Department News
The fall semester has begun in Thatcher, with students and faculty returning from summer endeavors that you can read about here.
Our classrooms and performance spaces are improved and tuned up for the fall’s dynamic mix of classes and concerts, which kicked off with a two-piano Friday Noon concert and Celliola. Little Bridges has new acoustic shades, and the Thatcher classrooms have new audio/video systems. People returning to the department have encountered some lovely musical instruments that have been added to the family, thanks to generous donors: a clavichord, virginal, guitar amplifier, tenor saxophone, and continuo organ.
We send our best wishes to Connie Deeter, who retired from teaching bass at Pomona College, and Igor Santos, who is beginning a position this fall as Assistant Professor of Music at Cornell University. Our class of 2025 graduates are now off to the next chapter of their careers as alums, while the class of 2029 starts anew. Ryan Baird is joining us in a continuing capacity as Lecturer in Bass, and Ania Vu is joining the faculty as Assistant Professor of Music. The semester offers a wide array of music by faculty, guests, and students, including a concert featuring Nmon Ford, our Fête Musicale, performances by Genevieve Lee, a celebration of Lori Laitman, a tribute to Karl Kohn, a trio performance led by Okaidja Afroso, and concerts by our stellar ensembles.
– Joti Rockwell, Department Chair
Of Special Note
We are delighted that Anh Dang Minh (Ania) Vu begins at Pomona College this fall as Assistant Professor in composition. She comes to Claremont from Chicago, where this past year she was a Lecturer in composition at both Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.M. in Music Composition and Theory from the Eastman School of Music with a minor in social psychology from the University of Rochester. She is a composer, pianist, and educator whose work explores the interplay between sound, language, time, and the laws of nature. She is fluent in four languages, including Polish and Vietnamese, and has received fellowships from the American Opera Project, the Tanglewood Music Center, Yaddo, and Copland House. Welcome, Ania!
Summer 2025
We were fortunate to have five students working in the department this summer. Deanna Perlov ’28 assisted with faculty research projects involving cataloguing musical scores; Adam Long ’27 and Beth Gardner SC ’25 worked on curriculum development and course technology with Alfred Cramer; Sofia Centeno ’26 worked as a department assistant throughout the month of July; and Sophie Park ’28 joined us in August as a student recording engineer. Our curriculum and departmental spaces are dramatically better due to the excellent work of these students.
Special Events
This November we will have a special tribute concert to celebrate the music and legacy of our dear Karl Kohn, who passed away last fall. Current and past faculty, along with students, will perform works by Kohn, Flaherty, and Schoenberg. This semester’s visiting artists Nmon Ford, Lori Laitman, and Okaidja Afroso will present to various classes as part of their residencies.
Performing Ensembles
The Pomona College Band, conducted by Graydon Beeks, will perform concerts on November 8 and 10. The program will feature premiere performances of two organ pieces by Alexandre Guilmant arranged by Stephen Klein, plus works by Arthur Bliss, Gustav Holst, John Frantzen, and others.
The centerpiece of the Pomona College Choir’s Fall 2025 concert, under direction of Donna M. Di Grazia, will be Tarik O’Regan’s Triptych (2005) for mixed chorus and percussion. This seventeen-minute work features texts from a wide variety of literary sources and cultural traditions, including excerpts from texts by John Milton, William Penn, Muhammad Rajab Al-Bayoumi (an Egyptian poet), William Blake, Rumi (a thirteenth-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic), William Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy, as well as short passages from the Jewish Reform prayerbook Shaarei Teshuva (“Gates of Repentance”), and from an ancient Persian text linked to Zoroastrianism, the ninth-century Indian Bundahishn. The Choir will be joined by eight percussionists, all of whom have studied with our department’s percussion teacher, Theresa Dimond. Paired with this work will be various shorter pieces from Central America, Spain, and Portugal.
