Graduate Student Spotlight: Xavier Davenport

Xavier Davenport

DMA Music Composition, Class of 2026

Share a little about why you chose the U of I College of Fine & Applied Arts for your graduate degree.

I came to the U of I to study composition for three main reasons: the professors, the facilities, and the interdisciplinary opportunities.

1. Music professors here are internationally renowned and create wonderful music I want to learn from. Our faculty teaching electronic music in particular are famous as exceptionally effective educators.
2. U of I is home to the second electronic music studio developed in the United States, and that long history and our mature facilities have been a wonderful environment in which I can experiment. I’ve learned a lot about spatial audio for example, and the school of music has the tools to let me create new musical instruments.
3. I have been able to forge unique collaborations with my colleagues in physics to create new interdisciplinary works. These collaborations have resulted in some off-campus performances, including one in California at a UNESCO world heritage event celebrating the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics.

What has been a highlight of your grad school experience so far?

The first year I was here, I was commissioned by a UK-based research group to create a piece involving a digital score. I was encouraged to experiment and do anything at all I wanted – I’ve rarely felt such an uninhibited sense of creativity! The resulting piece had a very well received performance in Boston, and a detailed analysis of my work as part of a larger research project on digital music notation. And now years later, I’m continuing to collaborate with that UK research group, but this time as a researcher and software developer in addition to a composer and performer.

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Share a little about a special project you have worked on.

I was awarded the 2024 Federal Critical Language Scholarship for Mandarin, which took me abroad to Taiwan for some intensive language study last summer. While I was there working on my Mandarin, I asked my host family to teach me some of their native Taiwanese Hokkien. At the final presentation of the program, I described the history of a traditional Hokkien song which was banned in the 1950s and learned to sing a verse of the tune. An elderly woman and a doctoral student in history separately approached me after the presentation to tell me how moved they were by my interest in their culture and history and dedication to learning their language to better understand their music and culture. It’s one of very few moments in my career that I could directly feel I had a strong positive emotional impact on another person.

What is your favorite space on campus and why?

The arboretum is the place for me! I especially love roaming the area in the summer when very few people are around. I grew up on a farm, so I think I miss green spaces and isolation sometimes, and the arboretum can provide exactly what I’m looking for.

What advice would you give students interested in attending your grad program?

We live in a world saturated with overqualified individuals with advanced degrees. If you want to succeed in music academia as I hope to do, doing the bare minimum is not enough. If you attend our grad program, be proactive; take advantage of every opportunity you can, but even more importantly, forge your own opportunities. I encourage anyone going into music to diversify what they can do, both within and outside of the typical musician’s skill-set, and create their own opportunities to highlight their unique combination of skills along the way.