Click on a Name to View Board Member Bio
(Names are listed alphabetically by last or group name):

• TANDY BEAL
• JACK BODY
• STEED COWART
• FRANK FOREMAN
• KENNY HILL
• MICHAEL MCGUSHIN
• HYO-SHIN NA
• JON SCOVILLE
• DAVID TANENBAUM

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• TANDY BEAL is a local dancer, instructor, and choreographer. She has organized a number of productions over the years with Tandy Beal & Company, including regular performances of a contemporary dance version of the Nutcracker, which originally premiered in 1982. She currently is also Creative Director of the Pickle Family Circus and StarStuff Productions. In the past she has worked with Bobby McFerrin, she choreographed 65 life-sized puppets for Frank Zappa, produced tailor-made corporate events for Pixar, SF Symphony and Carl Sagan (NASA). She also choreographed all the major characters in Tim Burton's “Nightmare Before Christmas”.

  
  

  For more info, please visit: starstuffproductions.com




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• JACK BODY, (born in 1944) studied at Auckland University, in Cologne and at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht. During 1976-77 he was a guest lecturer at the Akademi Musik Indonesia, Yogyakarta, and since 1980 he has lectured at the School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington, now the New Zealand School of Music.

  His music covers most genres, including solo and chamber music, orchestral music, music-theatre, music for dance and film as well as electroacoustic music. He has also worked in experimental photography and computer-controlled sound-image installations, having received commissions from several public galleries. A fascination with the music and cultures of Asia, particularly Indonesia, has been a strong influence on his music. As an ethnomusicologist his published recordings include music from Indonesia and China. A recent landmark publication he edited was South of the Clouds, field recordings of Prof Zhang Xingrong (Yunnan Art Institute), of instrumental music of the minorities of South West China (Ode Records, 2003).

  His music has been played and broadcast widely, nationally and internationally and he has been commissioned by the NZ String Quartet, the NZ Symphony Orchestra, the NZ Trio and many other groups, and has written four works for the Kronos Quartet. Jack Body's opera Alley, based on the life of Rewi Alley, was acclaimed at the 1998 NZ International Festival of the Arts. In 2003 he was a featured composer at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, and in 2004 he was honoured by a Composer Portrait concert in the NZ International Festival of the Arts. He has been a featured composer of the Atlas Ensemble (2004 Holland Festival), the Encuentros International Festival in Buenos Aires (2004), New Music Works, Santa Cruz, USA (2005), Neue Musik aus Neuseeland, Lübeck (2006), Art Summit Indonesia and the 4th International Music Festival, Phnom Penh (2007), and in 2008, the Beijing Modern Festival and the Cincinnati 08 Festival.

  Recordings of his music include Suara (Ode), electroacoustic compositions using field recordings from Indonesia, Sacred and Profane (Ode), three large scale works for voices, Artist Portrait (Waiteata Music) with compositions ranging from 1968 to 2002, and Pulse (Rattle), a series of five works based on transcriptions from traditional non-Western musics. Pulse won the 2002 NZ Music Award for Best Classical CD. Waiteata Music Press released a Composer Portrait of his music in 2003. (See publications for details of recordings).

  As a musical entrepreneur he has had wide experience including the organisation of a series of Sonic Circuses, 12-hour simultaneous multi-venue music marathons featuring New Zealand music. In 2002 he curated a five-concert festival of New Zealand music at the Ijsbreker in Amsterdam. He is the editor of Waiteata Music Press which publishes scores of New Zealand music, and has edited over twenty CDs of music by New Zealand composers.

  In the promotion of the music and musicians of the Asia-Pacific region Jack Body was artistic director for the Asia-Pacific Festivals and Conferences in 1984,1992 and 2007, ten-day events that juxtaposed traditional and contemporary music of New Zealand and her neighbours. He travels widely in Asia, particularly Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea, Japan and China, and has been actively involved in the Asian Composers League since 1981, and has served on its executive committee. He has been the guest of numerous music festivals in Asia and has arranged numerous visits to NZ by leading Asian composers such as Yuji Takahashi, Tan Dun, Qu Xiao-Song, Chinary Ung, etc.