Led by Donna M. Di Grazia, the Pomona College Glee Club’s concerts in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and New York City in May 2025 drew enthusiastic audiences of alumni, family, and friends of the choral program, the Music Department, and the College more broadly. In addition to four full-length concerts, the Glee Club enjoyed two energetic choral exchanges with high school programs from which Pomona’s ensemble had alumni: River Forest/Oak Park High School in Oak Park, and LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts in Manhattan. Earlier in the month, they also gave a twenty-minute performance at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
In May, the Pomona College Jazz Ensemble and director Barb Catlin welcomed Bobby Bradford, now 91, back to the Little Bridges stage as part of their Alumni Weekend concert. Following an unusually large senior class departure, the ensemble is excited to welcome a wave of new talent. The musicians are eager to rise to the occasion and bring fresh energy to the ensemble. The November 18th concert will showcase women composers, iconic compositions, and two vocal selections.
The Pomona College Orchestra, Eric Lindholm, conductor, is welcoming 24 new members following its Fall 2025 auditions. The first program featured the Three Northeastern Landscapes by local composer Tao Mijares, Kaija Saariaho’s Ciel d’hiver, Mahler’s Totenfeier, and the Slavonic Dance, op. 72, no. 7 by Dvořák. In November, the orchestra will present a single work, the massive and extravagant Symphony No. 2 by Rachmaninoff. The orchestra’s annual concerto competition will be held in late October, most likely to select a single soloist to appear on the February 27 and March 1, 2026 concerts. Be sure to check out the Pomona College Orchestra channel on YouTube!
In May, the Pomona College Balinese Gamelan Ensemble, Giri Kusuma, celebrated 50 years of directors I Nyoman and Nanik Wenten teaching Indonesian music and dance in Southern California. Giri Kusuma will perform on Monday, December 1 in Bridges Hall of Music.
The Pomona College West African Music Ensemble, Nani Agbeli, director, has been busy with rehearsals preparing for their November 24th performance.
Faculty News
Assistant Professor Malachai Komanoff Bandy is spending Steele Leave at Chicago’s Newberry Library, from whom he was fortunate to secure a nine-month fellowship to support work on his first book. In both written and performative capacities, his summer was productive and energizing: in July he played in the Oregon Bach Festival’s Pacific Northwest tour of J. S. Bach’s Markus Passion and joined The Gesualdo Six in LA for two performances of Secret Byrd, a staged 1590s underground Catholic mass. He then presented a paper at the 21st Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (Birmingham, UK) before joining Professors Di Grazia and Cramer at the 25th Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (Copenhagen, Denmark), where he chaired three music panels and presented another paper. In August, Prof. Bandy served on faculty at Viols West (San Luis Obispo) and directed live music for a staged reading of LIKE AS THE HART, a new play by Oliver Mayer exploring J. S. Bach’s 1705 trip to meet the composer Dieterich Buxtehude, whose music Prof. Bandy’s book project treats.
Although safeguarding precious calendar-space for writing, Prof. Bandy is enjoying a select few scholarly diversions: programming and directing a viol consort-song program for Tesserae Baroque in September, spending a weekend teaching at ViolSphere2 (Oracle, AZ) in October, organizing a panel for the American Musicological Society’s annual meeting in November, and joining Voices of Music (San Francisco) on newly commissioned Renaissance viols for a project handling 16th-c. music printed by Ottaviano Petrucci.
