The Faculty and Artists-in-Residence of the Creative Musicians Retreat comprise leaders in the fields of composition, electronic music and music education.
Our philosophy is that by participating together in all levels of community life, faculty, artists, and participants can create an environment where creativity flourishes.
Meet the 2022 Creative Musicians Retreat Faculty & Staff
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Alex Christie
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Anastasia Baker
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Arté Warren
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Caroline Mallonee
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DJ Sparr
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Kittie Cooper
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Loretta Notareschi
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Luke Schroeder
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Osnat Netzer
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Renée Favand-See
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Sam Pluta
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Sammi Stone
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Seth Brenzel
Alex Christie
Director of Electronic Music, Creative Musicians Retreat
Academic Dean & Director of Electronic Music, Young Musicians Program
Alex Christie makes acoustic and electronic music in many forms. His music has been called “vibrant”, “interesting, I guess,” and responsible for “ruin[ing] my day.” He enjoys collaborating with artists in all fields and is particularly interested the design of power structures, systems of intervention, and absurdist bureaucracy in composition. Alex is the founder and co-curator of the multidisciplinary arts series SOLOS (Charlottesville, VA) and the program coordinator for Synths for Beginners, a creative workshop series that provides free arts education and music equipment to Charlottesville youth. He is also a member of the bands Trash Cats, Altra, and Ear Infection, all of which are really great.
Recently, Alex’s work has explored the ecology of performance in intermedia art and interactive electronic music. Through real-time audio processing, instrument building, video, lighting, and theater, Alex expands performance environments to offer multiple lenses through which the audience can experience the work. Alex has performed and presented at a variety of conferences and festivals whose acronyms combine to spell nicedinsaucesfeeeemmmmmmfogascabsplotnort.
Alex began his compositional career many years ago as a student at Walden’s Young Musicians Program where he now serves as faculty, Director of Electronic Music, and an academic dean. He holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory, Mills College, and the University of Virginia where he is currently completing a PhD in Composition and Computer Technologies (CCT). Other interests include baseball and geometric shapes.
Anastasia Baker
Anastasia Baker is a singer and clarinetist entering her junior year at Montclair State University in New Jersey. There she studies music education under the vocal training of Kelley Hijleh and Karen Driscoll. Anastasia enjoys studying a wide variety of musical styles including classical, jazz, pop, and musical theater. In recent years she lead her high school marching band as drum major, and played various leads in musical productions such as Maria from The Sound of Music. She partakes in many vocal and instrumental ensembles, and is eager to share her knowledge of music as a teacher in the near future.
In her free time Anastasia enjoys painting, baking, and putting together PowerPoint presentation nights with her friends.
Arté Warren
Arté Warren is a flautist, freelance pianist, aspiring songwriter, producer, and audio engineer from Baltimore, Maryland. He attends Morgan State University in Baltimore where he’s entering his senior year as a Music major with a concentration in Flute Performance having studied under Dr. Anita Thesen, and is dual-enrolled for his Master of Arts in Teaching. He is a member of the Magnificent Marching Machine at Morgan State University under the direction of Mr. Melvin N. Miles Jr. Arté is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi National Honorary Band Fraternity.
Caroline Mallonee
Director, Creative Musicians Retreat
American composer Caroline Mallonee finds inspiration in visual art, science, languages, and musical puzzles. Her music has been programmed across the United States including at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Merkin Hall, Bargemusic, and National Sawdust, as well as further afield at the Long Leaf Opera Festival (NC), Carlsbad Music Festival (CA), Bennington Chamber Music Conference (VT), Jordan Hall (Boston, MA), Cambridge Music Festival (UK), and Tokyo Opera City (Japan). Mallonee has been commissioned to write new works for the New York Philharmonic, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Spektral Quartet, Firebird Ensemble, Present Music, Wet Ink Ensemble, Antares, PRISM Quartet, Ciompi Quartet, Ethos Percussion, and the Buffalo Chamber Players, for whom she serves as composer-in-residence. Carrie has been on the faculty of The Walden School since 1998 and is the director of the Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat. She first came to Walden as a student when she was 12 and has hiked Mt. Monadnock more than thirty times. She holds degrees from Harvard, Yale and Duke, and held a Fulbright Fellowship to the Netherlands, where she studied with Louis Andriessen. For more information, please visit www.carolinemallonee.com.