  Jack Body is a specialist in cross-cultural composition, in his own music as well as in his teaching. At Victoria University of Wellington he established a residency for traditional musicians to work collaboratively with composition staff and students. These guests have included, from Indonesia, Agus Supriawan, Dody Ekagustdiman (both from West Java), Rafiloza bin Rafii (Minangkabau), Wayan Yudane (Bali), and, from Kalinga, north Philippines, Benny Sokkong. These residencies have generated new compositions, recorded for broadcast and CD publication. In his own composition he has integrated other musical cultures as in Campur Sari for Javanese musician and string quartet, and Polish Dances, for clarinet and Javanese Gamelan.

  As the manager of Victoria University's Gamelan Padhang Moncar, he has stimulated the creation of new compositions, which have been recorded and broadcast. These include works for gamelan and piano, gamelan and orchestra, gamelan and organ, gamelan and choral plainsong etc. In 2000, to celebrate 25 years of gamelan in New Zealand, he co-organised BEAT, an International Gamelan Festival with over 100 overseas participants.

  
  

  For more info, please visit: jackbody.com




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• STEED COWART, is a composer and conductor, most interested in the progressive areas of new music, especially American experimental music. His compositions are for an array of instrumental and vocal combinations, electronics and inter-media. Timbre, harmonic definition, hocket, mobiles, and chance are among his compositional interests.

  His work has been performed around the United States and Canada by such groups as the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, SONOR, Ensemble Nova, Mills Contemporary Performance Ensemble, Shakespeare/Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz New Music Works, Heliotrope, the Club Foot Orchestra, the Ellen Webb Dance Company, the Gus Solomons Dance Company, Sincronia, performers Ellen Ruth Rose (viola), Paul Vorwerk (tenor), Curtis Nash (trumpet), William Winant (percussion), Bernhardt Batschelet (flute), Gino Robair (percussion), Andy Connell (clarinet), and at the CalArts Contemporary Music Festival.

  Born May 11, 1953 in Shelbyville, a small town in the rolling hills of middle Tennessee. He grew up in the country outside Dalton, Georgia, a textile producing town nestled in the red clay foothills of the southern-most Appalachians near Chattanooga. At about age ten he began school band at the urging of his mother. He initially played cornet, later trumpet, then French horn. Although a resident of a rural community, he had very good early teachers. Herman Johnson, then William R. Lee were band directors who were his earliest contacts with musicians. In fact, his first attempt at writing music was in response to an assignment from Johnson to his sixth-grade band to compose a solo to play for the class. Early in high school he began piano lessons with Richard Winchell, a composer. In addition to piano, Winchell taught him elementary music theory, and sparked his interest in composition.

  Cowart's education included study at Florida State University (composition with Roy Johnson, Harold Schiffman, and John Boda). It was here in Tallahassee the first public performances of his original compositions took place. These earliest pieces included Fanfare and Ricercare for brass quintet, Movements for piano, and a choral work, Dona Nobis Pacem. He transferred to The College of Wooster (composition with Ruth Still, conducting with Marshall Haddock), where he earned a BMus degree. He holds an MA and a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Bernard Rands, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, and Edwin Harkins. Further professional studies include: the Centre Acanthes 1983 at the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence for a program devoted to the music of Luciano Berio (Berio, David Osmond-Smith, Stuart Dempster), The Dartington Summer School of Music near Totnes, England (Richard Rodney Bennett, Peter Maxwell Davies, Charles Rosen), the Composers' Summer Seminars at California State University Long Beach (Donald Erb, Miles Anderson), The Conductors Institute Workshop (The Camellia Symphony Orchestra, Harold Farberman, Conductors Institute Director/Instructor). He surreptitiously attended the Fromm New Music Weeks at Aspen in 1985, hearing lectures and concerts by Berio, Subotnick, Rands, Druckman, Brown, Lucier, Sperry, and the Kronos Quartet.