Associate Professor Alfred Cramer has an article in the publication pipeline about structural features shared by musical melody and spoken pitch. Cramer’s software for applying the Implication-Realization model of melodic analysis to speech intonation is available at https://acramer.sites.pomona.edu/irprosodyparser/, with instructions co-authored by recent Pomona music graduate Melinda Yang. As a violinist, last spring he performed works by Brahms and Pauline Viardot with pianist Phillip Young and works by Telemann, Purcell, and Buxtehude with the Cornucopia Baroque Ensemble on campus, as well as playing baroque violin with the Con Gioia ensemble in Sierra Madre. This fall he will join his Pomona faculty colleagues in Cornucopia for a performance of music by Telemann, Handel, and Boismortier. Over the summer he gave presentations on Woody Guthrie’s song “This Land Is Your Land” at Pilgrim Place in Claremont and at the biennial meeting of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Professor Donna M. Di Grazia presented her paper “The Power of Silence in Nineteenth-Century Music” on July 24 at the Twenty-Fifth Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric held in Copenhagen, Denmark. The session was one of two organized by her colleague, Assistant Professor of Music Malachai Bandy. Earlier in the spring semester, she prepared the Pomona College Choir for its collaborative performances with the College Orchestra, and she conducted the Glee Club in a series of full-length and shorter performances both on campus and on tour to the Midwest and East Coast.
Associate Professor Melissa Givens was a featured soloist in Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepherd with Pasadena Pro Musica under the baton of Scott Lehmkuhl, Lecturer in Voice. The concert took place at First United Methodist Church, Pasadena in June. She also participated in a pre-show interview with KUSC’s Jennifer Miller about her nine-year history with the work, from its conception to the present. Prof. Givens wrote the program notes for the latest album release by Conspirare (Craig Hella Johnson, Artistic Director). The album, advena: liturgies for a broken world, consists of four works by noted Houston composer Mark
Buller on text by renowned writers Leah Lax and Euan Tait. It is distributed by Divine Art recordings and is available on all platforms.
During her sabbatical, Genevieve Lee worked behind the scenes with the founder and director of Redfish Music Festival (RMF), Fritz Gearhart. She helped with administrative tasks, organizational decisions, grant proposals, and the design of a new summer festival brochure. RMF connects classical chamber music to the under-served communities along Southern Oregon’s south coast, providing affordable live concerts and donor-supported free tickets in partnership with local organizations, churches, and libraries. Prof. Lee and RMF colleagues embarked on a tour of the coast in March; she returned to the festival in late July, performing piano quartets of Beethoven and Fauré and coaching chamber music groups of undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate students.
As a guest artist at the Garth Newel Music Center Summer Festival, Prof. Lee played 2-piano works of Darius Milhaud, Gabriella Smith, Maurice Ravel, and Florent Schmitt, and 8-hand arrangements of works by Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt. The concerts are available on YouTube. EarRelevant, Atlanta’s online source for classical and post-classical music journalism, reviewed the Aug. 17 concert and interviewed Lee for an article on the music of Florent Schmitt.
On campus, the Mojave Trio (with Maggie Parkins and Mona Tian) collaborated with Gary Champi, Assistant Professor of Dance, for the Spring Dance Concert. Champi created original choreography to Daniel Temkin’s Flow for seven dancers. This fall, Prof. Lee premiered a new commission by Mary Ellen Childs on a solo recital that included a Debussy set, Tom Flaherty’s ConcorDance, and pieces by Ives and Beethoven. Other collaborations include Celliola; Lori Laitman’s 70th birthday celebration; chamber music with Gary Bovyer, Sarah Thornblade, and Maggie Parkins; and a tribute concert in honor of Karl Kohn’s legacy as a composer and pianist.
Professor Eric Lindholm‘s summer projects included selecting upcoming repertoire for the Pomona College Orchestra, which involved carefully assessing more than a dozen works for appeal, level of difficulty, quality of the available materials, experience of the rehearsal process, historical and cultural diversity, and overall programming coherence. Through that process, he met with Pomona-based composer Tao Mijares and worked with him to create an updated edition of his Three Northeastern Landscapes, which the orchestra performed in October. Prof. Lindholm also created a new edition of the Zwei Lieder, op. 28 for voice, cello, and piano by Josephine Lang (1815–1880), which he performed with baritone Nmon Ford and pianist Gayle Blankenberg in September. He also made a new inventory of the department’s string instrument and bow collection, and led an initiative with Pomona’s trumpet teacher, John Aranda, to acquire two new C trumpets to add to the department’s collection. Together with his wife and daughter, he visited Vienna and Salzburg for 12 days in June and July.
