Charles Rosen was born in New York in 1927 and left The Juilliard School of Music at the age of eleven to study piano with Moritz Rosenthal, a pupil of Liszt. His New York debut in 1957 was followed in the same year by one of the first complete recordings of Debussy's Etudes, which attracted high praise. Since then his career as a piano virtuoso has included many tours of the United States and Europe, playing with leading orchestras and giving recitals. He has made frequent appearances with the BBC and various European and American radio stations, and his television appearances include the presentation of two programs on Beethoven's last years for BBC TV. In September 1999 he broadcast "Rosen on Chopin," a series of programs to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer's death for BBC Radio 3. His performances with the BBC Symphony Orchestra have included the BBC Promenade Concert premiere of Elliott Carter's Double Concerto, and the first performance of Boulez's Elats/Mutiples conducted by the composer.
Some of the most renowned composers have invited Charles Rosen to record their works: for Stravinsky he recorded Movements for Piano and Orchestra, for Elliott Carter the Double Concerto, and for Pierre Boulez all his piano works (of which the first album won the Edison Prize in Holland). Sony Classical has reissued his recording of the late Beethoven Sonatas, and Carlton Classics the Diabelli Variations: both original recordings received Grammy Award nominations. He has also recorded Elliott Carter's piano works, the original editions of various piano works by Schumann, and two discs of Chopin.
Charles Rosen is also a distinguished writer on music. His publications include The Classical Style (1971), which was published in five languages and won the USA National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1972, and The Romantic Generation (1995). An expanded edition of The Classical Style with an additional chapter and CD insert containing Beethoven's Op 106 and Op 110 was published in 1997. Recent publications include a collection of essays under the title Critical Entertainments published by Harvard University Press, Beethoven's Piano Sonatas - A Short Companion published by Yale University Press (2001), and Piano Notes, The Hidden World of the Pianist published by Allen Lane (2003).
The holder of a doctorate in French Literature from Princeton University, Charles Rosen holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Cambridge and Durham. He was appointed to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair at Harvard for 1980/81; this Chair, established in 1925, is offered every year to an outstanding individual in one of the arts, alternating between literature and music. In 1988 he was the George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University, and he was Professor of Music and Social Thought at the University of Chicago between 1991 and 1996. He currently holds the International Chair in Performance and Musicology at the Royal Northern College of Music. Charles Rosen is Musical America's Instrumentalist of the Year 2008.
Joseph Horowitz is the author of eight books mainly dealing with the history of classical music in the United States. His Conversations with Arrau, Understanding Toscanini, The Ivory Trade, Wagner Nights, Classical Music in America: A History, and Artists in Exile all treat aspects of the performer's art in detail. As Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1990s, he curated thematic, inter-disciplinary festival programming that redrew the parameters of "classical music" in favor of a "post-classical" musical landscape. He co-founded Post-Classical Ensemble, a chamber orchestra in DC, six years ago. His Post-Classical Productions also presents "post-classical" programming in New York City and Chicago. Last season, he produced "The Stravinsky Project" for Stanford Lively Arts - one in a series of Stravinsky festivals he has created exploring the implications in performance of Stravinsky's Russian roots and the psychology of exile. As Artistic Advisor to the Toradze Piano Studio, he is responsible for coaxing Genadi Zagor to improvise in public. As Director of an NEH National Education Project, he wrote a young readers book and commissioned an interactive DVD - materials he hopes will prove fruitful in infusing the arts and humanities into middle and high school Social Studies classrooms. He currently works as an artistic advisor to the New York Philharmonic and Pittsburgh Symphony, and to the Pacific Symphony's annual American Composers Festival. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement (UK), he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEH Research Fellowships, an Arts Journalism Fellowship from Columbia University, and a certificate of commendation from the Czech Parliament. His website is www.josephhorowitz.com.
