Gwyneth Bravo is active in the fields of musicology, music education, and cello pedagogy and is a doctoral candidate in Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles where she received a President’s Fellowship.  Earlier as a Fulbright scholar at the Musicological Institute of the University of Hamburg in Germany, Gwyneth worked with the research group Exilmusik contributing an article to their book Lebenswege von Musikerinnen im Dritten Reich und im Exil (2000).  Under the auspices of the Fulbright, Gwyneth also researched the music of Viktor Ullmann at archives in Europe, which served as a departure point for her ongoing work on the composer.  Most recently, Gwyneth served as the Visual Research Assistant for the Los Angeles Opera’s Recovered Voices Project—a series of performances presented by Music Director James Conlon with the opera in March 2007.  While Gwyneth focuses primarily on issues relating to nationalism, technology, and war in twentieth-century European music, her research also includes an exploration of diverse lineages of esotericism in the western musical tradition from the seventeenth century to the present.  Her dissertation, “Composing at the Nullpunkt: Histories and Philosophies of Death in Operas of Pavel Haas, Erwin Schulhoff, and Viktor Ullmann,” examines changing cultural conceptions of death during the first half of the twentieth century with reference to operatic works by these composers who were active in Prague during the 1920s and 1930s.  Drawing on history and philosophy, the dissertation explores how the dramatic confrontation with death is portrayed as a powerful catalyst in shaping the exigencies of human freedom. As part of her continued engagement with Ullmann’s work, Gwyneth is preparing a multi-media presentation of the composer’s 1944 melodrama for speaker and piano Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke.  Gwyneth is the winner of the 2007 Ingolf Dahl Competition for a paper presented on Ullmann’s opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis at the Joint Meeting of the Pacific Southwest and Northern Chapters of the American Musicological Society. Read more

Ross Joseph Fenimore
fenimore at ucla.edu

Kariann graduated from UCLA with a BA in English Literature and Music History in 2001. She graduated with an MA at UCSD in Music, Critical Studies and Experimental Practices, in 2004 with a thesis entitled "Foreign Bodies: Innovation, Repetition, and Corporeality in Electronic Dance Music," that discussed strategies for legitimation employed by various electronic dance music producers including manifesto-writing and sampling sounds from the human body. Kariann specializes in 20th century Brazilian art and popular music. She also maintains interests in American music in the broadest sense, including electronic dance music and transnational Latin art and rock genres. Her dissertation, "Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music's Global Transformations (1937-2006)," is a series of case-studies about international receptions and representations of Brazilian popular music through such examples as Carmen Miranda, Bossa Nova, the World Music boom, and Brazilian electronica. Kariann has been the recipient of area studies grants and fellowships, including a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship in Advanced Brazilian Portuguese for 2006-2007. She has presented her research at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) as well as regional and national meetings for the Society of Ethnomusicology and IASPM-US. Kariann plays the trumpet, electric bass, and Brazilian percussion.

A graduate in violin performance from Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC, Lindsay now enjoys the bemusing and often humorous experience of living in Los Angeles.  Her current musicological interests include Eastern European/Gypsy musics, American folk music and musicals, and issues of gender and sexuality in music. She has traveled the world with Village Harmony and the Callanwolde Youth Chorale, giving concerts in small villages and big cities and learning music and dance from the local populations. She has taught violin and voice, and has conducted college and middle school orchestras. An advocate of shape-note music, Lindsay enjoys teaching anyone who will listen about the joys of "singing the shapes" and the fun of fuging songs.

After earning a B.A. with honors in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley, where he researched and wrote about the lives of Asian American jazz musicians, Loren Kajikawa entered the musicology department at UCLA. Since then, his research areas have expanded to include r&b/soul, hip-hop, and electronic music, particularly how the music of such genres contributes to the production of racial, class, and gender identities. He has presented academic conference papers on performers as diverse as Asian American jazz pianist Glenn Horiuchi, hip-hop artists Mos Def and Talib Kweli, 1970s funk icon and bass virtuoso Bootsy Collins, and Japanese electronic/rock musician Cornelius. In 2004-2005, Loren served as a Teaching Fellow for the freshmen general education cluster on interracial dynamics. He is currently finishing his Ph.D. dissertation about racial politics and popular music entitled "Technologies of Identity: Jazz, Soul, and Hip-Hop in the 1990s." As a 2007-2008 UCLA Digital Humanities Fellow, Loren is working on a web-based approach to music analysis that will support his dissertation.

Eva Sobolevski received both her B.A. and M.A. in Musicology from University of California, Los Angeles. Her interests involve Eastern European Romanticism as well as issues of nationalism and totalitarianism. Currently, she is working on her doctoral dissertation, which will explore the competing contexts of Polish nationalism and universality in the music of Frederic Chopin. She taught a class on Beethoven in the summer of 2003, and presented at the Western Humanities Conference in Salt Lake City in the fall. She has been awarded the Lenart Travel Fellowship, which enabled her to spend the 2003/04 academic year in Warsaw, researching her dissertation.