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 2021 Creative Musicians Retreat Faculty & Staff
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Alex Christie
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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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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
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Ted Moore
Alex Christie
Director of Electronic Music, Creative Musicians Retreat
Academic Dean, Director of Composers Forums & 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 in the ways in which acoustic and electronic sound worlds intersect.
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. He is curious about the design of power structures, systems of interference, absurdist bureaucracy, and indeterminacy in composition.
Alex began his compositional career many years ago as a student at Walden’s Young Musicians Program where he now serves as faculty. He holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory and Mills College and is currently pursuing a PhD in Composition and Computer Technologies (CCT) at the University of Virginia as a Jefferson Fellow. Other interests include baseball and geometric shapes.
alexchristie.org
Caroline Mallonee
Director, Creative Musicians Retreat
Caroline Mallonee has been on the faculty of The Walden School since 1998. A composer of orchestral, chamber, and choral music, Mallonee’s music has been performed by prominent American ensembles including the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Present Music, Wet Ink Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players, Antares, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Spektral Quartet, Firebird Ensemble, Del Sol Quartet, Ciompi Quartet, Buffalo Chamber Players, the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, VocalEssence, and American Opera Projects.
Her music has been programmed at venues in New York including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Merkin Hall, Bargemusic, Town Hall, Roulette, and National Sawdust (as part of the New York Philharmonic CONTACT! series), as well as further afield at the Long Leaf Opera Festival (NC),Carlsbad Music Festival (CA), the Corcoran Gallery (Washington, DC), Jordan Hall (Boston, MA), Bennington Chamber Music Conference (VT), Cambridge Music Festival (UK), and Tokyo Opera City (Japan).
Her music is available from Boosey & Hawkes and Swirly Music. Carrie holds degrees from Harvard University, The Yale School of Music and Duke University, and she was a Fulbright scholar to the Netherlands in 2004. She first came to Walden as a student when she was 12 and has hiked Mt. Monadnock over thirty times.
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
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.
Loretta Notareschi
Faculty, Creative Musicians Retreat
Called a “bright wom[a]n with big ideas” (Souls in Action), Denver-based composer Loretta K. Notareschi (b. 1977) prioritizes “connecting with the audience” (303 Magazine) and creating “deeply personal” (5280 Magazine) music known for illuminating a “path to compassion” (303 Magazine). Her work has been described as “compelling” (Deforming Prisms), “alluring” (The Denver Channel) “touching” (Collegian), and “powerful” (The Denver Post). Born in Canton, OH and raised in Stillwater, OK, Notareschi is a professor of music at Regis University and a summer faculty member of The Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat. She received an MA and PhD in composition from the University of California at Berkeley, a BMus 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. She has received awards and grants from Chamber Music America, the Cincinnati Camerata, IronWorks Percussion Duo, the American Composers Forum, the former Ensemble Eleven, and the GALA Choruses, and in October 2016, she was a TEDxMileHigh speaker.
lorettanotareschi.com
Osnat Netzer
Faculty Mentor, Young Musicians Program
Osnat Netzer /osˈnat ˈnɛtsɛʁ/ is a multi-faceted musician based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Born in Haifa, Israel, she developed a love of music at a very young age, and trained intensively as a composer, pianist and singer-songwriter throughout her high school years, military service and undergraduate studies at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. She came to the United States in 2003 for graduate studies in composition, music theory and piano at Mannes, and continued her studies in composition at New England Conservatory, where she earned her doctorate in 2011. Her highly theatrical and kinetic compositions have been performed in Israel, France, Germany, Korea, China, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, Croatia, Canada and the United States, published by Edition Peters and earthsongs, and recorded on Bridge Records. Performers of her music include International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Talea Ensemble, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Israel Contemporary Players, Spektral Quartet, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Firebird Ensemble, saxophonist Geoffrey Landman and bass David Salsbery Fry.
Her opera, The Wondrous Woman Within, was described as “riotously funny” in The New York Times when its first scene was performed at New York City Opera’s VOX festival in 2012 and “challenging and fascinating” by critic Amir Kidron when it received its premiere in a sold out run at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre in 2015. Other recent and upcoming performances of her compositions include Are you yet living? (ICE), Zwang und Zweifel (Patchwork) and Luce Cantabile (Kenneth Radnofsky and the Bach, Beethoven & Brahms Society Orchestra).
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, Dr. Netzer currently serves on the faculties of Harvard University, Longy School of Music of Bard College and The Walden School.
osnatnetzer.com
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.