A Senior Lecturer in Music at the Open University, Robert Philip pioneered the study of recordings as performance documents, writing the first PhD dissertation on the subject and presenting many radio programs on BBC Radio 3. From 1976 to 1999 he worked as a Producer of Arts Programs in the BBC's Open University Production Centre. In 2000 he joined the Open University's Music Department as a Lecturer. He has written two books. Early Recordings and Musical Style (Cambridge, 1992) was the first book to consider the implications of changing performing styles on recordings, and was described in a leading article in the Times as "a bomb dropped on musically correct modern orthodoxy." Of Performing Music in the Age of Recording (Yale, 2004), Charles Rosen in the New York Review of Books wrote, "a brilliant analysis - the best account I know of how musical life in general has changed since the introduction of vinyl and long-playing records in the 1950s." Other recent publications include chapters for Performing Brahms (Cambridge, 2003) and Words about Music: Essays in Honour of Stanley Sadie (Boydell, 2005). He gave the keynote paper at the 2007 Conference of the Royal Musical Association, "Studying recordings: the evolution of a discipline" (available online at the CHARM website), and is currently writing a book on orchestral music for Yale University Press.
Will Crutchfield spent his teens as a vocal coach and rehearsal pianist, made his name as a writer and musicologist in the mid-1980's (becoming the youngest music critic in the history of the New York Times), and returned to his theater roots in the mid-1990's to conduct opera. After initial conducting successes with productions in small companies and conservatories, Crutchfield was named to two positions: Director of Opera for the Caramoor International Music Festival (1997-present) and Music Director of the Opera de Colombia in Bogota (1999-2005). At these two theaters he built his style, which the Financial Times called "a fine balance of bravado, intensity, sensitivity and scholarly savoir-faire," in cycles of standard repertory classics as well as pioneering revivals of less familiar works.
Crutchfield has accepted guest engagements in several theaters at home and abroad, including The Canadian Opera Company (Tancredi with Ewa Podles), The Washington Opera (Giulio Cesare with Hei-Kyung Hong), The Minnesota Opera (I Capuleti e i Montecchi with Sumi Jo and Vivica Genaux; La Traviata with Judith Howarth), the Baltimore Opera (La Cenerentola and Werner Herzog's production of Die Zauberflöte), Florida Grand Opera (Don Pasquale), L'Opéra Français de New York (Gluck's Pélérins de la Mècque), the Mark Morris Dance Group (Dido and Aeneas), Wolf Trap Opera (La Finta Giardiniera), the State Theatre Pretoria (Il Barbiere di Siviglia) and the Orquesta Filarmonica de la Gran Canaria (Norma).Ê In 2006, he began a long-term relationship with the Polish National Opera in Warsaw, beginning with productions of Tancredi, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Guillaume Tell.
In reviews of the celebrated Caramoor revivals - alongside praise for the musical interpretation - the press has consistently recognized the qualities of the rare operas themselves more positively than has been the case in productions elsewhere. The New York Times, reviewing the production of La Donna del Lago that inaugurated the series, discerned "a palpable conviction that Rossini's serious operas are not static vehicles for elaborate vocal display, but elegant and humane musical dramas." According to The Wall Street Journal, "Mr. Crutchfield brought his sure sense of bel canto style to bear upon Lucrezia Borgia, and the semi-staged concert version at Caramoor's Venetian Theater was both delightful and thought-provoking." Subsequent revivals of Bellini's Il Pirata, Rossini's La Gazza Ladra and Otello, Handel's Deidamia, Gluck's Paride ed Elena and Donizettis Élisabeth, a lost opera whose autograph manuscript Crutchfield himself discovered and reconstructed have been highly acclaimed. Most recently Caramoor presented the first American performance of Bellini's La Sonnambula in the new Ricordi critical edition and the composer's original keys, an uncut Traviata based on period performance practice, and the infrequently produced treasures I Puritani by Bellini and Tancredi by Rossini.
Crutchfield has also been involved in training the next generation of singers. He prefers to work repeatedly with young artists he believes in so that the process can develop from production to production. He served on the faculties of all three New York conservatories (Juilliard, Manhattan and Mannes) and he continues to devote the summer months to extensive training programs at Caramoor. Some of the singers with whose debuts and early careers he has been associated include: Vivica Genaux, Nancy Herrera, Marguerite Krull, Bruce Fowler, Daniel Mobbs, Georgia Jarman, Patricia Risley, Yegishe Manucharyan, Olga Makarina, Kate Aldrich and Alexandra Deshorties. An often-noted component of Crutchfield's research, as of his practical work with singers, has been the recovery and development of the art of ornamental improvisation.
