The Department Welcomes Eight New Graduate Students for Fall 2008

Published: September 24, 2008

Ching-Yi Chen is currently a visiting exchange student from the Music Department of Sheffield University, England. She is currently working on cross-cultural aspects of the development of Chinese orchestral music in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.

Morit Gaifman studied Western Musicology at Columbia University. After completing her B.A. she began to train in the performance of Japanese Noh theater, including dance, chant, drums and flute. She also began to play the dumbek and perform in Near Eastern music ensembles. Morit is excited to be at UCLA where she looks forward to analyzing the structure of Noh music and to contribute to the creation of new Noh. She is a member of Theatre Nohgalea and has worked with San Francisco's Theatre of Yugen.

Raised in the East Bay of Northern California, Jake Jamieson is an avid percussionist with a strong passion for the music of the African Diaspora, particularly African American and Brazilian popular music, along with the deep history of Hindustani music. He hopes to explore the presence of spirituality in music and the cultural implications of musical systems based on oral learning traditions.

Amalia Mora holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from UC, Santa Cruz, in Anthropology, with a focus on human rights and international development. Upon graduating from UCSC, she worked for several international relief organizations, and subsequently returned to classical vocal studies, which she had begun at the Colburn School of Performing Arts during high school. She currently trains privately in classical voice with Kyra Humphrey and in Argentine Tango with Liz Lira, recently participated in opera and classical voice workshops, and enjoys creative writing and composition. While at UCLA, she hopes to focus on displaced peoples, applied ethnomusicology, and the vocal music of India, Argentina, and China.

Lauren Poluha hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and attended the University of Michigan.  While there, she studied piano and music theory, joined the Javanese gamelan ensemble, and fell in love with the field of ethnomusicology.  She graduated from Michigan in 2006 with a B.M. in Music Theory.  Shortly after graduating, she moved to Santa Cruz county, where she worked as an Outdoor Educator, teaching 6th-grade ecology and conservation in the redwood forest.  Lauren plans to focus her studies on Caribbean and West African music, religion, and globalization, with the greater goal of learning ways to use music as a tool to create relationships and respect between diverse people and cultures.  She is very excited to be joining the ethnomusicology community at UCLA!

Kim Tran is interested in the intersection of music and politics. Her senior thesis, written about Cuban guitarist-composer Leo Brouwer, was recently mentioned in the July 2008 issue of Tempo. She was in Vietnam for 3 months in 2007, and would like to continue working with living composers in Vietnam and abroad.

Jessie Vallejo graduated from the Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam with a BM in Music Education and a minor in Spanish.  Last year, in addition to teaching 3-12 grade orchestra in Syracuse, NY, Jessie presented her research on the application of mariachi music in a string orchestra setting at international conferences.  Her current interests include the connections between social justice and music education with Native and Latin American music, the fusions of musical styles, violin pedagogy, and arranging.

Nolan Warden began his undergraduate career as a percussion major at Indiana University School of Music. He finished at Berklee College of Music, graduating magna cum laude with a dual major in hand percussion performance and music business. At Tufts University, Nolan earned the MA in ethnomusicology with a thesis on transculturation in Afro-Cuban cajón rituals. Recently, he has worked as an adjunct faculty member at College of Lake County in Illinois, at Malcolm X College in Chicago, and served as a facilitator in Boston University's online graduate program in music education. As a percussionist, Nolan often performs in Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies and has appeared in La Pasión Según San Marcos by Osvaldo Golijov. At UCLA, Nolan plans to focus on representations of indigenousness in Mexican popular music, the meanings and possibilities of applied ethnomusicology, music in conflict escalation and resolution, and socio-cultural aspects of music education.