In May, Joti Rockwell published the article “Theorizing Musical Motion, Moving with the Steel Guitar” in vol. 68, no. 2 of Journal of Music Theory. In June, he attended the Los Angeles Gamelan Festival at the Indonesian Consulate in Los Angeles, where he formally recognized I Nyoman Wenten and Nanik Wenten for their decades of work at Pomona College and their fifty years of teaching Indonesian music and Dance in California. Later that month, he accompanied Peter Harper’s “Heart Tour” on mandolin, theremin, guitar, and keytar for two weeks of performances in southern France. This tour included a collaboration with the Arles Conservatory of Music and Centre for Cultural Development in Saint-Martin de Crau, where there was a culminating concert with a children’s choir in the city’s bullfighting arena. As of July, he begins a three-year term as Reviews Editor for the journal Music Theory Spectrum.
Associate Professor Gibb Schreffler saw the publication of two of his works in very different areas this past Spring. First, “Reclaiming ‘Shenandoah’: A Recovery of Working Chanty Form” (Folk Music Journal 12.5) reconstructs the way a famous American song was traditionally sung in application to nineteenth-century sailors’ shipboard labor. Second, a long-form article in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Sikhism, Vol. 2 elucidates the complicated history of musical phenomena and concepts that the Sikh religious community associates with the identity of their faith.
Prof. Schreffler also began drafting the manuscript of his next book, concerning the African American heritage of sailors’ work-songs. This research intersected with his teaching, through the course American Maritime Musical Worlds. As the capstone activity in the course, Prof. Schreffler led students aboard the brigantine Exy Johnson of San Pedro, wherein the class experienced sailing the vessel while applying their acquired knowledge of chanty singing to the work.
After directing the Society for Ethnomusicology Southern California and Hawai‘i Chapter’s annual conference in March, Prof. Schreffler entered his second year as President of the organization.
Assistant Professor Ania Vu has had a busy year full of premieres and new projects. In March, her orchestral piece Water Realms was premiered by the Chicago Composers’ Orchestra, the largest new music ensemble in Chicago. Later that month, her string trio Four in the Morning received its premiere at James Madison University, and was performed again in Claremont on September 14 by Tom Flaherty, Cindy Fogg, and Rachel Vetter Huang. In May, she heard her first-ever carillon piece, Earth’s Farewell, come to life at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago by Alex Johnson and Kayla Gunderson.
Over the summer, Prof. Vu spent a month at the Yaddo Residency in Saratoga Springs, NY, composing two new works: 2<> for Ensemble Dal Niente, and Unveiling, a Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival commission premiered by the JACK Quartet. Beyond composing, she also served as a judge for the ASCAP 2025 Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and mentored young composers through the Suncoast Composer Fellowship Program in Sarasota, FL.
This fall at Pomona, she’s especially excited to be teaching Introduction to Electronic Music and Composition Since 1900, and to get to know her students and the Claremont community. In October, she will return to her alma mater, the Eastman School of Music, where the Zohn Collective will perform two of her vocal works; she will also give a guest talk at the first-year colloquium. On November 1, she will make her Claremont debut as a pianist, performing Karl Kohn’s San Gabriel Set alongside Tom Flaherty and Cindy Fogg.
Emeritus Faculty
Graydon Beeks conducted the Pomona College Band in a pair of concerts in April 2025 including premiere performances of Adventure in the Air by Mark Winges. In May, his article “William Croft’s References to Henry Purcell’s Settings of The Funeral Sentences” was published in a Festschrift. He also presented the paper ‘‘‘Some Overtures to be played before the First Lesson’: New Candidates” at the annual Handel Festival and Conference in Halle, Germany and took part in the meetings of the Editorial Board of the Hallische-Händel-Ausgabe and the Vorstand of the Georg-Friedrich-Händel Gesellschaft. In July, he presented the paper “Odes & Songs on St. Cecilia’s Day and Other Occasions: The Secular Vocal Music of William Croft Reconsidered” at a conference in Birmingham, England.
