Jerome Rosen
Jerome Rosen, Professor Emeritus, is a noted composer, performing artist, and educator, as well as the founding member of the Department of Music, whose faculty he joined in the early 1950s. He served as the first chairman when the department was formally established in 1960. Professor Rosen was born in Boston in 1921 and received his Bachelors and Masters in Music from the University of California at Berkeley. He studied composition with Roger Sessions and William Denny at U.C. Berkeley and with Darius Milhaud in Paris. While in Paris, he also studied clarinet with Ulysse Delecluse at the Paris Conservatory of Music. His awards for composition include the George Ladd Prix de Paris, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two grants from the Fromm Foundation, and residence at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. Rosen has received prizes for performance as well as for composition. He performed with the UCD Symphony Orchestra as clarinet soloist in Darius Milhaud's Clarinet Concerto in November 1992 and as saxophone soloist for his own Saxophone Concerto in February 1997. In March 1997 the Empyrean Ensemble performed his Sextet Sine Nomine. He appeared in March 1998 as soloist with the Sacramento Wind Orchestra for his Three Waltzes for Saxophone and Band. Rosen's first opera, Calisto and Melibea, to a libretto by Edwin Honig, was premiered in the University Theatre Season at UC Davis in June 1979. His second opera, Emperor Norton of the USA, libretto by James Schevill, was premiered by the Departments of Music and Theatre and Dance in June 1999.