DJ Sparr
Composer and electric guitarist D. J. Sparr, who Gramophone recently hailed as “exemplary,” is one of America’s preeminent composer-performers. He has caught the attention of critics with his eclectic style, described as “pop-Romantic…iridescent and wondrous” (The Mercury News) and “suits the boundary erasing spirit of today’s new-music world” (The New York Times). The Los Angeles Times praises him as “an excellent soloist,” and the Santa Cruz Sentinel says that he “wowed an enthusiastic audience…Sparr’s guitar sang in a near-human voice.” He was the electric guitar concerto soloist on the 2018 GRAMMY award-winning, all-Kenneth Fuchs recording with JoAnn Falletta and the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2011, Sparr was named one of NPR listener’s favorite 100 composers under the age 40. He has composed for and performed with renowned ensembles such as the Houston Grand Opera, Cabrillo Festival, New World Symphony, Washington National Opera, and Eighth Blackbird. His music has received awards from BMI, New Music USA, and the League of Composers/ISCM. Sparr is a faculty member at the famed Walden School’s Creative Musicians Retreat in Dublin, New Hampshire. His works and guitar performances appear on Naxos, Innova Recordings, and Centaur Records.
D.J. lives in Baton Rouge, LA with his wife Kimberly, son Harris, Nannette the hound dog, and Bundini the boxer. Sparr’s music is published by Bill Holab Music.
Kittie Cooper
Director of Composers Forums
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 performed and presented at a variety of festivals and conferences across the United States, and performs locally in Charlottesville as a guitarist, electronic musician, and improviser.
Kittie’s music has been commissioned and performed by International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Ensemble Dal Niente, Splinter Reeds, Popebama, and Ghost Ensemble. She serves as Director of Composers Forums and Faculty for The Walden School Young Musicians Program and staff for the Creative Musicians Retreat. Next year, she will begin pursuing an MFA in interdisciplinary arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She holds a BM from Northwestern University in music education and guitar performance, and an MEd in special education from George Mason University. In her spare time, she enjoys taking care of the stray cats in her neighborhood.
Loretta Notareschi
Faculty, Creative Musicians Retreat
Called a “bright wom[a]n with big ideas” (Souls in Action), Colorado-based composer Loretta K. Notareschi (b. 1977) seeks to create “compassion” (303 Magazine) and connection through her “powerful” (The Denver Post) and “deeply personal” (5280 Magazine) music. Whether writing for string quartet or symphony orchestra, church congregations or classical ukulele players, she seeks to “connec[t] with the audience” (303 Magazine) and move listeners with music of meaning.
Born in Canton, Ohio and raised in Stillwater, Oklahoma, Notareschi is a professor of music at Regis University and a summer faculty member of The Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat. She received master’s and doctoral degrees in composition from the University of California at Berkeley, a bachelor’s of music in composition from the University of Southern California, and the General Diploma from the Zoltàn Kodàly Pedagogical Institute of Music in Kecskemèt, Hungary, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. Notareschi’s music has been performed in the United States, Europe, and South America by groups as diverse as the Spektral Quartet, the Sacred and Profane Chamber Chorus, the Duo Montagnard, The Playground Ensemble, the Boulder Symphony, and the former Ensemble Eleven. She has received awards and grants from the Cincinnati Camerata, IronWorks Percussion Duo, the American Composers Forum, and the GALA Choruses, and in October 2016, she was a TEDxMileHigh speaker. Her primary teachers in composition have included Morten Lauridsen, Erica Muhl, Rick Lesemann, Cindy Cox, and Jorge Liderman, and her music is published by Disegni Music, Friedrich Hofmeister, and Bachovich.
