Pay tribute

What: Davis High School Hall of Fame induction ceremony and dinner

When: Saturday: 6 p.m. reception, 7 p.m. dinner and awards

Where: Freeborn Hall, UC Davis

Tickets: $55 each; call (530) 756-3679 or go online

“I live in Berkeley now, but I grew up in Davis,” said composer and educator Elinor Armer, who said she is delighted to be one of this year’s inductees in the Davis High School Hall of Fame.

Armer came to Davis as an infant — her father got a job in the agricultural engineering department at UC Davis.

“I grew up in a house on Oak Avenue, at what was then the edge of town. Instead of Eighth Street, there were fields with sugar beets,” she recalled.

Music — and exotic sounds — were part of Armer’s home life as a child.

“My father had worked for Magnavox as an acoustic engineer,” she said. “He coined the word ‘stereophonic.’ ” So naturally the family home included a good record player, with classical LPs and other albums with stereo special effects, including one with the sound of a train approaching from a distance.

Armer attended local schools, and took piano lessons as a girl from Fritz Berens, who was the conductor of the Sacramento Symphony at that time. It was during her senior year at Davis High School, in 1956-57, that she was offered an opportunity that had far-reaching consequences.

Jerry Rosen, who had come to UCD in 1952 as the founding faculty member of the music department, invited the young Armer to perform in a concert at the university.

“I did the piano part in the Hindemith Trombone Sonata, with Don Brewer, who was the music director at Davis High at the time. It was really my public debut, and it launched my career,” Armer said.

“As a thank-you, Jerry came to the high school and played clarinet in a chamber version of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ on which I played piano.”

In those days, Davis High was in the red brick building on Russell Boulevard that now houses Davis City Hall.

After graduating from DHS in 1957, Armer went on to Mills College in Oakland, where she studied composition with the French composer Darius Milhaud. She vividly recalls that when UCD built Freeborn Hall in 1962, Milhaud was commissioned to write his Symphony No. 12 (“Rurale”) to celebrate the venue’s dedication.

After further studies at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, Armer joined the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and she founded the conservatory’s composition department in 1984. She has been associated with the conservatory for 43 years, and currently serves as an emeritus professor, working with composition students by special arrangement.

Asked to pick a few favorite compositions from her long career, Armer mentioned a large-scale, imaginative piece titled  “The Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts,” a series of compositions that were a collaboration between Armer and the noted author Ursula K. Le Guin, winner of numerous literary awards.

“It started out as one piece, but it evolved into a whole series of pieces that we did over a period of about 10 years,” she said. “It’s about an archipelago of islands where music is used in different ways, including music as weather, music as food and music as a love potion.”

Armer’s family and Le Guin’s family have connections going back a long way — “my father grew up in a house next door to her parents’ house in Berkeley,” Armer explained. Le Guin’s father was the noted anthropologist Alfred Kroeber; her mother Theodora wrote the book “Ishi In Two Worlds,” which is still widely read.

Armer also mentioned a piece titled “Call of the West,” an orchestral suite she wrote for the Oakland Youth Orchestra a few years ago.

“The title is supposed to make you think of Jack London’s ‘Call of the Wild,’ ” she explained; Jack London, of course, lived in Oakland for a time. “The music is obliquely about Oakland and California. I am a very chauvinistic Californian.

“The Oakland Youth Orchestra took it on a tour of Greece, and when they played it in the town of Delphi (famous for the oracle), the mayor of Delphi shook my hand and said ‘Apollo thanks you for your music.’ That was thrilling for me.”

Armer said being inducted into the Davis High School Hall of Fame is a significant honor.

“It means a lot to me to know that I was nominated by the members of my class,” she said. “I hope I will sit with them at the table at the ceremony. I went through school from kindergarten through high school with them. We all go back so far.”

— Reach Jeff Hudson at [email protected] or (530) 747-8055.

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