Tom Flaherty had numerous works premiered this year, including Phoenix by Jennie Jung (piano) and Jin-Shan Dai (cello); Taking Flight and Bar Talk with Jonathan by Trio Euphoria (with Rachel V. Huang and Cindy Fogg); Cello Mashup by the National Cello Institute Orchestra; and Dream Fragments by Maggie Parkins (cello) and Alison Bjorkedal (harp). This year’s Celliola concert featured Trio Euphoria and colleagues Melissa Givens, Joti Rockwell, and Genevieve Feiwen Lee. His piano duo Taking the Fifths will appear on the Karl Kohn tribute concert in November.
William Peterson presented an organ demonstration in April for Joti Rockwell’s course, “Advanced Topics in Music Theory and Analysis.” The presentation included an introduction to the Hill Memorial Organ, built by C. B. Fisk of Gloucester, MA, and installed in Bridges Hall of Music in 2001, defining structural components of the organ from a builder’s perspective (with reference to the windchests, the pipework, and the key action). The demonstration ended with a discussion and a performance of J.S. Bach’s Fugue in C Major (BWV 545).
Student Happenings
Students ventured off-campus for multiple learning experiences this past spring. In February, Pomona College Orchestra members attended the LA Phil performance “Schubert, Strauss & Saariaho: Finnish superstars fulfill the ‘Unfinished’ and explore the mysteries of the afterlife.” In early March, music students attended the LA Opera’s performance of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Later that month, students in Gibb Schreffler’s course American Maritime Musical Worlds traveled to San Pedro to sail and perform chanties that coincided with their work aboard the Exy Johnson.
Music major Simon Shelley ’26 attended the Creative Musicians Retreat at the Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire in June. Over the course of 9 days, he participated in classes, attended workshops, and composed and performed music alongside 40 fellow musicians. His piece Sonos for violin and piano was performed by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble at the retreat.
Madyson Chung Lee SC ’27 spent the month of June in New York City researching the role that non-Western music plays in Western community settings. New York’s dense and diverse population made for the perfect setting to complete this research as various communities and individuals used music to grapple with the current political climate and state of the world. Her research ultimately revealed that non-Western music plays an integral role in protest, comfort with and within public spaces, and in self-expression and connection within the folds of daily New York City life.
Aria Wang ’27 conducted a student undergraduate research project (SURP) this summer, studying melodic properties of spoken English, French, and Mandarin in collaboration with Prof. Alfred Cramer.
Alumni Spotlight
Composer and conductor Nathan Henninger ’94 has just released his debut album, a recording made in the Teldex Studio in Berlin, Germany in 2023, of his Five Scenes for Orchestra, a 21-minute work for orchestra consisting of a prologue and five movements. A review in vinyl-fan.de describes it as a “Remarkable Debut” and a work of “fascinating sonic beauty.” Five Scenes for Orchestra is an expanded version of At Dusk, Nathan’s senior project at Pomona, which was performed in Little Bridges by the Pomona College Orchestra under the direction of Marc Lowenstein in April 1994. His advisor was Karl Kohn, who heard the recording of the new work “with much pleasure” and described it as “lush and rich. Bravo!”
Nathan was born in Toronto, Canada, where his father Richard Henninger ’66, also a composer, taught music theory and composition at the University of Toronto before studying computer sound synthesis at Stanford University and transitioning into a career as a software architect. His mother, Polly (Johnson) Henninger ’67, was a neuropsychologist with a keen interest in music, especially plainsong and chant, which she studied at Solesmes, France, and opera. She was also an avid choral singer, so there was always music in his life. Growing up, Nathan split his time between Ontario, where he graduated from high school, and Pasadena, California, where close relatives lived.
