In Memoriam
“The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.” – Irving Berlin
UCSC Professor David H. Cope
(1941 – 2025)
Professor David Cope is widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of AI and music for his groundbreaking work in Experiments in Musical Intelligence, producing a prolific body of musical compositions in the styles of Bach, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and others. He later developed computer programs which produced highly original and convincing compositions and visual art works. His music has been recorded and performed worldwide; some of his music can be heard on YouTube, accompanied by original visual displays. David’s endless curiosity and creativity led him to pursue his love of astronomy and to explore other artistic media such as photography and glass blowing.
UCSC Professor Larry Polansky
(1954 – 2024)
A brilliant, generous, and creative man whose interests acknowledged few disciplinary boundaries, Larry was a music composer, guitarist and professional performer of plucked strings, 38-year-long college-level educator, computer music programmer, writer, scholar, editor, publisher, and theorist, as well as an avid student of shaker music, Indonesian gamelan, Judaism, experimental tuning theory, American Sign Language poetry, and much more.
UCSC Professor Linda Burman-Hall
(1947 – 2023)
Professor Linda Burman-Hall joined the UC Santa Cruz Music Department as a Lecturer in 1976, and was a vital part of the community for over four decades. She was known best as the Artistic Director of Santa Cruz Baroque who regularly performed a wide range of music, from works of the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen to world premieres of multi-cultural, experimental, and computer music. She was active in our music department as a musicologist-performer specializing in Baroque and classical literature for early keyboards, and an ethnomusicologist of Euro-American and Indonesian traditional musics.
UCSC Professor Paul C. Nauert
(1966 – 2019)
Professor Paul C. Nauert was a beloved teacher, and a rare two-time awardee of UCSC’s distinguished Excellence in Teaching Award. His scholarly work was diverse and impactful, ranging from the perception of rhythmic complexity to harmonic structure, and his computational approaches to the organization of arbitrary time sequences have had a major impact on machine listening technology. A CD of his compositions, A Distant Music, was released by New World Records in 2015; the disc’s liner notes, by Professor Amy C. Beal, illuminate his approach to composing and the ways it changed in the context of his illness.
UCSC Professor Fredric Lieberman
(1940 – 2013)
In a long, colorful, and distinguished career, Fredric Lieberman helped to shape the understanding of American popular music in the 20th century and left his mark on the scholarship of Asian ethnomusicology, as well as the legal intricacies of artistic copyright issues.
Fearless in designing and undertaking some of the largest courses ever taught in the Arts Division—such as American Popular Music, The Hollywood Musical, and Music of the Beatles—Lieberman brought his expertise and connoisseurship to a seemingly infinite topography of musical genres, and was as expert on the work of Richard Wagner as he was of Chinese classical performance nuance and the oeuvre of John Lennon. As an ethnomusicologist, Lieberman was a lifelong researcher into the indigenous musical styles and traditions of China, Japan, Korea, Tibet and South India, and has published on Chinese musical customs, comparisons of Western sonata forms and haiku, and cultural comparisons of the music of Bali and Java.
