Spring 2026 Music Gazette

Greetings from the Music Department! Spring 2026 began with wonderful concerts including a student performance of Beethoven’s 5th and 9th sonatas for piano and violin on January 30. That same afternoon, we also got to hear a rollicking start to the Friday Noon Concert Series with Gayle Blankenburg and Mark Menzies playing a Lou Harrison polka. A special Ussachevsky Memorial Festival featured a passing of the baton from Tom Flaherty to Ania Vu, who directed it for the first time. Classes have begun, with students studying, writing, rehearsing, and preparing for culminating work later in the semester. In addition to the department’s core classroom courses in history, theory, and ethnomusicology, this spring also has offerings including Orchestration; Musical Storytelling; Perception, Cognition, and the History of Sound; and Jamaican Musical Aesthetics. We are delighted to welcome back Scott Graff, who is teaching voice this semester, and William Appleton ’14, who is teaching “Materials of Music.” Some of the concerts to look forward to later in the semester include the Artifex Consort, the Srivani Jade Ensemble, and the Choir and Orchestra collaboration. Whether it’s in Lyman or Bridges Hall of Music, elsewhere on campus, or outside of Claremont, we hope to see you soon!

– Joti Rockwell, Department Chair

In this Issue

Department News
Performing Ensembles
Faculty
Students
Alumni

Of Special Note

Congratulations are in order to our faculty and alumni members of the LA Master Chorale for their double GRAMMY® Award nomination in the Best Choral Performance category, with a win for Yanga by Gabriela Ortiz. The ensemble’s roster includes current Pomona faculty members Tamara Bevard, Scott Graff, Luc Kleiner, Scott Lehmkuhl, and Alina Roitstein, in addition to alumni Adrien Redford ’14 and Hayden Eberhart ’07. Bravi tutti!

In November, the Tribute to Karl Kohn concert brought many familiar faces and happy memories to Little Bridges. A heartfelt program note from Tom Flaherty sums it up: “Karl was an incredible role model for us all. Despite being talented and accomplished enough to rest on his laurels past his mid-twenties, he worked tirelessly, producing new compositions and playing challenging piano music into his late nineties. He produced an astonishing number of pieces and performed music of his own and others with unmatched clarity and verve.” The concert was a lively and fascinating snapshot into a lifetime of musical exploration, collaboration, and artistry.

This year’s Ussachevsky Memorial Festival of Electracoustic Music began a new chapter with the passing of the proverbial baton from Tom Flaherty to Ania Vu. The two performed a new work composed by Tom for the occasion, Choreomania. The festival welcomed composer-in-residence James Díaz and also featured works by Vu, Kyong Mee Choi, Bobby Ge, Tonia Ko, Leah Reid, Peter Shin, Kaija Saariaho, and visiting artist Cerulean S. Payne-Passmore. 
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Special Events

Indian classical vocalist and composer Srivani Jade makes her Bridges Hall debut on April 4. Drawing on her background as an educator and scholar, along with training in the Kirana style of Hindustani music, Srivani shares aspects of this tradition that are less commonly heard on American stages.

In March, assistant professor Malachai Komanoff Bandy’s early music ensemble Artifex Consort will perform rarely heard works for three violas da gamba, including what may be the first modern performance of the complete six sonatas by English composer Benjamin Hely (d. 1699).
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Performing Ensembles

The POMONA COLLEGE BAND, conducted by Graydon Beeks, will perform concerts on April 24 and 26. The program will feature premiere performances of In This Breath by Shuying Li, and works by Scott Joplin, Gustav Holst, Roger Nixon, Alfred Reed, Matyas Seiber, and John Philip Sousa.

