazz and classical piece to use as learning material. As a cellist, he selected the classical piece, transposed parts, and performed with the ensemble.
Cherise Higgins (’21) began the combined M.A./Ph.D. program in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley this fall. Her current research areas of focus include vocality, Black vernacular music, and identity/subject formation. She is spending this first semester understanding how the voice and body can be a site of resistance.
Lucy Geller (’21) began the two-year M.M. program in Contemporary Musical Arts at New England Conservatory in Boston this fall.
Matthew Cook (’20) sang the role of Garibaldo in Handel’s opera Rodelinda with Neo Opera of San Diego, CA on May 17-18, 2024. In July and August, he participated in the Baroque Vokal Akademie in Mainz, Germany.
Lydia Saylor (’18) sang Joel Mandelbaum’s The Past is Now with a string orchestra composed of students, faculty, and friends of the Aaron Copland School of Music under the direction of Bridget Kinneary in June 2024. In July she sang the role of Morgana in Handel’s Alcina at the Saluzzo Opera Academy in Saluzzo, Italy.
Margaret Hunter (’00) appeared as soprano soloist with Capella de la Torre in the program “Choral-Metamorphosen von Luther bis Bach” at Bachfest in Leipzig, Germany in June, and in the program “Melancholia UNCOVERED” in the series Renaissance Musik an Elba und Weser 2024 in the Agustinum in Braunschweig in the same month.
Carlo Caballero (’89) organized a music festival at the University of Colorado, Boulder in February/March 2024 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of composer Gabriel Fauré’s death. The festival was comprised of four concerts, nine premieres, and a scholarly conference over the course of a week. Details may be found at Fauré Centennial Festival in Boulder, Feb. 27–March 3 2024.
Raj Bhimani (’82) will present a concert at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center featuring a piano work by Germaine Tailleferre, which he composed in New York. It was discovered in the library’s collection after his March concert of previously unpublished piano works by the composer. The upcoming program will also include piano transcriptions of movements from Tailleferre’s 1951 opera Il était un Petit Navire and works by Mozart and Brahms.
Chris Nichols (’75) reports that, after many years of singing as a baritone he has in recent years been exploring the repertoire for spinto tenor and helden tenor. A music major at Pomona focusing on composition, he has carried his music making forward as “the world’s greatest avocation.”
Lawrence Moss (’49), who died in 2022 after a distinguished career as a composer and professor of music at Mills College, Yale University, the University of Maryland, and Tianjin Conservatory of Music in China, is memorialized on the album Unseen Paths (Navona Records label) with chamber and solo piano music and two one-act comic operas. In a review in the August 2024 issue of Gramophone, Donald Rosenberg describes Moss as “a prime example of a curious composer keen to explore as many musical paths as possible.”
We hope you will share your music-specific happenings with us for our next Music Gazette. Submit to: audrey.dunne@pomona.edu
Please email broader life submissions to the PC Magazine at:pcmnotes@pomona.edu.