Sam Nichols
 ssnichols@ucdavis.edu 530.752.4492 17 Old Fire House Office Hours M and W 11 am – 12 pm |
Composer and guitarist Sam Nichols is a lecturer in the UC Davis Music Department. Born in Maine, he attended Vassar College (BA, 1994) and Brandeis University (MA 1999; PhD 2006), where he studied composition and theory. His composition teachers include Ross Bauer, Eric Chasalow, Annea Lockwood, David Rakowski, Richard Wilson and Yehudi Wyner. His dissertation is entitled “Harmony and Morphology in George Benjamin's Third Invention.” His music has been performed by eighth blackbird, the Empyrean Ensemble, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, among other groups. Upcoming projects include Monkey Fist for cellist David Russell, and new commissions from the Empyrean Ensemble and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. He is currently working on a commission from Guerilla Opera for their 2008-09 season: Unnamed: or, the Unnamed. Guerilla Opera is a collective of young Boston-based singers and instrumentalists dedicated to promoting a unique theatre-oriented brand of chamber opera featuring a repertoire of newly commissioned works. An ongoing collaboration with sculptor Robin Hill has produced two multi-media installations. One of these, Kardex, an interactive piece, was featured at Another Year in LA, the CSU Stanislaus Art Gallery, and epicenter07 (the annual exposition of the University of California Digital Arts Research Network). Kardex will be on display at the “in tHe sPirit oF CAGE” event at the Mondavi Center on January 13, 2008. In the summer of 2008 he will attend the Montalvo Arts Center for a five-week residency. At UC Davis he has taught Orchestration, Classical Guitar, Chamber Music, Beethoven, first- and second-year Music Theory, and—in cooperation with the Program in Technocultural Studies—Electronic Music. He also founded the UC Davis Guitar Ensemble, which includes in its repertoire Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint. |