The POMONA COLLEGE CHOIR, led by Donna M. Di Grazia, gave two successful concerts in November featuring music from Spain and Central America, paired with Tarik O’Regan’s Triptych for choir and percussion ensemble. The Choir is deeply grateful to Theresa Dimond (Lecturer in Percussion) for her assistance in securing the freelance percussionists who performed alongside them. Also showcased on these concerts was the Music Department’s latest instrument acquisition, made possible by the Carol Baber Herman ’51 Musical Instrument Fund: a brand new digital Baroque continuo organ (op. 205) built by American organ builder Glenn Giuttari of Harpsichord Clearing House (Rehoboth, Massachusetts). The organ’s sounds reproduce sampled historical organs through the Hauptwerk computer program (Milan Digital Audio). This April, the Choir will join the Pomona College Orchestra in performances of Poulenc’s Gloria and Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem.

Under the leadership of Donna M. Di Grazia, the POMONA COLLEGE GLEE CLUB has embarked on its 2026 semester. An enthusiastic group of 34 singers performed at the annual Pacific Southwest Intercollegiate Choral Association festival in February, held this year at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, California. The clinician at this year’s festival was Cecilia Rydinger, Professor of Orchestral Conducting at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and Director of Orphei Drängar (Sweden). The Glee Club will be traveling to Colorado and New Mexico this May for its annual tour. Their program will highlight works by Caroline Shaw, Reena Esmail, Lucy Walker, Ethel Smyth, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, and Clara Schumann, among others.

The POMONA COLLEGE JAZZ ENSEMBLE, directed by Barb Catlin, will present two spring concerts. Their March performance featured small combos and big band arrangements, including a composition by Noah Straus PZ’26. Their Alumni Weekend concert on May 1 will be a Latin program with guest artists Lauren Ellis on percussion/drums, Francisco Torres on trombone, and Tom Luer on saxophone. The LA-based, GRAMMY®-nominated guests have played with artists from Poncho Sanchez and Bill Holman to Kurt Elling and Gordon Goodwin.

The POMONA COLLEGE ORCHESTRA, Eric Lindholm, conductor, presented a blockbuster program over the February/March weekend that included Respighi’s colorful and evocative Fountains of Rome (complete with organ!) and music by Debussy and Lili Boulanger. Matthew Chang ’27 joined the orchestra as soloist in the Violin Concerto No. 2 by Prokofiev, written at the same time as his great ballet Romeo and Juliet and the beloved children’s tale Peter and the Wolf. In April, the Orchestra will collaborate with the Pomona College Choir in Poulenc’s witty Gloria and the powerful and theatric Dona nobis pacem by Vaughan Williams. The Orchestra continues its practice of featuring works by composers from under-represented backgrounds alongside well-known standards.

POMONA COLLEGE BALINESE GAMELAN ENSEMBLE, Giri Kusuma, under the leadership of directors I Nyoman and Nanik Wenten, will perform on Monday, May 4 in Bridges Hall of Music.

POMONA COLLEGE AFRO-CUBAN MUSIC ENSEMBLE, Joe Addington, director, has been busy with rehearsals preparing for their April 27^th performance of music and dance from the Afro-Cuban Yoruba tradition.
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Faculty News

Assistant Professor Malachai Komanoff Bandy is continuing his Steele Leave as a fellow at Chicago’s Newberry Library, hard at work on his book project treating Dieterich Buxtehude’s 1680 Passion cycle Membra Jesu nostri. He is excited to share the recent publication of his chapter “Scordatura as Dispositio: Notation, Rhetorical Figure, and Visual Effect in Heinrich Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (c.1680)” in Jesuit Rhetoric across Space and Time: Local and Global Perspectives (Brill, Jesuit Studies series). Prof. Bandy has also shared recent work in spoken formats: in January, he gave a keynote talk on archival research and materiality at the Newberry Library’s 2026 Multidisciplinary Graduate Student Conference in Premodern Studies, before presenting on baroque musical passion theology on the Newberry’s public Colloquium series. In February, he presented a paper on early modern theology, anatomical dissection, and German baroque musical rhetoric at the annual meeting of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, before reworking that paper for the annual meeting of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music in April. Prof. Bandy is enjoying a spring of invigorating performance projects as well: he played baroque double bass with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (dir. Nicholas McGegan) in February, and in May he will appear as a viol soloist with Bach Collegium San Diego, before leading Artifex Consort from the viol on the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library concert series in La Jolla. He looks forward to rejoining the Music Department in the fall, with renewed energy and discoveries to share.