  His musical life has been fortunately and profoundly influenced by associations with some of the most remarkable musicians of our time. After an auspicious meeting over frozen Finlandia vodka chased by Guinness stout during Cage's guest lectureship at UC, San Diego in 1980, he remained a friendly acquaintance of John Cage until the elder composer's death in 1992. Also at UCSD he became friends with Toru Takemitsu, worked with the amazingly virtuosic [THE] - Edwin Harkins and Philip Larson, and established enduring and enriching friendships with his teachers Bernard Rands and Pauline Oliveros that are invaluable to him. At each juncture, there have been amazing composers, performers, and musical intellects -- either teachers, colleagues, students, or others -- far too numerous to name, who have made a deep and lasting impact on his artistic and personal life.

  A California resident beginning in 1977, Steed Cowart currently lives in downtown Oakland near Lake Merritt. Since 1986, he has taught at Mills College where, along with Fred Frith, he co-directs the Contemporary Performance Ensemble, and is the Concert Coordinator for the Music Department Concert Series. He also worked at UC Santa Cruz where he taught musicianship studies, composition, conducted the faculty new music group Ensemble Nova, and was director of the new music festival April in Santa Cruz.

  Cowart discovered an aptitude for conducting in his mid-teen years. Experienced almost exclusively with conducting new music, his conducting is informed by his compositional knowledge, and vice versa. With the SONOR ensemble at UCSD he was Bernard Rand's assistant conductor. At UCSC he conducted Ensemble Nova and many performances of student compositions and student ensembles. He led the San Francisco-based Club Foot Orchestra in touring performances accompanying silent films, beginning with the premiere of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 1988. He has appeared as guest conductor with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and has conducted many ad hoc ensembles in performances of new music. Christian Wolff, Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Lou Harrison, Luciano Berio, David Behrman, Luc Ferrari, James Tenney, Bernard Rands, Robert Erickson, John Bischoff, Wadada Leo Smith, Alvin Curran, José Maceda, David Rosenboom, Malcolm Goldstein, Bun-Ching Lam, Brenda Hutchinson, Amy Denio, Philip Collins, David Felder, George Barati, Robert Morris, Olivia Block, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, and Roscoe Mitchell are but a few of the many composers whose music he has conducted or directed with the composer's supervision.

  For more info, please visit: steedcowart.com




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• FRANK FOREMAN, Born San Francisco 1938 and still play basketball there. Taught what some call art in public secondary schools in San Francisco for 28 years. His students report he was good at what he did: corupting youth by opening eyes. The demands of teaching limited his art production, which was sporatic, and mostly illegal, until he left academia in 1994. Now, he makes videos, pictures, prints, three dimensional stuff, site specific sculptures and occasional performances and installations which sometimes get him into trouble.

  An absurdist by nature, a pre-Dadaist by training, a Gregorian Chanting atheist who suffers from Heavy Thinking Sickness, Frank is a Random Idea Generator in several disciplines. Wanderlust informs his work. Fire hydrants, rust, lichen, goodgraffiti, dice and espresso are a few of his manias. Sunrises and sunsets in the East are his inspirations.

  
  

  For more info, please visit: Frank Foreman's profile




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• KENNY HILL, has been in and around the music community in Santa Cruz and New Music Works since the 1970s, His natural playing ability draws on music from many sources, traditional and exotic, ancient to modern. He has performed and taught in many,many schools and venues, local and international over the last 35 years. Kenny Hill is also a world recognized guitar maker, his guitars being played by many of the finest touring guitarists on world stages today. He always plays on a guitar that he made himself.

  
  

  For more info, please visit: hillguitar.com




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• MICHAEL MCGUSHIN, is a professor of music at Cabrillo College and the coach/accompanist for the Music Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the conductor of the chamber choir Ariose and of Cabrillo's Westside Choir. From 2002-2004 he served as the director of the Full Spectrum Chorus of Santa Cruz. He has served as music director for a number of theater and opera productions in the Santa Cruz area. Some of these include Shakespeare Santa Cruz's productions of Princess and the Pea, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty; Cabrillo Stage's productions of The Fantasticks and The Music Man; to name a few. As a pianist, Michael is a long-time member of the New Music Works Ensemble for which he also serves as an artistic advisor, and has appeared with many performing groups in the Santa Cruz and Monterey County areas. He is a featured performer on recordings of chamber music by Paul Bowles, Lou Harrison and Germaine Tailleferre.




