Faculty & Staff

Composer Cody Wright’s music has been performed at La Schola Cantorum in Paris, New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall in Boston and at CAMI Hall in New York City, by distinguished performers such as the Flux Quartet, the yesaroun’ Duo, and pianist Sergey Schepkin. His work “Daydream” for tenor saxophone, vibraphone, and recorded material, was originally written for a Walden debut by the yesaroun’ Duo, and has since become Cody’s most widely performed work, having been performed on four continents.

Mr. Wright graduated cum laude with a B.M. degree in Composition from New England Conservatory in Boston, and a M.M. degree in Composition from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He completed a year of graduate studies in Composition New Media at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, and he is a member of Pi Kappa Lambda. His principal teachers have included Alan Fletcher, Leonardo Balada, Morton Subotnick, and James Tenney for composition, and F. John Adams, Denis Colwell and Robert Page for conducting. He has also studied with Philip Lasser, Lee Hyla, and Michael Gandolfi. Mr. Wright previously served on the composition faculty of the Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire and was awarded the 2003 Patricia Plude Faculty Fellowship for excellence in teaching.

Composer Daniel Felsenfeld has been commissioned and performed by Simone Dinnerstein, Opera On Tap, The Chorus of Trinity Wall Street, UrbanArias, Metropolis Ensemble, Transient Canvas, The Crossing/ICE, Meerenai Shim, the New York Philharmonic New Music Biennial, NANOWorks Opera, Kathleen Supovè, Two Sense (Lisa Moore and Ashley Bathgate), ASCAP, San Jose Opera, ETHEL, Great Noise Ensemble, American Opera Projects, The Secret Opera, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Transit, Redshift, Nadia Sirota, Jennifer Choi, Lara Downes, Blair McMillen, Metropolis Ensemble, Two Sides Sounding, Kristin Elgersma, Eleanor Taylor and Jen Devore, Alcyone Ensemble, Parhelion Trio, Bryan Haslettm Xanthos Ensemble, Friction Quartet, Momenta Quartet, Nouvelle Ensemble Moderne, Cornelius Duffallo, Emily Manzo, Stephianie Mortimore, Mellissa Hughes, Corey Dargel, Jenny Lin, New York City Opera (VOX), ACME, New Gallery Concert Series, Gabriella Diaz, Jody Redhage, Caroline Worra, Kristin Chambers, Marcy Richardson, Kamala Sankaram, The Jessold Consort, New England Conservatory Philharmonic in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Galapagos Art Space, The Kimmell Center, Jordan Hall, the Kitchen, Miller Theatre, Merkin Hall, Wigmore Hall, Stanford University, Harvard University, National Sawdust, The Stone, Brown University, Le Poisson Rouge, City Winery, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C, and as part of the BEAT Festival, MATA Festival, Make Music New York, 21c Liederabend, Ecstatic Music Festival, Opera Grows in Brooklyn, New Brew, Serial Underground, and John Wesley Harding’s Cabinet of Wonders. When rapper Jay-Zperformed in Carnegie Hall, along with Alicia Keys and Nas, backed by a full orchestra, Felsenfeld was asked to do all of the orchestrations and arrangements. He also collaborated with The Roots (offering music on their Grammy-nominated record Undun, appearing with them and the Metropolis Ensemble on the Jimmy Fallon Show) and ?uestlove with Keren Ann and David Murray. He also wrote arrangements for noth ShuffleCulture and Electronium, shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with ?uestlove, Sasha Grey, Deerhoof, Reggie Watts, and How to Dress Well and the Metropolis Ensemble. He is also the Court Composer for John Wesley Harding’s Cabinet of Wonders, for which he wrote the theme—and which can be heard as an NPR Podcast. Residencies include Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, The Hermitage, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Felsenfeld is also an accomplished essayist, annotator, and author, with eight books to his name as well as articles for the New York Times, Listen, Playbill, Time Out New York, Symphony Magazine, Strings Magazine, New Music Box, and Early Music Magazine; program notes for the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra, Miller Theatre, Wigmore Hall, and Carnegie Hall; liner notes for Naxos, Bridge, Koch, EMI, Sony, and Adjustable Music. He served as curator for The Score in the Opinionator Section of the New York Times, he co-founded the New Music Gathering (an annual conference-concert series hybrid) which took place in San Francisco in 2015, as well as for Music After, a marathon concert on 9.11.11 he co-produced with Eleonor Sandresky. He is a teaching artist at the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

Born in Akron, Ohio, Dennis K. Sullivan II is a percussionist and composer based in Queens, NY. Dennis explores  cross-genre  coalescence  between  acoustic,  electronic  and timbral  based  noise  music.  As a percussionist, Dennis is a founding member of the performance duo, Radical 2 with percussionist/engineer, Levy Lorenzo and Popebama, a high octane experimental percussion/saxophone duo with composer/saxophonist Erin Rogers. In addition, Dennis has shared the stage with The International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble ECCE, Ensemble Court Circuit, Wavefield Ensemble, Either/Or, Ensemble Pamplemousse, The Argento New Music Project and others.