In November, Associate Professor Alfred Cramer published an article on the overlap between musical melody and spoken language entitled “Intervallic intonation: applying the Implication-Realization model of musical melody to speech intonation and prosody.” It appears in the online journal PLOS One. As a baroque violinist, in February he joined Pomona colleagues in the Cornucopia Baroque Ensemble for a performance of music by Telemann, Handel, and Boismortier. Last fall he performed in Los Angeles and Claremont with the Con Gioia Early Music Ensemble in works by Handel, Bach, and Mozart. In April he will participate in Con Gioia’s performance of works from Bach’s time in Weimar.

This semester Prof. Cramer is teaching Engaging Music (the Music Department’s introduction to music history) along with Perception, Cognition, and the History of Sound. An ongoing project of the latter course since it was first taught in 2013 has been an online map of the Claremont soundscape.

Professor Donna M. Di Grazia is working on a book chapter on the current state of research on Franz Liszt as a conductor for an edited volume on composer-conductors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to be published by Brepols (Turnhout, Belgium) later this year or in early 2027. She also remains fully engaged leading the Pomona College Choir and Glee Club, whose concert programs she curates and conducts.

Associate Professor Melissa Givens kicked off the fall semester performing with Celliola. She presented two lecture recitals in September as part of the Tippy McMichael Lecture Series at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, AR. The first was on the recently published art songs of Florence Price and the second was on Price’s newly published and lesser performed spiritual settings. In October, she brought her recital program “You Can Tell the World: Spirituals in Concert” to the Grace Church Concert Series at Grace Episcopal Church, The Plains, VA. On campus, she organized a celebration of the composer Lori Laitman on the occasion of her 70th birthday. Ms. Laitman coached our students, who performed a recital of her songs. The culminating event was concert of her art songs by the entire voice faculty, joined by some instrumental colleagues.

Professor Genevieve Lee has enjoyed several collaborations this season with her colleagues in a variety of instrumental combinations. She also performed with voice faculty Tamara Bevard, Scott Lemkuhl, Alina Roitstein, and new string bass faculty Ryan Baird for the first time. She continues to explore new music, finding it rewarding to work with composers Tom Flaherty, Lori Laitman, Mary Ellen Childs, and James Díaz. 2025 ended with a performance of the Chopin piano trio with violinist Tomasz Golka and cellist Clement Chow at the Helena Modjeska Festival in Los Angeles.

Prof. Lee opened the spring semester concert season with students Eva Chen ’27 and Aria Wang ’27 and a fun program of Beethoven’s “Spring” and “Kreutzer” sonatas. February was a short but busy month: for the annual Ussachevsky electro-acoustic music festival, she performed Kyong Mee Choi’s solo piano piece with fixed media and collaborated with new colleague Ania Vu and two guest percussionists in a work by composer-in-residence James Díaz. At CSU Northridge, she was invited to perform on a concert honoring the Cuban-American composer Aurelio de la Vega, playing with violinist Lorenz Gamma and cellist Kyle Champion. She was joined on campus by longtime chamber music pal, Tobias Werner, for a program featuring “three Bs” but including the lesser-known sonata of Mélanie Bonis.

In January and March, Prof. Lee returns to Redfish Music Festival with a set of winter concerts on the southern Oregon coast: Port Orford, North Bend, Brookings, and Bandon. She joined violinist Fritz Gearhart in a January program of Prokofiev, Beethoven, de Falla, and Quincy Porter. March concerts, with cellist Andrew Smith, will include trios by Mélanie Bonis, Frank Martin, and R. Schumann.

Professor Eric Lindholm continues to be immersed in his role as conductor of the Pomona College Orchestra. For the Orchestra’s performances of Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste this spring, he examined myriad inconsistencies and discrepancies in the known versions of the musical material of this brilliant but harmonically dense piece, making decisions on a case-by-case basis and arriving at a unique edition. Recruiting for the Class of 2030 is in full swing, and applicants to Pomona submitted nearly 200 supplements on orchestral instruments this cycle. Prof. Lindholm’s Orchestration and Instrumentation course (Music 113) has a record enrollment this spring, creating an especially lively experience for all involved. Starting next fall, he will have a reduced teaching load to allow more time for orchestration and composition projects.