Luke Schroeder
Luke was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, but grew up and currently lives in Wichita Falls, Texas. In the fall, Luke will be entering his Senior year at Texas Tech University, where he majors in Music Education. He hopes to become a teacher one day and share his passion for music with his students. At Texas Tech, Luke plays Viola in the University Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Bravura, and New Music Ensemble. He has played with the Wichita Falls Symphony Orchestra as well. Luke also works for the Texas Tech String Project. String Project is an organization funded by Texas Tech University that allows string music education students to teach beginner string players. Luke enjoys listening to a wide range of music and spending time with good friends. His hobbies include collecting records, discovering different coffee shops, and watching sports. Luke is looking forward to a fun and exciting summer at Walden!
Osnat Netzer
Osnat Netzer /osˈnat ˈnɛtsɛʁ/ is a composer, performer and educator. Osnat creates her compositions collaboratively, tailoring her work to the performer’s sensibilities, physicality and improvisational inclinations. She takes inspiration from cognitive linguistics, and in dialogue with the embodied experience of physical forces, such as potential and kinetic energy, resulting in compositions that are rich in musical languages and connected to the fulsome pursuit for tension and relaxation.
Born in Haifa, Israel, Netzer studied composition and piano at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where her primary composition teacher was Menachem Zur. She came to the United States in 2003 for graduate studies in composition with Robert Cuckson at Mannes school of Music and continued her studies with Lee Hyla at New England Conservatory, where she earned her doctorate in 2011. In 2019, she joined the faculty of DePaul University as Assistant Professor of Composition and Musicianship.
Netzer’s works have been commissioned and performed by Ensemble Dal Niente, ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Patchwork, mezzo-soprano Lucy Dhegrae, bass David Salsbery Fry, saxophonists Kenneth Radnofsky, Doug O’Connor and Geoffrey Landman, Spektral Quartet, and Winsor Music, among many others, published by Edition Peters and earthsongs, and recorded on Bridge Records and New Focus Recordings.
As a pianist and performer, she regularly plays and conducts new music by fellow composers, as well as her own songs and compositions. Also a committed and passionate educator, Netzer teaches at The Walden School and has served on the faculties of New England Conservatory, Longy School of Music of Bard College and Harvard University.
Renée Favand-See
Renée Favand-See is a composer and soprano living in Portland, Oregon. Her works explore the music of words, natural and made environments, emotions and spiritual questions. These investigations yield vocal music of all stripes, Musique Concrète-esque electronic pieces, and lyrically driven instrumental music cultivating relationships that unfold in the spaces between voices.
In January, 2021 Trio Triumphatrix and Voices of Ascension premiered Renée’s works First Flight and We Need Earth for their production Astronautica: Voices of Women in Space. Recent projects include: Solitude for soprano Arwen Myers; Ten full moons for Northwest Art Song; Wie der Katz mit der Maus for fEARnoMUSIC; Growing for Portland Piano International; as well as a recording project of her work Only in falling with Resonance Ensemble. Among her commissions are works for Voices of Ascension, Resonance Ensemble, Five Boroughs Music Festival, Lucy Shelton and Eighth Blackbird, Sequitur, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, American Opera Projects, Wet Ink Ensemble, Outer Voices Festival, and cellist Ha-Yang Kim. Other groups who have performed her music include The Julians; Friends of Rain; Electrogals; Del Sol String Quartet; Peabody Trio; and many singers, including Hai-Ting Chinn, Jesse Blumberg, Blythe Gaissert, Hannah Penn, Anna Haagenson, Alissa Rose, Jennifer Aylmer, Kristin Norderval, and William Ferguson.