His compositions have recently been performed by Yarn/Wire, Decoder, flutist Kenneth J. Cox, New Thread Saxophone Quartet, Hypercube, N/A Ensemble and others while being featured on the International Contemporary Ensemble’s OpenICE series, nymusikk Bergen, SPLICE Festival, Ball State Festival of New Music, Omaha Under the Radar, Cleveland’s reSound Festival and the Edmonton Fringe Festival. Upcoming projects include new works for Unheard-of// ensemble, guitarist Jay Sorce, flutist Kennith J. Cox, and “Fight. Songs,” an evening of music curated with Popebama  bandmate Erin Rogers written for and performed with Decoder to be premiered at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie in March 2020.

Dennis holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts (DMA) from Stony Brook University. He currently serves as adjunct professor of percussion and director of the wind ensemble at Adelphi University as well as adjunct professor of music at Manhattan College. Dennis’s other interests include hiking, Cleveland sports and heavy metal music.  He owns an embarrassing amount of hats!

www.dennisksullivan.com

Erin Cameron enjoys a diverse career as a clarinetist, composer, and educator. Her clarinet playing has been heard in performances across the country, including appearances on Toledo’s WGTE radio station, with the North Texas Wind Symphony and Toledo Symphony, and on the Sounds Modern concert series in Fort Worth, Texas. Erin is an active educator and has worked with young musicians and artists at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp and the Missouri Fine Arts Academy, in addition to serving as a Teaching Fellow at the University of North Texas. An avid proponent of new music, she has performed over 30 world and regional premieres of new works. Her compositions have been performed in collaboration with the International Contemporary Ensemble and Chicago’s Zafa Collective. In her free time, Erin enjoys vegetarian cooking and nature walks. Erin is currently pursuing her doctorate in clarinet performance at the University of North Texas; she also holds degrees from Bowling Green State University and Northwestern University.

Assistant Director of Composers Forums, Young Musicians Program

Kittie Cooper is a composer, performer, and educator based in Charlottesville, Virginia. She makes art that incorporates feminism and explores the spectrum between silliness and seriousness. Her work has been called “highly original and wonderfully fun”. She is interested in text and graphic scores, improvisation, and DIY electronic instruments. She has recently performed and presented at festivals and conferences including SPLICE, the International Alliance for Women in Music Conference, Electronic Music Midwest, N_SEME, and MOXsonic Festival. She also performs locally in Charlottesville as a guitarist, electronic musician, and improviser.

Kittie teaches music for students with visual impairments at the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind. She has taught in many settings, including public schools, self-contained special education schools, and a private progressive school. She holds a BM from Northwestern University in music education and guitar performance, and is pursuing a Master’s degree in special education at George Mason University. Kittie has spent the past five summers at Walden working as faculty, Assistant Director of Composers Forums, and staff. In her spare time, she enjoys counting down the days to Halloween and taking care of the stray cats in her neighborhood.

Lila Meretzky is a musician and composer from New York City. She currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee where she recently completed her sophomore year at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. She can usually be found running around organizing concerts and art happenings on campus and around Nashville. Lila also dabbles in music criticism and modern dance. A voracious reader, Lila once had to dump out an entire backpack full of books while going through security at LaGuardia Airport.

Michael Kropf is a composer whose work deals with hidden emotions and evocative places. He has collaborated with Marin Alsop, the Telegraph Quartet, the San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. In 2016, Michael was commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, in partnership with John Adams and Deborah O’Grady’s Pacific Harmony Foundation, to write a new orchestral work called “Spinning Music.” The work was later described as “a brilliant, rapid fire stretch of perpetual motion,” by the SF Chronicle’s Joshua Kosman. Recent projects include a collaboration with the Apple Hill String Quartet, as well as a piano quartet for the 2018 Aspen Music Festival.

Michael completed his Master’s degree in Composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2016, where he won First Prize in the Highsmith Orchestral Composition Competition, the Bienial Art Song Composition Competition, and the Telegraph Quartet Composition Competition, as well as Third Prize in their Biennial Choral Competition. In 2014, his composition for chamber ensemble “Kinesthesia” received an honorable mention at the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composers Awards.

He served as Co-Director of the Hot Air Music Festival, a daylong marathon of new music which takes place annually at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He is also a Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Dynamic Music Festival, a two day concert-series in New York City focused on creating a dialogue between student composers from different schools in and around the Tri-State area. He currently teaches composition and musicianship at the Walden School in New Hampshire and the San Francisco Conservatory Pre-College.