Current projects include a commission for Northwest Art Song entitled Ten full moons to be premiered in September 2019. Recent projects include: 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 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 music has been heard at Resonant Bodies Festival, Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space, Joe’s Pub Public, American Opera Projects at South Oxford Space, Opera Index, Outer Voices, and HERE Arts Center in New York City; Agnes Flanagan Chapel, Lincoln Hall and First Presbyterian in Portland; WGBH Radio Boston and Pickman Concert Hall in Cambridge; The Longy School of Music in Paris; New Music New Haven, Kilbourn Concert Series in Rochester; First and Franklin Street Concert Series in Baltimore; and Settlement Music School in Philadelphia.
Renée’s works are featured on Five Borough’s “Five Borough Songbook” on GPR Records; Sequitur’s “To Have and to Hold” available on Koch, and on Prism Quartet’s “Dedication” on Innova. This year, her choral work Only in falling will be recorded and released by Resonance Ensemble.
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. She studied composition with Joseph Schwantner, Samuel Adler, Warren Benson and David Liptak at Eastman, and then with Mathias Spahlinger at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg, and with Martin Bresnick, David Lang and Jacob Druckman at the Yale School of Music. 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.
reneefavand.com
Sam Pluta
Sam Pluta began working at the Walden School in 2001, and holds the record as the faculty member to teach the most consecutive summers in a row at YMP (16). As an artist, Sam is a composer and electronics performer whose work explores the intersections between instrumental forces, reactive computerized sound worlds, traditionally notated scores, improvisation, audio-visuals, psycho-acoustic phenomena, and installation-like soundscapes. Since 2009, Sam has served as Technical Director and composing member of Wet Ink Ensemble. In addition to his work with Wet Ink, Sam has received commissions and written music for groups like the New York Philharmonic, Yarn/Wire, Ensemble Dal Niente, International Contemporary Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Mantra Percussion, and Spektral Quartet. Sam appears as a composer and performer on over twenty albums of new music and jazz, many of which are released on his label, Carrier Records. Sam received his DMA from Columbia University and is now Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
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.
Ted Moore
Ted Moore is a composer, sound designer, multimedia artist, and educator living in Chicago. His work has been reviewed as “an impressive achievement both artistically and technically” (Jay Gabler, VitaMN), “wonderfully creepy” (Matthew Everett, TC Daily Planet), and “epic” (Rob Hubbard, Pioneer Press). Ted’s work focuses on live electronic processing with live performers.
His music has been premiered by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, Yarn/Wire, Quince Vocal Ensemble, AVIDduo, Firebird Ensemble, RenegadeEnsemble, and the Enkidu Quartet, and has been performed across the country including at Spectrum (NYC), National Sawdust (NYC), Electroacoustic Barn Dance (Fredericksburg, VA), Root Signals (Statesboro, GA), Luther College (Decorah, IA), Festival of Contemporary Music (Berkeley, CA), The Walden School (Dublin, NH), Access Contemporary Music (Chicago, IL), NASA (Champaign-Urbana, IL & Lubbock, TX), New Horizons Music Festival (Kirksville, MO), La Crosse New Music Festival (La Crosse, WI), and various places in the Twin Cities.
Ted has also been featured as a sound installation artist by the St. Paul Public Library, TC Make, and notably at the 2014 Northern Spark Festival in Minneapolis, Creative Musicians Retreat (Dublin, NH), McNally Smith College of Music (St. Paul), MacPhail Center for Music (Minneapolis), and Slam Academy (Minneapolis). Find him at tedmooremusic.com.
Each summer, an acclaimed contemporary music ensemble joins us at the Creative Musicians Retreat. Since 2016, our Ensemble-in-Residence has been Mivos Quartet.
During the week, the ensemble rehearses and workshops pieces composed by Creative Musician Retreat participants. These works are then performed on a Composers Forum. Members of the Ensemble-in-Residence also provide coaching and lessons to those enrolled at at the Retreat, and they perform a public concert of new music. Additional artists-in-residence join Mivos so that participants can compose pieces for a variety of instruments. In 2020, our artists-in-residence were percussionist Matthew Gold, pianist Eric Huebner, and choral conductor Thomas Colohan.
Our 2021 Composer-In-Residence is Marcos Balter. He will be on campus all week moderating three Composers Forums, conducting master classes, and giving private composition lessons. He was the composer-in-residence for the Young Musicians Program in 2018, and we are thrilled to welcome him back to Walden in this new role.
Past Composers-in-Residence have been Lisa Bielawa, George Lewis, Christopher Theofanidis, Annie Gosfield, Michael Daugherty, Martin Bresnick, Russell Pinkston, James Mobberley, and Eve Beglarian.
