Sam Nichols
 ssnichols@ucdavis.edu 530.752.4492 15 Old Fire House Office Hours TBD |
Sam Nichols is a composer who lives and works in Northern California. His music has been performed by eighth blackbird, the Empyrean Ensemble, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, among other groups. He has received fellowships to the Composers Conference and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. Upcoming projects include pieces for several San Francisco Bay Area ensembles, including Earplay, the Empyrean Ensemble and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. He will soon start work on new solo pieces for percussionist Chris Froh and cellist David Russell. Currently, he’s writing a chamber opera for the Boston-based Guerilla Opera for their 2009-10 season: Unnamed: or, the Unnamed. This spring he will help create a piece in collaboration with Duo X as part of their residency. 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, epicenter07 (the annual exposition of the University of California Digital Arts Research Network) and at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts in Davis, CA. 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. For the past six years he has worked as a lecturer in the UC Davis Music Department; he also teaches in the Technocultural Studies Department. For more info, including audio samples, visit his website. |