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• HYO-SHIN NA, As a two-time recipient of the Korean National Composers Prize (1994, a work for piano solo; 2003, a work for Korean traditional orchestra) and the Asian American Arts Foundation Fellowship (2000), Hyo-shin Na has had her music performed world-wide; at festivals and concert series in her native country as well as throughout Europe, North America, Africa and the rest of Asia. Her works have been performed in California (where she currently resides) by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Earplay, San Jose Chamber Orchestra, Pacific Chamber Symphony, New Music Works, Music Now, Citywinds, Pacific Arts Woodwind Quintet, and the Stanford and Del Sol String Quartets, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio, the BBC, Korean Broadcasting System, German Radio and Belgian Radio. Recently, her solo piano music has been performed in San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Seoul, Kyoto, and at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna by Thomas Schultz, by Sarah Cahill in New York, Washington, DC, and at the Spoleto Festival, and by Yuji Takahashi in Tokyo, Osaka, Kamakura, at JakArt@2002 Festival and at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, and her music for two pianos by Yuji and Aki Takahashi in Tokyo. During the 1998 - 1999 season, the Kronos Quartet commissioned and performed Ms. Na's Song of the Beggars throughout Europe, Africa, Korea and North America.

  Ms. Na has recently been awarded commissions by the Koussevitzky Foundation to write a piece for the San Jose Chamber Orchestra (2002), by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard to write a piece for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (1997), by the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts (2000), Earplay (2003), Seoul Traditional Orchestra (2002), New Music Works (1999), Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea (2000, 2001), Philharmonia Gaudi Vienna (2000), Citywinds (1998, 2001), Piano Spheres (2001), Life and Dream Singers (2001), Pacific Chamber Symphony (2002) and Music Now (2001), among others. She was a Djerassi Resident Artist in October, 2000 and in December, 2003. Ms. Na has lectured on the relationship between her music and traditional Korean music at such varied institutions as Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Santa Cruz, Cal State Hayward, City College of San Francisco, the National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts, the Ishihara Hall in Osaka, and universities throughout South Korea. She was a resident composer at the March, 2000 concerts of the Other Minds Festival (San Francisco), at the Jeonju Sori Festival (Korea) and at the Northeast Asia Festival (Japan) in 2003. Her music has been recorded on the Fontec, Top Arts, and Seoul labels and is published in Korea and Australia. She is the author of Conversations with Kayageum Master Byung-ki Hwang (Pulbit Press).

  Ms. Na is currently working on a piano piece for Thomas Schultz to be premiered in May, 2004 at Weill Recital Hall in New York and on a koto piece for Shoko Hikage. Along with her work with western and Korean instruments, in 2002 she began to compose for other Asian instruments.

  Her musical studies were at Ewha University (Seoul, Korea), Manhattan School of Music, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she received her doctorate.

  
  

  For more info, please visit: hyo-shinna.com




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• JON SCOVILLE is currently Music Director of Tandy Beal & Company and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Utah. Accomplished composer and dance accompanist, he has toured world-wide and accompanied for many dancers including a partial listing: Glady's Bailin, Tandy Beal, Ellen Bromberg, Carolyn Carlson, Remy Charlip, Loa Clawson, Lynda Davis, Laura Dean, Bill Evans, Abby Fiat, Phyllis Haskell, David Hochoy, Kelly Holt, Cliff Keuter, Betty Jones, Steve Koester, Marc Lawton, Murray Louis, Cathy McCann, Kathleen McClintock, Donald McKayle, Susan McLain, Douglas Nielsen, Alwin Nikolais, David Popalisky, Shirley Ririe, Carl Schaeffer, Ellen Sevy, Jeff Slayton, Robert Small, Erik Stern, Clay Taliaferro, Doug Varone, Tim Wengerd, Donna White, and Joan Woodbury.

