SAN DIEGO ARTS : Music

UC San Diego’s new music ensemble, SONOR, has just been invited to be the representative American resident ensemble at next summer’s Darmstadt Festival in Germany. Directors Tom Nee and Jean-Charles Francois will take 23 UCSD musicians to the festival, which is the granddaddy of contemporary music conferences.

According to Nee, the Darmstadt director attended UCSD’s Erickson Festival earlier this year and was sufficiently impressed to invite SONOR to perform and give seminars during the two-week conference, which opens July 31. SONOR will bring to Germany new works by UCSD resident composers Joji Yuasa and Will Ogden, as well as pieces by graduate composition students Paul Koonce and Paul Davies.