Michael was born in Danbury, Connecticut and received his Bachelor of Music degree from New York University. His teachers and mentors have included David Conte, John Adams, Justin Dello Joio, Luboš Mrkvička, and Youngmi Ha. He will be beginning a doctoral degree in music composition at the University of Michigan this fall.

Nurse, Young Musicians Program

Michele Taillon is a board-certified holistic registered nurse and member of the American Holistic Nurses Association. Her nursing career has allowed her to work with many people across the lifespan. As a holistic nurse she is passionate about person-centered health care and the wellness model. She has served on the wellness committees for the New Hampshire State Veterans Home, Living Innovations (an agency providing services for the disabled), and currently within the Manchester New Hampshire school district where she also works with special needs students.

In 2017 she earned a 200-hour yoga teacher certificate bringing the benefits of yoga to the community, and volunteering her teaching with several nonprofit agencies. She is currently involved as a nurse and yoga teacher serving the needs of young women who have suffered trauma and disfigurement.

In her spare time, she enjoys kayaking, hiking, the ocean, sustainable commerce, and looks forward to a 500-hour yoga teacher training in late 2018.

Nate May (B. 1987) is an American composer whose music draws on research and imagination, often treating contemporary issues of place, migration, and environment with textural intricacy, rhythmic drive, and a taste for repurposed sounds. Raised in Huntington, West Virginia, much of his work stems from a “fascination, love, and respect for the people” of Appalachia (Soapbox), including his oratorio State—premiered by singer Kate Wakefield (Lung) and MUSE, Cincinnati’s Women’s Choir—and his monodrama, Dust in the Bottomland—set in present-day West Virginia and sung by lyric bass Andrew Munn, which has been performed twelve times in seven states and broadcast on radio and television. He has been a fellow at the highSCORE festival (Pavia, Italy) and the Sō Percussion Summer Institute (Princeton, New Jersey), and was selected as one of three U.S. composers to participate in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2017 National Composers Intensive. He has received commissions from the Walden School, Brianna Matzke, Thea Rossen, and Neutrals Duo, and his work has been performed by Eric Wubbels, Adam Sliwinski, Nathan Nabb, Patchwork Duo, Hajnal Pivnick, Quartetto Indaco, and many others. Large-scale collaborations include the world-touring work Spiral by choreographer/dancer Wanjiru Kamuyu, and Kalahari Waits, the debut album of indigenous experimental trio Khoi Khonnexion, produced during a year in South Africa on a Reese Miller scholarship from the Telluride Association.

Currently pursuing a D.M.A. in composition at Yale, he holds degrees from Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (M.M., Composition) and the University of Michigan (B.F.A., Jazz and Contemplative Studies), and has studied with Christopher Theofanidis, Geri Allen, Ellen Rowe, Stephen Rush, Miguel Roig-Francolí, and Michael Fiday. His work has received support from ArtsWave, People’s Liberty, and the Berea College Appalachian Sound Fellowship. He currently serves as a Teaching Fellow at Yale, and previously served on adjunct faculty at Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music. This is his second summer teaching at Walden.

Dr. Rebekah Griffin Greene is an award-winning bassist, composer, pianist, cellist, poet, and singer who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in bass performance, composition, and music education from the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, as well as a doctorate in bass performance from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

After recovering from a serious wrist injury and winning the Alice Nelson Music Competition in 1995 on the bass, she orchestrated her own bass and piano piece for the San Luis Obispo Symphony, launching her career as a composer and bass soloist. Now active in New York City as a freelance jazz, solo, chamber, Broadway and orchestral musician, she has performed her own works, as well as traditional recital repertoire, in such places as Hong Kong, Quebec, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu and Chicago. Her chamber pieces have been performed by ensembles on four continents, and her Atlantis Revelation soundtrack has had hundreds of thousands of internet radio plays since 2012.

Her composition teachers include Morten Lauridsen and Frank Ticheli, and her bass teachers include Paul Ellison, Joseph Carver and Kurt Muroki. Having taught classroom music in both Los Angeles Unified and New York City Schools, she is currently teaching private and group bass at the Lucy Moses School, Bloomingdale School of Music, and the Thurnauer Music School, where she is also the Head of Theory and Ear Training, proudly implementing a new Walden-based curriculum she wrote last summer. She lives in Queens, New York City, with her trombonist husband, Dr. Terry Greene II, her son, Kayden, daughter Phoenix, and many instruments. Please visit YouTube to see some of Rebekah’s compositions and performances.