Notwithstanding his concentration on opera, Crutchfield has also led symphonic repertory including works of Mahler, Strauss, Bartók, Beethoven, Britten, Schubert and Mendelssohn with various orchestras in the U.S. and Latin America. He has also remained active as a pianist, and his speaking voice is familiar to audiences who have heard his frequent intermission broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera. Crutchfield is currently completing a book on performance practice in Italian opera.
George Barth is Professor of Teaching at Stanford University, where he holds the Billie Bennett Achilles Directorship of Keyboard Programs.Ê His specialties include the piano music of Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Ives and Bartók, and his research explores changes in musical orthography and expression from the eighteenth century to the present.Ê Some of his other projects explore relationships between music and language, as for example his CD-ROM Understanding Beethoven: The Mind of the Master, his book The Pianist as Orator: Beethoven and the Transformation of Keyboard Style(Cornell, 1992), and his critical edition of Charles Ives's First Piano Sonata for the Ives Society, a work-in-progress with Jon Barlow and Jeffrey Treviño.Ê He recorded the Beethoven Cello Sonatas on period instruments with cellist Stephen Harrison of the Ives Quartet (Alliance for Lifelong Learning), and Schubert's Winterreise with mezzo-soprano Miriam Abramowitsch (Music & Arts).Ê His articles and reviews appear in New Grove Dictionary II, Early Music, Hungarian Quarterly, Music & Letters, Early Keyboard Studies Newsletter, Humanities magazine, and Music Library Association Notes.
In April of 2007 George Barth and his colleague Kumaran Arul co-produced the highly acclaimed symposium "Reactions to the Record: Perspectives on Historic Performance," during which scholars and performers from the United States and abroad explored the rich legacy of early sound recording. Last March he was a panelist in Joseph Horowitz's "Stravinsky Project" for Stanford Lively Arts, and with pianist Arul, offered a reinterpretation of Stravinsky's Sonata for Two Pianos in order to question Stravinsky's own polemics. This past autumn he and Arul co-taught a seminar in early recordings and musical style, which featured guest residencies by Claude Frank, Malcolm Bilson, Rebecca Plack and Walter Frisch. His most recent essay, "Carl Czerny and Musical Authority: Locating the 'Primary Vessel' of the Musical Tradition" (in Beyond The Art of Finger Dexterity: Reassessing Carl Czerny, for the Eastman Studies in Music series) shows how people rather than musical scores have remained the "primary vessel" of the classic tradition.
Before teaching at Stanford, he served on the faculties of the University of Washington in Seattle and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and earned graduate degrees in eighteenth-century performance practice at Cornell University, studying fortepiano with Malcolm Bilson, and musicology with Neal Zaslaw, James Webster and Roger Parker.
Jonathan Bellman, Professor of Music and Head of Academic Studies in Music at the University of Northern Colorado, earned piano performance degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Illinois, and a D.M.A. in Piano Performance Practices at Stanford University in 1990. His first two books, The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe (1993), and The Exotic in Western Music (1998; a collection of essays by himself and others), were published by Northeastern University Press; his third book, A Short Guide to Writing about Music (2000; 2nd ed. 2007) is a textbook published by Longman. His newest book, Chopin's Polish Ballade, is in production at Oxford University Press. He completed the piano parts for John Michael Cooper's reconstruction of the original version of the Fantaisie und Variationen über den Zigeunermarsch aus Webers "Preziosa," composed jointly by Felix Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles, which was for two pianos and orchestra. The premiere of this reconstruction, for which Prof. Bellman will be one of the piano soloists, will occur in February, 2009. He also writes for the musicology weblog Dial M for Musicology. Additional information is available here.
Sandra Rosenblum is the author of Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music: Their Principles and Applications. Selected a Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1989, it was subsequently translated into Korean. Other writings for books include an Historical Introduction for Muzio Clementi's Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Pianoforte (1801) for a facsimile reprint by Da Capo Press, 1974; and "'A composer known here but to few': Reception and Performance Styles of Chopin's Music in America, 1839-1900," for The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (2004).