This past fall, Associate Professor Joti Rockwell collaborated with Mark Allen from the Art Department on a Benton Museum performance, which included oscilloscopes projecting visualizations of sound generated by a modular synthesizer, a theremin, and a pedal steel guitar. In October, he played in Claremont’s Laemmle plaza as part of the Cougar Estrada band, and in November, he played banjo at the Karl Kohn memorial concert. Later that month, he gave a lecture as part of Claremont Graduate University’s guest artist series entitled “Getting to Know the American Mandolin Family.” In December, he performed with Peter Harper at Claremont’s Folk Music Center as part of a screening of a French documentary made about a summer 2025 arena performance with a children’s choir in Saint-Martin-de-Crau. In January, he did a lecture-demonstration about plucked-string instruments for Claremont’s Foothill Philharmonic Committee, which supports the LA Phil.

Associate Professor Gibb Schreffler has been drafting chapters for his next book, concerning the lineage of songs that includes sailors’ work-songs, chanties. The period of that singing practice, aboard sailing ships, was preceded and succeeded by African American subjects practicing this tradition in non-sailing contexts, and it is on these historical “bookends” that Schreffler’s research focuses. To gather additional field-based data for the work, he is planning trips to the Caribbean, Guyana, and Ghana during an upcoming research sabbatical. For archival research at the Library of Congress ahead of these field trips, Schreffler has received the Eileen Southern Fellowship award from the Society for American Music.

On June 12, Schreffler will present a paper based on this research at the Connecticut Sea Music Festival in Essex, CT. As President of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Southern California and Hawai‘i Chapter, Schreffler had a busy winter preparing for the organization’s annual meeting that was held at the University of San Diego on February 28.

Assistant Professor Ania Vu had several performances of her music across the US, including at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA; the Lawndale Music Center in Houston; the Ear Taxi Festival in Chicago; the Eastman School of Music; Concordia College; and various universities in Texas. Her most recent performance was Five in One by Brightwork newmusic at UC Davis. On April 18, small tenderness will be presented at the Hear Now Music Festival in Venice, CA by the Lyris Quartet and the HEX ensemble. Her piece 2+ is featured on Flannel Duo’s newest EP, alongside a piece by Pomona’s previous Visiting Assistant Professor, Igor Santos.

Over the winter break, Prof. Vu was invited to give composition masterclasses and a presentation of her work to students at the Vietnam National Academy of Music in Hanoi.

This spring, she is teaching two courses, one of which is a new course she designed, MUS98: Musical Storytelling—a class that focuses on using music as a narrative tool in opera and film. In March and April, she will be a guest lecturer to present on her music at Chapman University and UCLA.

She is also excited by a visit of her collaborator and graphic novelist/cartoonist, Paul Karasik, to work on the story and libretto of her opera-in-progress Through the Doors. Then together with Paul and Professor of English Jonathan Lethem, the three of them will be part of the panel talk “Three Artists, Three Mediums: On the Collaborative Process.”
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Emeritus Faculty

Graydon Beeks conducted the Pomona College Band in a pair of concerts in November 2025 featuring premiere performances of two arrangements by Stephen Klein and works by Leroy Anderson, Arthur Bliss, John Frantzen, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Later that month he presented the paper “The Use of Cannons Material in Handel’s Op. 2 Trio Sonatas” at the Fourteenth Handel Institute Conference in London, England. In February 2026 he joined his colleagues in the Cornucopia Baroque Ensemble for a program of music by Boismortier, Handel, and Telemann on the Friday Noon Concert series.