Choral Director, Young Musicians Program

Previously based in Seattle, conductor and composer Sarah Riskind is the incoming Director of Choral Activities at Eureka College in central Illinois. In her eight summers at Walden, she has shared her specialties in choral composition and improvisation, arrangements of Judeo-Spanish melodies, and Renaissance polyphony.

Among her original works are Jewish and Judeo-Christian music, secular pieces with improvisatory elements, and frequent settings with string obbligato parts. Recent premieres include the tenor/bass arrangement of Oseh Shalom by the Appalachian State Glee Club in April 2019, the Robert Frost setting Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter by the Pacifica Choirs Interludes Ensemble in March 2019, and several arrangements of Judeo-Spanish melodies by the Seattle Jewish Chorale and Sarah’s own ensemble Las Kantaderas del Noroeste in November/December 2018. She has also written for the Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Ensemble Dal Niente as part of the Walden School Faculty Commissioning Project and is currently involved with the Creative Commissions project through the University of Cincinnati.

Sarah enjoys accompanying voices as a violinist/fiddler and improvisor, and she has most recently sung soprano in the Mägi Ensemble, a professional Baltic women’s choir in Seattle. She holds a DMA in Choral Conducting from University of Washington, an MM in Choral Conducting from University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a BA in Music from Williams College.

www.sarahriskind.com

New York native Dr. Terry L. Greene II is a trombonist, improviser, drummer, arranger, composer, educator and poet.  Terry received his Doctorate in Musical Arts from Stony Brook University in 2008, studying under trombonists Ray Anderson and Michael Powell, as well as outside of school studies with trombonists Steve Turre and Vincent Gardener. He has since then performed with The Roots, Tony Allen, Amp Fidler, Macy Grey, David Murray, Oliver Lake, Elliot Sharp, Mark Helias, Ray Anderson, Charlie Persip, Rufus Reid, Steve Turre, Kim Burrell, Kirk Franklin, Israel Houghton, and several other notable creative artists. You can hear Terry as a trombonist on Oliver Lake’s latest big band album titled “Wheels,” Elliot Sharp’s 2016 Aggregat album called “Dilectrical,” an NPR filming of David Murray’s Cuban Ensemble, and “congahead.com” performances with Chia’s Dance Party at LP founder Martin Cohen’s home. He plays with the Astoria Symphony, and played funk and gospel with the Christian Cultural Center Band. Terry has additional experience playing other musical genres including new music, hard rock, free improvisation, Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, and Colombian music.

As a composer, he has collaborated and performed his own music and poetry with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and Splinter Reeds woodwind quintet in conjunction with faculty commissions from the Walden School Young Musicians Program in Dublin, New Hampshire. Terry has also written and arranged for the Christian Cultural Center Band and his own small jazz ensembles on several freelance projects. His pieces have been performed in New York City, Carmel Valley, California, and New Hampshire.

In addition to his versatile performance abilities, Terry also teaches students of all ages and economic backgrounds.  Most notably would be his work with The Walden School Young Musicians Program as a faculty member, composition forum moderator, band leader, jazz and free improvisation instructor, coach for singer/songwriters, choral singer, and creative musical contributor on trombone and drums. Some of his other adventures include teaching theory and performance ensembles at Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts, teaching jazz history and performance at Stony Brook University, teaching musical instruments and poetry/hip hop to children in the South Bronx and Far Rockaway for the Thrive Collective, and teaching general music to students at Clara Barton High school in Brooklyn. Terry also led improvisation workshops as an educational facilitator for The Coltrane Home, which is the organization that preserves the home of John and Alice Coltrane.

Terry is passionate about being an artist who is a husband and father in New York City, and lives in Queens with his equally accomplished wife, Rebekah Griffin Greene, their son Kayden and daughter Phoenix who will all be a part of Walden 2019.

Theo Trevisan is a composer, singer, and aspiring conductor studying music and computer science at Princeton University.  As a young child, his parents dragged him to a choir concert against his wishes, but he became enthralled with the singing within minutes, and subsequently ended up auditioning for and enrolling at the American Boychoir School.  After graduating, he started to listen to composers who wrote after 1900 as an act of teenage rebellion against his parents (whose favorite composers are Haydn and Mozart).  This led him to Walden, where he attended the Young Musicians Program from summers 2014 to 2017, learning about topics ranging from cereal to serialism.

At school, Theo sings in far too many choirs, directs a co-ed jazz/classical acappella group, and performs in the Laptop Orchestra.  Last summer, he worked for Daniel Trueman on the bitKlavier digital prepared piano app, and looks forward to assisting Jeff Snyder’s research later this summer.  Some of his interests and inspirations (musical and otherwise) include the Renaissance, Modernism, algorithms, video games, puns, and memes.  He’s super excited to return to Walden on staff this year!