Her articles and reviews have appeared in Proceedings of the Second International Chopin Congress, Warsaw, October 10-17, 1999; Fontes Artis Musicae, Journal of the Conductors' Guild, Early Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Performance Practice Review, NOTES, and other journals. She has been a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute and the American Council of Learned Societies, and received the 1999 Wilk Prize for an essay on Polish music.
Rosenblum has lectured, given master classes, and adjudicated piano students at universities, conservatories, and piano teachers's organizations across the U.S. She has also given papers at conferences in Durham (UK) and Warsaw. For some time her research has been focused on performance practices in Chopin's music, most recently including their connection to the instruments he played.
David Breckbill holds degrees in music and musicology from Goshen College, the University of Iowa, and the University of California, Berkeley. Best known for work on the discography and history of musical performance styles in Wagner, he has contributed to Wagner in Performance (Yale, 1992), The Wagner Compendium (Thames & Hudson, 1992), the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Der fliegende Holländer (2000), and the forthcoming Wagner and His World (Princeton, 2009); in addition, he has written the entries on Beethoven symphonies, Liszt, Wolf, and Mahler for 1001 Classical Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die(Cassell, 2007). He reviews recordings regularly for the BBC Music Magazine (since 1995), ARSC Journal, and The Wagner Journal, and has presented papers at national meetings of the American Musicological Society, at the 1997 London conference of the International Musicological Society, and at a 2006 symposium sponsored by the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). He was an Edison Fellow at the British Library's Archive of Recorded Sound in 2006, and has participated in NEH Summer Seminars on Time and Music (Columbia University, 1993) and Opera: Interpretation, Reading, Staging (Princeton University, 2002). Since 1991 he has been Adjunct Assistant Professor of Music at Doane College (Crete, Nebraska), where he additionally serves as staff accompanist. He is a member of PIANOFOURTE (founded in 1997), which performs music for two pianos, eight hands, and has appeared regularly throughout Nebraska as well as in Wyoming and Florida.
Allan Evans teaches at the Mannes College of Music, New School University, New York. He studied with the Rev. Gary Davis (guitar), Irén Marik (piano), Peter Pindar Stearns (composition), Felix Salzer, and Carl Schacter (Schenkerian analysis). Evans has produced and annotated CDs, primarily of historic recordings in classical and world music. He recently co-edited a reader of Moriz Rosenthal's writings (Indiana) and has written a biography of Ignaz Friedman (to be published in June, 2009). Evans founded Arbiter of Cultural Traditions (www.arbiterrecords.com) and also writes on traditional Italian cuisine.
For over thirty years, Rex Lawson has been at the forefront of pianola music throughout the world. He has performed in some fifteen countries in Europe and North America, broadcast on hundreds of occasions and is well represented on both LP and CD. From Carnegie Hall to the Last Night of the Proms, with conductors from Pierre Boulez to Sir Andrew Davis, he has brought the pianola back to the very highest level of international concert-giving.
Concurrent with these professional musical activities, Rex has been very active in bringing an element of scholarship to the world of the player piano. He and Denis Hall founded the Pianola Institute in 1985, and together they edit its annual Pianola Journal. Rex writes the website at www.pianola.org, which is widely regarded as the authoritative source of information about the history and music of the different types of player piano. ÊRex Lawson lives in south-east London with a wife who manages orchestral conductors, and a collection of some 11,000 music rolls.
Denis Hall's love and enthusiasm for the piano started when he was just big enough to climb on to the piano bench, and produce the fascinating sounds resulting from pressing down the keys. His interest in how different pianists interpreted the same works was kindled by listening to performances on 78 rpm records during his school days, and thus began a life-long hobby of record collecting, particularly of the piano. Stumbling across reproducing pianos in the early 1960s opened a new field of interest for him, resulting in the purchase of his first Duo-Art upright in 1965 - for the princely sum of £20 sterling. Since then, he has looked on disc and roll recordings as complementing each other, both being invaluable sources for study and enjoyment of those great artists who flourished during the romantic great days of the piano.
Over the years, he has involved himself in the restoration and preparation of reproducing pianos for concerts and recordings, and in the transfer of 78 rpm recordings to master tape for LP and CD reissue. These days, he spends much of his time in retirement maintaining his own reproducing pianos in a condition which he hopes does justice to the virtuosi of 100 years ago who entrusted their art to the piano roll medium.