Renée has written chamber, orchestral, choral and electronic pieces, as well as music for video and dance, including collaborations with Ten Tiny Dances in Portland, TRIP Dance Theatre in Los Angeles, Group Motion in Philadelphia and video artist Christine Sciulli in New York City. Renée has also ventured into theater, with long-time friend and collaborator, Hai-Ting Chinn, with Science Fair, a staged vocal recital produced by HERE Arts Center in New York City.
Her honors include a grant from the American Music Center for her oratorio Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes., a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Bearns Prize from Columbia University.
She holds B.M. and M.M. degrees in composition from the Eastman and Yale Schools of Music, respectively. Her earliest compositional studies began at age twelve at The Walden School, a summer program for young musicians in Dublin, New Hampshire.
Renée currently teaches music composition and theory at Portland State University and Creative Musicians Retreat in New England.
Sam Pluta
Sam Pluta is a composer, electronics performer, and sound artist. Though his work has a wide breadth, his central focus is on using the computer as a performance instrument capable of sharing the stage with groups ranging from new music ensembles to world-class improvisers. By creating musical systems of shared agency, Pluta’s vibrant sonic universe focuses on the visceral interaction of instrumental performers with reactive computerized sound worlds.
As a composer of instrumental music, Pluta has written works for Wet Ink Ensemble, the New York Philharmonic, International Contemporary Ensemble, Yarn/Wire, Spektral Quartet, and other groups. His compositions range from solo instrumental works to pieces for ensemble with electronics to compositions for large ensemble.
Pluta is the Technical Director for the Wet Ink Ensemble, a group for whom he is a member composer as well as principal electronics performer. As a performer of chamber music, in addition to his own works, Pluta has performed and premiered works by Peter Ablinger, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Charmaine Lee, Katharina Rosenberger, George Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Kate Soper, Eric Wubbels and others.
As an improviser, Pluta has collaborated with some of the finest creative musicians in the world, including Peter Evans, Evan Parker, Ikue Mori, Craig Taborn, Ingrid Laubrock, Ben Lamar Gay, and Anne La Berge. Pluta is a member of multiple improvisation-based ensembles, including the jazz influenced Peter Evans Ensemble, the free improvisation-based Rocket Science, and the analog synth/laptop duo exclusiveOr (with Jeff Snyder). With these various groups he has toured Europe and America and performed at major festivals and venues, such as the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, the Moers and Donaueshingen Festivals in Germany, Bimhuis in Amsterdam, and The Vortex in London.
Pluta studied composition and electronic music at Columbia University, where he received his DMA in 2012. He received Master’s degrees from the University of Birmingham in the UK and the University of Texas at Austin, and completed his undergraduate work at Santa Clara University. His principal teachers include Brad Garton, George Lewis, Tristan Murail, Fabien Levy, Scott Wilson, Jonty Harrison, Russell Pinkston, Kevin Puts, and Lynn Shurtleff. Previous to joining the Computer Music faculty at Peabody Institute, Pluta taught composition and computer music at the University of Chicago, Bennington College, Manhattan School of Music, and The Walden School.
Sammi Stone
Director of Operations
Sammi Jo Stone is an oboist, saxophonist, and composer, originally from Baker City in rural northeastern Oregon. She holds degrees in music from Williams College in Williamstown, MA and the University of California San Diego. She has worked around the United States in pit orchestras and chamber ensembles, and as a senior counselor at the innovative Woodwinds @ Wallowa Lake chamber music camp in Joseph, OR.
She is passionate about learning and teaching music, going on hikes, and knowing which birds are which. She composes music and writes texts intended for musical setting, and aspires to honor the complex sounds of the natural world with songful compositions informed by spectral study.
In addition to working for the Walden School, she is an oboe lessons teacher and small-batch coffee roaster.
Seth Brenzel
Executive Director & Director, Young Musicians Program
Seth Brenzel, Executive Director, has been associated with The Walden School for more than 30 years. He was fortunate to be a student at Walden for six magical summers (1985-1990), and since 1994, has served the School as a staff member, faculty member, Director of Operations, and as the Associate Director from 1996 to 2003, when he became the School’s Executive Director. Since 1995, he has sung tenor with the Grammy Award-winning San Francisco Symphony Chorus, and is currently a professional member of that ensemble.