Tom Flaherty’s latest premieres include Choreomania for cello and piano/keyboard with Ania Vu at the Ussachevsky Festival and Semiquincentennial Spangles for brass and organ in March. Recent recordings include Winging It for solo cello; Bar Talk with Jonathan with Rachel Huang, violin and Cindy Fogg, viola; Phoenix, performed by Jin-Shan Dai, violin and Jennie Jung, piano; and ConcorDance performed by Gloria Cheng, piano. On cello, he played quartets by Gabriel Fauré and Louise Héritte-Viardot with Rachel Huang, Cindy Fogg, and Steve Moss at HMC on March 1 and will perform with Leslie Schroerlucke, Cindy Fogg, and Wan-Chin Chang in Orange County on April 19.

William Peterson performed the Prelude of Karl Kohn in the November 1 “Tribute to Karl Kohn” concert in Bridges Hall of Music. The Inaugural Concert on the Hill Memorial Organ in Bridges Hall, which Bill presented on October 12, 2002, included the West Coast premiere of the Prelude (2000). In response to the dynamics indicated by the composer, the registration plan devised for this work draws on the full range of tonal resources provided by the Fisk organ.
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Student Happenings

This past fall, six seniors—Saira Arora, Jisue Choi, Hannah Guo, Simon Shelley, Noah Straus, and Aaron Wu—did a range of musical projects for the department’s Senior Colloquium course. Topics included music therapy for patients with schizophrenia, meaning and gesture in Liszt’s piano music, rhythmic complexity in Stravinsky’s pieces, the incorporation of classical techniques into folk music, the jazz side of John Williams’s film scoring, and the gentrification of house music. Our congratulations go to Hannah and Aaron on their fall 2025 graduation, and we look forward to hearing more from Saira, Jisue, Noah, and Simon this spring.

Tristan Lartigue ’29 will participate in the Intercollegiate Band at the College Band Directors National Association’s Reno, NV conference in March. He studies percussion with Theresa Dimond and plays in both the Orchestra and Band.

Deanna Perlov ’28 is assisting Donna M. Di Grazia with a book chapter, assembling and transcribing primary source materials related to Franz Liszt as a composer-conductor.

Students from two courses, Topics in Music Theory and Musical Storytelling, enjoyed a performance of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten at the LA Opera in March.
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Alumni Spotlight

Our former lecturer in guitar Jack Sanders recently caught up with Tyler Barbour ’09. They shared an abbreviated Q&A.

Your guitar experience at Pomona began with classical-style music, but once you were introduced to flamenco music, that became your focus. What drew you to flamenco music and where has that taken your career?

The flamenco bug bit me when you played a Farruca by Dennis Koster during my time at Pomona College. I was immediately mesmerized by the striking contrasts between the abrasive strumming, the rasgueados, and the delicacy of the arpeggios. The Spanish poet Manuel Ríos Ruiz once said that flamenco is “fire covered in morning dew,” which your Farruca communicated to me in a fascinating way.

Then I moved to Spain to find that I had started playing the guitar far too late to ever make a living as a guitarist: the level of playing here is insane. However, my passion for flamenco has been instrumental in my research in Spanish Cultural Studies at the University of Cádiz. It has also been fundamental to how I teach, how I write, and how I understand the world we live in. I couldn´t imagine my life without flamenco.

You now live in Spain and for a number of years you have refined your flamenco skills by working with singers, dancers, and other flamenco guitarists. How have those experiences helped you develop your art?

What I like most about living in El Puerto de Santa Maria, which is 15 minutes from Cádiz and 15 minutes from Jerez, is that there are many singers in the area to play with. I study at the Miguel Salado Guitar Academy in Jerez and have been learning song accompaniment for years. The singer at the academy is amazing, and at my book presentations I accompany her.

If you can’t accompany the singing, then you aren’t a flamenco guitarist, so learning from an elite guitarist who specializes in accompanying singers has been great for my playing, which I’m still working on.

What led you to pursue a doctorate and when did you begin to discover the connection between flamenco artists and their resistance to General Franco?

While at Pomona, I studied abroad in Buenos Aires, where one of my courses examined the relationship between singer-songwriters and political protest under Latin American dictatorships, which fascinated me. Later, as a master’s student at the University of Cádiz, I took courses that explored that same relationship during Franco´s dictatorship.