Jonathan Summers was awarded a scholarship to the Intermediate School of the Royal Academy of Music, London at the age of fifteen where he continued his studies full-time at eighteen gaining a graduate degree. Further tuition at the Royal College of Music followed resulting in a performance diploma and since then he has pursued many musical activities including performing, accompanying, coaching, teaching, composing and researching. His main academic interest is in pianists of the past and historical piano recordings. On this subject he has lectured at Trinity College of Music in London, the Great Romantics Festival in Canada, and writes for International Piano magazine.
In 2003 Jonathan and soprano Rebecca Plack gave the premiere of his song cycle Five Poems of Robert Frost and in 2005 won the Los Angeles International Liszt Competition resulting in concerts in London and Budapest. 2007 saw the publication of Jonathan's A-Z of Pianists for Naxos Educational. This 860 page book comprises more than 300 biographies of pianists with four compact discs containing 70 tracks of recordings to compliment the text. Jonathan has written liner notes for, APR, Chandos, BBC Legends and most of the Naxos Great Pianists series. Jonathan Summers is Curator of Classical Recordings at the British Library Sound Archive.
Jerry McBride is currently Head Librarian of the Stanford Music Library and Archive of Recorded Sound. He has served as Music Librarian at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont and as Archivist of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles. He has been active as a member of the Music Library Association, where he has served in a wide variety of appointments. He is currently on the MLA Legislative Committee, where he is working on various issues concerning copyright laws related to music and sound recordings, and has represented the MLA at the US Copyright Office hearings on orphan works. He has written on topics concerning music librarianship and is currently working on a bio-bibliography of the composer Douglas Moore.
David Milsom was educated throughout at Sheffield University, graduating in 1995 with all relevant academic and performance prizes, and going on to achieve a Ph D in 2001, funded by the British Academy. Currently, he is an AHRC Research Fellow at Leeds University School of Music, undertaking a project to investigate and record, in experimental historical ways, a number of "classical" German string chamber works, in collaboration with Clive Brown and other members of Leeds University Centre for Historically-Informed Performance (LUCHIP) following on from his monograph, Theory and Practice in Late Nineteenth-Century Performance 1850-1900 (Aldershot, 2003).
David, who has given numerous papers and invited talks including the RMA "Performance 2000" event and last year's RMA Annual Conference at Royal Holloway, has also published on the performance of Viotti's music, Mendelssohn's orchestral practice and early orchestral recordings. He is also writing an A-Z of Solo String Players for Naxos, due to be completed in 2010. He reviews regularly for The Strad Magazine.
As a violinist and practicing musician, David has a broad base of experience, although for the last few years his solo and chamber recitals have been almost exclusively in the sphere of nineteenth-century "historically-informed" performance. He is also a popular violin and viola teacher - David and his wife run a small music school which seeks to provide good-quality music tuition to a range of pupils. In his spare time, David sings tenor in the choirs of St John's Church, Ranmoor, Sheffield and indulges an interest in the English choral tradition.
Rebecca Plack is a gifted performer, teacher and scholar. She graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, received the M.M. in voice from Manhattan School of Music, studied with Jane Randolph at the San Francisco Conservatory, and completed the Ph.D. in musicology at Cornell University. As a Lieder singer, she has worked with Elly Ameling and Malcolm Bilson; as a researcher specializing in Lieder performance, she was awarded an Edison Fellowship to research early recordings at the British Library. Her groundbreaking doctoral dissertation, "The Substance of Style: How Singing Creates Sound in Lieder Recordings, 1902-1939," examines the relationship between vocal technique and performance style, demonstrating that stylistic gestures are grounded in singers' habitual vocalism.
As a recitalist, Rebecca Plack's performance credits include the International Great Romantics Festival in Hamilton, Canada and the ATERForum Festival in Ferrara, Italy. On the operatic stage, she has performed leading and featured roles with Sacramento Opera and Ithaca Opera, as well as with the Aspen Opera Center. She is a winner of the Los Angeles International Liszt Competition and has given concerts throughout northern California: at San Francisco's Old First Church, on Santa Rosa's Absolute Music series, and with the West Marin Music Festival, the Davis Chorale, and the Chamber Music Society of Sacramento.
