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Music Faculty

Assistant Professor of Music

Jay Afrisando is a composer, multimedia artist, researcher, and educator. He works on aural diversity, acoustic ecology, and cultural identity, focusing on disability and environmental justice, accessibility, and decolonization of arts practices.

Professor of Music , Department Chair

As a music historian and performer, Amy Beal specializes primarily in 20th-century music and American music.

Professor of Music, Director of Graduate Studies

Ben Leeds Carson's work as a composer and improviser is supported by a variety of research, including empirical studies in perception, theory of mind, and theory of musical form. Dr. Carson offers courses in theory and analysis, perception studies, and popular culture.

Assistant Professor of Music

Nicol Hammond is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Musicology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is an ethnomusicologist and popular music scholar specializing in South African popular, traditional, and choral music, and in feminist and queer studies.

Professor of Music

Karlton E. Hester, Ph.D. (composer/flutist/saxophonist), began his career as a composer and recording artist in Los Angeles where he worked as a studio musician and music educator. He received his Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Music, Conductor

Active in a wide variety of music, Bruce has a national profile as a conductor and music educator from coast to coast, from classical repertoire at Carnegie Hall to the stage of the Hollywood Bowl conducting with Stevie Wonder and Latin superstars Juanes and Gloria Estefan.

Professor of Music

Hi Kyung Kim is a composer whose music often integrates Non-Western with Western music.

Associate Professor of Music

Tanya Merchant is an ethnomusicologist whose research interests include music’s intersection with issues of nationalism, gender, identity, and the post-colonial situation.

Associate Professor of Music , Hasan Endowed Chair in Classical Indian Music

Dard Neuman is the Hasan Endowed Chair in Classical Indian Music and Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Receiving his Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Music

Russell C. Rodríguez received his Ph.D. from the department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was named a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in 2007.

Assistant Professor of Music

Matt Schumaker’s music engages with research into computer-assisted composition and interactive computer music with performers.

Professor of Music

Professor Treadwell is a specialist in early European plucked-string instruments, and performs both in the U.S. and abroad as a soloist and continuo player.

Assistant Professor of Music

"The goal of creative practice for me goes beyond artistic expression to reaching communion with the universe, which is the source of creation. Consequently, composition is a birthright and not a privilege. Sound is magical and mysterious; it is also healing.