At Pomona, Nathan majored in music and studied theory and composition with Karl Kohn and Tom Flaherty, as well as piano. He also played horn in the orchestra and sang in the College Choir, the Glee Club, the Madrigals, and the Men’s Blue & White. After teaching music at Rim of the World High School for three years, he continued his training at the Juilliard School and Greenwich House Music School, both in New York City. At the latter, he studied piano with Taka Kigawa for ten years and concertized regularly. He also continued his choral singing with the Riverside Choral Society and the Collegiate Chorale.
In 2019, just before the pandemic, Nathan got a job teaching piano at a conservatory on the island of Terceira, learned Portuguese, and settled into the natural environment of the Azores, where he is now based and from which he derives inspiration. He visits New York and travels frequently but always looks forward to returning to Portugal.
In recent years Nathan has focused his attention increasingly on film music, having attended the Hollywood Music Workshop in Baden, Austria in 2023 and received a Graduate Certificate in Scoring for Film, TV and Video Games from the Film Scoring Academy of Europe in Sofia, Bulgaria in the same year. He describes his musical style as combining elements of traditional symphonic music with impressionism and a cinematic sensibility somewhere between John Williams and Gustav Holst. In June 2025 he recorded his Romanza, for String Orchestra, Piano, and Percussion at Rottenbiller Hall in Budapest. It will be released in February 2026.
For more information, visit nathanhenninger.com.
Alumni News
Jacqueline Cordes ’25 released her new album Frozen Star and music video, “The Puppetmaker.” Her soundtrack written for the short film “Three Angles” is coming soon. Jacqueline shared her synesthetic perspective in a webinar titled “How to Create Colorful Music”; co-authored the peer-reviewed article “How Vast is Music—Creating ‘The Fibonacci Variations’ with Colors and Scales,” published in The Fibonacci Quarterly; and was profiled in the Claremont Courier in August.
Andrew Zhao ’22 has received a Master of Arts in piano performance from the Royal Academy of Music in London, and has been accepted into the Yale University School of Music Doctor of Musical Arts program in the same field beginning this fall.
Sean Smith ’22 was selected as one of thirteen Composition Fellows for the 2025 PREMIERE|Project Festival sponsored by Choral Arts Initiative, an award-winning professional ensemble based in Irvine, CA, known for championing new choral music. Designed as a professional development experience that models the commissioning process, the festival concluded with live and recorded premieres.
Matthew Cook ’20 has taken the position of assistant choirmaster at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Corona del Mar, CA. This summer he sang solo recitals at the Sharon L. Morse Performing Arts Center in The Villages, FL, at Messiah United Methodist Church in West Springfield, VA, and at St. Michael and All Angels. He also played a solo organ recital at Burke United Methodist Church in Burke, VA.
Evelyn Saylor ’13 presented a concert of her own works at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City on July 24.
She was joined by Lydia Saylor ’16 and Myra Smith ’16. In June, Evelyn’s music was performed at ShapeShifter Lab and her audiovisual installation Sulfur and Arsenic was exhibited at Museum Mile Festival, also in NYC. Several of these projects were the result of a two-week residency at the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
Jennifer Locke ’03 has been promoted to Senior Director of Fellowship and Scholar Programs at Occidental College. In this role she will continue to lead the Office of National and International Fellowships while also overseeing the recruitment and administration of Oxy’s Barack Obama Scholars Program, including managing the program’s two funded summer experiences and postgraduate fellowship.
Margaret Hunter ’00 appeared as soprano soloist with Cantus Thuringia at the Festival Bachowski in Świndnica, Poland, on August 31 in a program of music by Dowland, Bennett, Locke, Purcell, and Tallis.
Lucy Shelton ’65 premiered the lead role of Lili in Lucidity with On Site Opera in Manhattan in November 2024, followed by performances in Seattle and Ithaca. Created by composer Laura Kaminsky and librettist David Cote, the opera explores the mind of a woman experiencing dementia and the effects of her cognitive decline on those around her. This year Lucy was honored with the President’s Medal of Distinguished Service by the Manhattan School of Music, where she has taught in the Contemporary Performance Program since 2007.