Rebecca Plack's passions for music, performance and the art of singing coalesce in her work as a teacher. She assisted Will Crutchfield in the inaugural years of his Handel Project, teaching Baroque ornamentation and Italian diction; later, at Cornell, she created a seminar on musical virtuosity and also began her career as a voice teacher. ÊShe has a voice studio in Davis, California.
Pianist Kumaran Arul has performed widely throughout the U.S. and abroad in solo, chamber, and concerto performances. Recent performances have taken him to New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco and overseas to Hungary and England. Critics have commented on his unique style and his use of nineteenth-century performance techniques including improvisation. In addition to his performing, Arul is lecturer in music at Stanford University where he teaches piano and chamber music. Over the last twenty years, Arul has been an avid collector of historic recordings and has pursued research in performance practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His current work deals with alternative traditions of performing classical music on the earliest recordings and the performance aesthetics of Heinrich Schenker. These topics were the subject of papers delivered in 2008 at the Association for Recorded Sound Collections conference in March and the Performing Romantic Music conference in Durham, UK in July. In April 2007 Arul co-produced with his colleague, George Barth, the acclaimed symposium "Reactions to the Record" at Stanford, which highlighted the latest work in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performance practice by performers and scholars from around the world. In May 2007, Arul was a recipient of a SICA grant to pursue further work on early recordings in conjunction with the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound. Arul holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and the University of Michigan School of Music.
A native of Krasnodar, Russia, Genadi Zagor began his musical training at the age of four with his father, a well-known guitarist and composer. Since his debut with orchestra at the age of ten, he has appeared as soloist with the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Gotham City Orchestra, Northbrook Symphony Orchestra, and the South Bend Symphony Orchestra, among others. In 2000, he moved to the United States and joined Alexander Toradze's thriving piano program at Indiana University, South Bend, where he is currently on the faculty. His solo performances in recent years include the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival as part of the "World Rising Stars" series, and the Toradze Piano Studio Rachmaninoff Marathon, both of which were broadcast live on National Public Radio (NPR). A New York Times review by Antony Tommasini was unreserved in its praise for Zagor's "nimble-fingered" and "elegant" performance of the Bach Concerto in F Major. In March 2008, he performed improvisations on submitted themes to great acclaim as part of the Stanford University Stravinsky Festival. In 2000, he moved to the United States and joined Alexander Toradze's thriving piano program at Indiana University, South Bend, where he is currently on the faculty. Zagor also serves on the faculty of the University of the Northern Iowa School of Music.
Jeffrey Treviño is a PhD student in music composition at the University of California at San Diego (MA, 2007). Recent composition commissions have come from the University of California at Berkeley Graduate Program in Media Studies, the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music at the University of California at Santa Barbara, bass clarinetist Anthony Burr (Speculum Musicae), percussionist Ross Karre, flutist Reiko Manabe, contrabassist James Ilgenfritz, violinist Mark Menzies, and the Arditti String Quartet, with notable premieres at the International Computer Music Conference (Miami, 2004, and New Orleans, 2006), the Oberlin Conservatory Percussion Institute, New York City's Symphony Space, Germany's Akademie Schloss Solitude Summer Residencies, South Korea's Seoul International Computer Music Festival (2007), Mexico's Visiones Sonoras (2007), SIGGRAPH (2007), the International Conference of the Society for Improvised Music (Chicago, 2007), the Freiburg Hochschule fŸr Musik, June in Buffalo (2008), Portugal's Vila Real Conservatory, New York City's Miguel Abreu Gallery, and the Carlsbad Music Festival (2008). His electronic and orchestral film underscores have premiered at a variety of film festivals, including the Marin County Festival of Short Films (2004), the Rhode Island International Film Festival (2004), the Real to Reel Film Festival (2004), the Oakland International Film Festival (2004), the Cantor Arts Festival at Stanford (2004),the Stanford Student Film Festival (2004), the U.C. Berkeley Student Film Festival (2004), the True/False Film Festival (2005), the Wisconsin Film Festival (2005), and San Francisco's Documentary Film Festival (2005).