Initially, I wanted to write my dissertation about how the poetry of Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, was sung as political protest not only by singer-songwriters but also by flamenco singers. However, my thesis advisor suggested a more holistic approach to literature that looked beyond Lorca´s poetry. This led us to a central research question: what role did writers play in instrumentalizing flamenco as a vehicle for political protest under Franco?

By taking a panoramic view of flamenco-related cultural production, my research helps us understand how written flamenco lyrics, flamenco theatre, and, most importantly, articles written in prominent cultural magazines interacted in complex and meaningful ways as Spain´s struggle for democracy intensified. The innovativeness of our interdisciplinary approach is why my doctoral thesis received the cum laude designation in 2019, and why the book version of that thesis, published in 2025 by the University of Cádiz, has been heralded by some as a landmark book in flamenco studies.

How has your Pomona College experience shaped your musical and professional journey?

Pomona College is a special place where my brilliant classmates and professors taught me the importance of listening. Nobody knows everything. My research sits at the crossroads of many fields of study: Spanish literature, musicology, Spanish cultural studies, politics, flamenco studies, and others. This means that I’m often surrounded by people who have a far more profound understanding of something specific than I do. Pomona taught me that in those situations I’m in the right place—a place where I can learn.
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Alumni News

Hannah Guo ’25 began work in January as an Associate Product Manager at Warner Music Group. As a member of the tech team, she helps manage the process of building internal tools that WMG employees use to support artists and songwriters, identifying needs and working with engineers to build the tools and improve features from start to finish.

In January, Ilana Shapiro ’22 saw the publication of two flute transcriptions of two cello works by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, the Concertino Op. 43bis and the Solo Sonata Op. 72, by Peermusic Classical Hamburg to the European market. These were part of Shapiro’s work toward her senior thesis and flute recital in 2022. The Concertino also won the National Flute Association’s 2025 Newly Published Music Competition.

Sean Smith ’21 has been hired as a Teaching Artist with Villa Musica, a San Diego-based non-profit that provides lessons, classes, and ensembles, prioritizing access and community engagement. He is teaching and constructing an ongoing curriculum for middle school choirs, while also teaching early childhood general music classes and private voice lessons.

Matthew Cook ’20 will sing the bass solos in Mozart’s Requiem at St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Corona del Mar, CA this spring. He is also coaching undergraduate singers at Chapman College.

Rhian Moore ’18 was recently named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list in the category of Hollywood and Entertainment. Moore is an executive producer of the acclaimed new film Josephine (2026) and holds the position of Head of Programs for the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE).

Lydia Saylor ’18 sang recitals at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Baldwin, NY, in October 2025 and at CUNY Graduate Center in November. In December she appeared as soprano soloist with the Choral Society of the Hamptons, premiering a new Christmas Cantata by Bruce Saylor as well as his arrangement of Max Reger’s Maria Wiegenlied for soprano and strings. In January 2026 she participated in a Bach Institute sponsored by Emmanuel Music in Boston, MA and performed in a concert of Bach arias.

Evelyn Saylor ’13 composed the music for a production of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde for Schauspiel Frankfurt, which opened on December 12, 2025 and will continue running during the 2025–26 season.

Margaret Hunter ’00 participated in the 20th Anniversary Concert of Capella de la Torre in October 2025, and in December she joined the ensemble in a program of Music of Anne of Brittany in the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, Germany.

Scott Pauley ’87 has been named Managing and Artistic Director of Chatham Baroque, the Pittsburgh, PA-based ensemble with which he will continue to play plucked stringed instruments.

Lucy Shelton ’65 will make her Metropolitan Opera debut in Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence in April 2026 and participate in a concert celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation on May 17th at Lincoln Center in New York City.

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.

Editor: Audrey Dunne
Alumni Section: Prof. Emeritus Graydon Beeks
Alumni Spotlight: Jack Sanders
Proofing Services: Hayden Eberhart

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