Seth has served as the co-clerk of the Board of Trustees of the San Francisco Friends School, and in the past, he has served on the boards of The Walden School, Swarthmore College, and Earplay, a San Francisco-based new music ensemble. Seth received his B.A., with degrees in Music and Political Science, from Swarthmore College, where he served as President of the College’s Alumni Association. He received an M.B.A. from the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, with a focus in non-profit management and marketing; he has also served on the Haas School’s Development Council. He is a 2012 graduate of Leadership San Francisco, where he serves as an alumni advisor.
Prior to becoming Walden’s first full-time Executive Director, Seth worked part-time for Walden during the year and held positions as a senior consultant at Deloitte Consulting, in marketing and public relations at the San Francisco Symphony, and led both the marketing and the enterprise sales teams for an internet software company, now part of Adobe. When not at Walden, Seth lives in San Francisco with his husband, Malcolm Gaines, and their daughter, Cora.
Each summer, an acclaimed contemporary music ensemble and composer-in-residence join us at the Creative Musicians Retreat.
Our 2022 composer-in-residence will be Lei Liang.
Lei Liang (b.1972) is a Chinese-born American composer whose works have been described as “hauntingly beautiful and sonically colorful” by The New York Times, and as “far, far out of the ordinary, brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous” by The Washington Post.
Winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Lei Liang is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto Xiaoxiang (for saxophone and orchestra) was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
Lei Liang was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. Other commissions and performances come from the Taipei Chinese Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, the Thailand Philharmonic, the Fromm Music Foundation, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, the National Endowment for the Arts, MAP Fund, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, Arditti Quartet, Shanghai Quartet, the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New York New Music Ensemble and Boston Musica Viva, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, violinist Cho-Liang Lin, among others.
Lei Liang’s ten portrait discs are released on Naxos, Mode, New World, BMOP/sound, Albany, Encounter and Bridge Records, along with more than a dozen compilation discs. As a scholar and conservationist of cultural traditions, he served as editor and co-editor of five books, and published more than thirty articles. In 2020, Shanghai Conservatory of Music Press publishes a biography of Lei Liang, with essays by composers, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, performers, music critics, literary scholars, poets, and scientists. The book was edited by Prof. Qin Luo of Shanghai Conservatory.
From 2013-2016, Lei Liang served as Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute where his multimedia works preserve and reimagine culture through combining advanced technology and scientific research. In 2018, Liang returned to the Institute as its inaugural Research Artist-in-Residence.
Lei Liang’s recent works address issues of sex trafficking across the US-Mexican border (Cuatro Corridos), America’s complex relationship with gun and violence (Inheritance), and environmental awareness through the sonification of coral reefs.
Lei Liang studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (BM and MM) and Harvard University (PhD). A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he held fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships. Lei Liang taught in China as a distinguished visiting professor at Shaanxi Normal University College of Arts in Xi’an; served as honorary professor of composition and sound design at Wuhan Conservatory of Music and as visiting assistant professor of music at Middlebury College. He is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego where he served as chair of the composition area and Acting Chair of the Music Department. Starting from 2018, Lei Liang serves as the Artistic Director of the Chou Wen-chung Music Research Center in China. Lei Liang’s catalogue of more than a hundred compositions is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York).
International Contemporary Ensemble
Members of the Ensemble-in-Residence kick off the festival with a concert of new music on the first night, and during the week, the ensemble rehearses and workshops pieces composed by Creative Musician Retreat participants. These works are then performed on a Composers Forum. The ensemble also provides chamber music coaching and private lessons to those enrolled at at the Retreat.
With a commitment to cultivating a more curious and engaged society through music, the International Contemporary Ensemble – as a commissioner and performer at the highest level – amplifies creators whose work propels and challenges how music is made and experienced. The Ensemble’s 36 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present.