An accomplished pianist and tubist, Treviño has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Sheldonian Theatre, and the Sydney Opera House. In 2005, Treviño debuted the SCUBA, a robotically augmented concert tuba, at the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression in Vancouver. As a musicologist, Trevi–o has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Musicological Society in support of his work on Hollywood film and cartoon music, composer Charles Ives, and philosophies of musical expression in contemporary instrument design. Treviño's pedagogical efforts were recognized with the Department Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His PhD work is supported by the University of California's Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship.
Robert Huw Morgan is the University Organist at Stanford University. A native of Wales, he received his BA and MA from the University of Cambridge, where he was an organ scholar at St. John's College. In this role he assisted the celebrated choral conductor George Guest in directing the famous chapel choir. In 1999, he was awarded two doctorates in music from the University of Washington. He is also a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists. Dr. Morgan has performed in Europe, Australia, the United States and Canada. His performances have been featured on the BBC radio and television, as well as stations in other countries. His repertoire includes works from the earliest sources of keyboard music to contemporary works (including the West Coast premiere of Hyperion by Jean Guillou), along with such Romantic masterpieces as Liszt's Fantasia and Fugue on "Ad nos" and Reger's Variations and Fugue on an Original Theme. In 2004, he performed the complete organ works of Dieterich Buxtehude, as a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the celebrated Fisk organ in Stanford Memorial Church. He has also performed the complete organ works of Couperin and de Grigny.
In addition to his duties at Memorial Church, he holds the positions of Lecturer in Organ and Choral Studies and director of the University Singers at Stanford University.
His organ teachers have included Nicolas Kynaston and Carole Terry.
William Cheng is a second-year PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at Harvard University. He was born in Taipei and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2007, he obtained his BA in Music and English from Stanford University, where he studied piano with Kumaran Arul and George Barth. He is the recipient of Stanford's Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education (2007), the Deans' Award (2007), the Hoefer Prize for Excellence in Writing (2007), the Sudler Prize (2007), the Blew-Culley-Lafollette Award in Piano Performance (2006), and the American Musicological Society's Cultural Diversity Fellowship (2006). As the winner of Stanford's Concerto Competition, he performed Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra (SSO) in May 2006. In past summers, he has toured New Zealand and Australia with the SSO, participated in the Banff International Keyboard Festival, attended the St. Lawrence String Quartet's Chamber Music Seminar, and conducted archival research in Paris. William has presented papers on a range of 19th- and 20th-century musical topics and is the coordinator of the Harvard Graduate Music Forum's forthcoming interdisciplinary conference "Un-Music" (March 2009), which seeks to explore ontological aspects of music, musicality, musical analysis, noise, and silence. His own musicological studies concern video games, technoculture, opera, politics, and gender. On-going projects include the reception and meta-theatrics of Korngold's Die tote Stadt, the French romance and constructions of female amateurism in 1830s Paris (supported by Harvard's John Knowles Paine Fellowship), the gendering of voices and sounds in video games, and an extensive ethnography of virtual music-making behaviors in the game Lord of the Rings Online. He will be writing a dissertation on the musical cultures and cultural musics of video games and new media. For two years at Stanford, William was a teaching assistant for undergraduate music theory courses, and as a recent participant of a music pedagogy seminar led by Christopher Hasty at Harvard, he is currently designing a course in classical piano improvisation. Last year, he also initiated a recital-lecture series at Harvard called "Improvisations on Themes from the Audience." The third concert in the series is scheduled for April 2009 and will be entitled "Themes from Childhood." In his spare time, William dabbles in fiction writing, experimental cooking, and gentle stretching exercises.
Dr. Nicholas Isaacs has a DMA/MA in Music from Stanford University, a LGSM in Piano from Guildhall School of Music, London, and an MA in History from St. Andrews University, Scotland. He has been CSMA's Music School Director for over 20 years, and serves as Artistic Director for our concert hall. Dr. Isaacs' professional experience includes serving on the music faculty of Santa Clara University, Foothill College, and Atlantic College, Wales, as well as being a frequent guest lecturer, recitalist and accompanist in the UK, USA and Canada. He has extensive experience in curriculum development with the Music Teachers' Association of California and the International Baccalaureate, and has received awards and recognition from the English-Speaking Union, Stanford University, Council for the Arts in Palo Alto (Mid-Peninsula) and Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors.
