Carol A. Hess (Department of Music)

In Aaron Copland in Latin America: Music and Cultural Politics, Carol A. Hess examines composer and conductor Aaron Copland's U.S. government-sponsored tours of Latin America between 1941 and 1963. Based on interviews with eyewitnesses, previously untapped Latin American press accounts and Copland’s diaries inform this in-depth examination of the composer’s approach to cultural diplomacy. 

Grace Wang (Department of American Studies)

In Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance, Grace Wang explores how Asian Americans use music to construct narratives of self, race, class and belonging in national and transnational spaces. She highlights how they navigate racialization in different genres by considering the experiences of Asians and Asian Americans in Western classical music, U.S. popular music, and Mandopop (Mandarin-language popular music). 

Her study encompasses the perceptions and motivations of middle-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents intensely involved in their children's classical music training, and of Asian and Asian American classical musicians whose prominence in their chosen profession is celebrated by some and undermined by others. 

John Lee Hooker Jr., Julia Simon (Department of French and Italian)

From the Shadow of the Blues: My Story of Music, Addiction and Redemption is a powerful memoir of redemption by John Lee Hooker Jr., with writing from Julia Simon.

As the son of blues legend John Lee Hooker, our protagonist was exposed to the music world from an early age and, as a teenager, began singing in his father's shows. After falling into drug addiction, Junior was in and out of jail and prison for several decades, eventually becoming sober and starting his own successful career in blues. 

Charlie D. Hankin (Department of Spanish and Portuguese)

Hip hop is a global form of creative expression. In Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, rappers refuse the boundaries of hip hop’s US genesis, claiming the art form as a means to empower themselves and their communities in the face of postcolonial racial and class violence. Despite the geographic and linguistic borders that separate these artists, Charlie Hankin finds in their music and lyrics a common understanding of hip hop’s capacity to intervene in the public sphere and a shared poetics of neighborhood, nation, and transatlantic yearnings.

In Break and Flow: Hip Hop Poetics in the Americas, Hankin illuminates how new media is used to produce and distribute knowledge in the Global South, refining our understanding of poetry and popular music at the turn of the millennium.

Nicolás Alberto Dosman (Department of Music)

In Growing Your Choral Program: A Practical Guide for New Directors, Nicolás Dosman covers such topics as choral philosophies and approaches, programming and logistics, strategies for notational literacy and vocal technique, diverse repertoire selections, choral program management, lesson and rehearsal planning and leadership skills. Throughout, Dosman pulls not only from his own experience but also the work and research of others established in the field. 

Carol A. Hess (Department of Music)

Experiencing Latin American Music is a textbook that provides an overview of 50 genres of music and their intersection with identity, the body, religion, and more. A detailed instructor’s packet contains sample quizzes, clicker questions, and creative, classroom-tested assignments designed to encourage critical thinking and spark the imagination.

Henry Spiller (Department of Music)

Archaic Instruments in Modern West Java: Bamboo Murmurs by Henry Spiller explores how residents of Bandung, Indonesia, have re-adopted bamboo musical instruments to forge bridges between traditional and modern values, including musical environmentalism, heavy metal music and cultural authenticity.

Juan Diego Díaz (Department of Music)

Juan Diego Díaz reexamines long-held ideas about music of Africa and the African diaspora in Africanness in Action: Essentialism and Musical Imaginations of Africa in Brazil. Using the perspectives of musicians in Bahia, Brazil, he shows how they promote social change and critique racial inequality by creatively engaging tropes about African music and culture.

Anna Maria Busse Berger, Henry Spiller (Department of Music)

Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. This study represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. 

In 14 essays, scholars show the complexity of the topic highlighting how some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, others tried to suppress it. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories.

Composers and musicians will come together this fall to build community and experiment with new sounds at the Taproot New Music Festival at UC Davis. Curator Sam Nichols says “there is a sense of adventure” to the festival, which promises to provide audiences with a sense of what is happening now in the genre. The first concert kicks off Oct. 25, followed by a full weekend of events Nov. 6 - 9, 2025. 

Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Charlie Hankin spent years studying rap music and community in Brazil, Cuba and Haiti. That research culminated into the award-winning book, "Break and Flow: Hip Hop Poetics in the Americas." He also became an unlikely collaborator with some local musicians he was working with.