  A partial listing of his works include: An Atlas of Shadows (1999 Tandy Beal Salt Lake City Premiere), Looking for Signs At The Crossroads (Instrumental Suite produced and recorded in Rio de Janiero 1998), HATS (1997 Instrumental Suitecommissioned by New Music Works), DEMODEX (Score for Amiens Ecole du Dance, Premiere 1996 in Amiens, France), Clad Only in Green and Starstream (2 pieces for VIVA! a musical circus featuring performers from the Moscow Circus), Aurora (a dance score for Alwin Nikolais), and Ceremonies in Dark Places (dance score for Murray Louis, premiere Verona, Italy) to name a few. PIS ALLER, his most recent percussion score for Laura Dean's Ultimate Journey premiered in 2000 in Salt Lake City.

  Additionally, Jon has received several composer's grants and has co-authored a book on musical instrument building.

  
  For more info, please visit: asgardprod.com/scovillebio.htm




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• DAVID TANENBAUM is recognized internationally as an outstanding performing and recording artist, a charismatic educator, and a transcriber and editor of both taste and intelligence. David Tanenbaum is one of the most admired classical guitarists of his generation. He has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Australia, the former Soviet Union and Asia, and in 1988 he became the first American guitarist to be invited to perform in China by the Chinese government. He has been soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, the Oakland Symphony, Vienna's ORF orchestra, with such eminent conductors as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kent Nagano and John Adams.

  David Tanenbaum has been a featured soloist at many international festivals, including those of Bath, Luzern, Frankfurt, Barcelona and Vienna as well as numerous guitar festivals. In 1989, as President of the Second American Classical Guitar Congress, he commissioned five new works, including Rosewood by Henry Brant for a large guitar orchestra. He has subsequently conducted Rosewood more than a dozen times on four continents.

  While his repertoire encompasses diverse styles, David Tanenbaum is recognized as one of today's most eloquent proponents of new guitar repertoire. Among the many works written for him is Hans Werner Henze's guitar concerto An Eine Aolsharfe, which he premiered throughout Europe and recorded with the composer conducting, Terry Riley's first guitar piece, Ascención, four works by 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner Aaron Jay Kernis, two pieces by Roberto Sierra, and a suite by Lou Harrison. He is currently working with Terry Riley on a series of 24 guitar pieces. He has toured extensively with Steve Reich and Musicians, was invited to Japan in 1991 by Toru Takemitsu, and has had a long association with the Ensemble Modern. As a chamber musician he has collaborated with, among others, the Kronos, Shanghai, Alexander and Chester String Quartets, dancer Tandy Beal and guitarist Manuel Barrueco. He is currently a member of the World Guitar Ensemble, which regularly tours Europe.

  David Tanenbaum's three dozen recordings, which reflect his broad repertoire interests, can be found on New Albion, EMI, Nonesuch, Ars Musici, Rhino, GSP, Albany, Audiofon, Bayer, Acoustic Music Records, Bridge, Stradivarius and others. His 2002 recording as soloist with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in John Adam's Naive and Sentimental Music was nominated for a Grammy as the Best New Composition. He has produced many editions of guitar music, including the David Tanenbaum Concert Series for Guitar Solo Publications. He has also written a series of three books, The Essential Studies, which analyze the etudes of Sor, Carcassi and Brouwer and compliment his recordings of those works on GSP, and his chapter on the Revival of the Classical Guitar in the 20th Century appears in the Cambridge Companion to the Guitar.

  David Tanenbaum is currently Chair of the Guitar Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he received the 1995 Oustanding Professor Award, and he has been Artist-In-Residence at the Manhattan School of Music. He is in demand for master classes worldwide. Mr. Tanenbaum's students have won many international competitions, and his former students hold teaching positions internationally.

  David Tanenbaum studied guitar with Rolando Valdez-Blain, Aaron Shearer and Michael Lorimer, attending the San Francisco Conservatory and Peabody Conservatory. Further studies included work with pianist Jeanne Stark-Iochmans and harpsichordist Laurette Goldberg. He participated in the 1981 New York master class with Andres Segovia.

  
  For more info, please visit: davidtanenbaum.com




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