UC Davis music professors Kurt Rohde and Pablo Ortiz have won two of the music world's most prestigious honors: a Rome Prize and an Academy Award in Music.

Rome Prize

Composer and violist Rohde, a San Francisco resident, is one of two 2008 recipients of the Rome Prize in musical composition. The prize, given by the American Academy in Rome to emerging artists, was first awarded in 1921. It provides an 11-month fellowship at the Rome Academy in Rome, Italy. Past winners include American composers Aaron Copland and Martin Bresnick.

Rohde will join about 30 winners of Rome Prizes in other fields of the arts and humanities at the academy, a multidisciplinary residential community located on the Janiculum, Rome's highest hill. Fellows spend the time "refining and expanding their art, drawing on their colleagues' experience and erudition," according to the academy's Web site. The academy was established in 1894 and chartered by an Act of Congress in 1905.

Rohde's fellowship will take place from September 2008 through August 2009. He plans to complete the composition of two new works: a violin concertino for San Francisco-based violinist Axel Strauss and a puppet opera for the Adorno Ensemble, a San Francisco chamber group that performs live classical and contemporary music.

"It will be great for my work. I need to have a large amount of uninterrupted time to make major headway on these projects, and for me there is no doubt that the environment offered at the American Academy in Rome will be inspiring," said Rohde, an assistant professor of music who teaches composition and theory.

Rohde earned a bachelor's degree in viola and composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a diploma in viola and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and a master's degree in viola at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His past honors include the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Charles Ives Fellowship and Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also won commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Hanson Institute for American Music. Rohde joined UC Davis in 2006, where he is an assistant professor of music. He also serves as artistic director of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and co-director of the UC Davis Empyrean Ensemble.

Rohde's work will next be performed on Thursday, April 17, at a 7:30 p.m. concert of the Cypress String Quartet at the Historic Villa, 15400 Montalvo Road, in Saratoga, Calif. The group will perform Rohde's "Gravities for String Quartet," a piece inspired by Bartok's Quartet No. 6 and Joseph Haydn's Quartet, Op 77, No. 2. Rohde will attend the concert to talk with the audience about his creative process. For more information about the performance, visit http://montalvoarts.org/events/cypress_rohde/.

Academy Award in Music

Ortiz, a composer of chamber, vocal, orchestral and electronic music, is one of four 2008 recipients of the Academy Award in Music, granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The honor comes with a $7,500 cash award and another $7,500 toward the recording of one work.

Based in New York City, the American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists and writers dedicated to fostering and sustaining an interest in music, literature and the fine arts by identifying and encouraging individual artists. Members, including artist and UC Davis professor Wayne Thiebaud and writer John Updike, make awards annually to four composers, three architects, five artists and eight writers.

"It is very gratifying to receive this recognition," Ortiz said. From his award money, Ortiz said he intends to make a $2,500 donation to the UC Davis Department of Music to name a seat in the department's planned new recital hall in honor of his mother, Olga Salguero, a music lover and pianist. He also wants to make donations to the Davis Joint Unified School District to help offset budget cuts that threaten to weaken school music programs next year.

Ortiz, a native of Buenos Aires, completed an undergraduate degree at the Universidad Catolica Argentina before moving to New York, where he earned a master's and Ph.D. in music composition at Columbia University. He joined UC Davis in 1994. He is a professor of music.

Ortiz's past awards include a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has won commissions from the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, the San Francisco-based Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Centro Experimental Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires and Fideicomiso para la Cultura Mexico/USA.

His compositions have been performed by the Buenos Aires Philarmonic, the Arditti String Quartet, the Ensemble Contrechamps of Geneva, Music Mobile, Continuum, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Chanticleer, and the Theatre of Voices. His music has also been heard at international festivals in Salzburg, Geneva, Strasbourg, Havana, Frankfurt, Zurich, Sao Paulo and Mexico City. He has also written music for plays and films and composed children's songs based on poems by award-winning poet Francisco Alarcon, a lecturer in Spanish and classics at UC Davis.

Ortiz's work will next be performed on Thursday, April 17, at a free Noon Concert on campus. Tenor Ian Howell will perform works by Ortiz as well as Bach and Handel. The concert will take place from 12:05 p.m. to 1 p.m. in the Main Theatre in Wright Hall. For more information, visit: http://music.ucdavis.edu/events.

"Hipermilonga," a work by Ortiz for violin, clarinet and piano, will be performed at a 7 p.m. concert of the Adorno Ensemble on Friday, May 30, in the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, Golden Gate Park. For more information, visit: http://www.adornoensemble.org/calendar-detail.php?recordID=32.