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OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS, the Hugo and Christine Davise Fund for Contemporary Music has supported hundreds of student and faculty projects at UCLA Library—fostering innovative collection-building and helping to integrate music scholarship and practices across the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
Successful applicants include music professor and composer Kay Rhie, who received funding to support the publication of her chamber opera Quake, which was originally commissioned by Opera UCLA.
“Professional score production and publishing are often overlooked, yet they are an integral component of a composer’s life,” said Rhie. “The Davise Fund supported this very important aspect of my work as a creator active in academia, and this will allow the work to be shared, performed and interpreted.”
Rhie’s score was made accessible to Voice and Opera Area students, furthering positive learning outcomes for those who performed in a fully staged production of Quake.
“Singers don’t often get the opportunity to consult the composer of the piece they’re working on,” said alumna Sabrina Langlois, who as a student premiered the role of Penelope and now is a professional opera singer.
A Davise grant also was able to address the difficulties musicians and scholars face finding collections of new music for study and performance.
“Because living composers haven’t found publishers for their music, or publishers have made works ‘rental only’, meaning they aren’t available for study, just on hire for performance—a lot of new music is challenging to access,” said Matthew Vest, music inquiry and research librarian at the Walter H. Rubsamen Music Library.
Recognizing this gap, Vest used Davise funding to develop an open access model for building a collection of contemporary music scores. Established in 2018, the Contemporary Music Score Collection has become the largest repository of its kind, including 5,477 scores from composers across 112 countries, with scores viewed annually over 306,000 times world-wide.
“Endowed funds towards specific projects not only allow for a donor to invest in the success of the Library, but also in the experts at the front lines of teaching, research and creativity that makes our Library the heart of the research enterprise,” said Athena N. Jackson, Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian.
