The Faculty 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, staff, artists, and participants can create an environment where creativity flourishes.
Meet the 2026 Creative Musicians Retreat Faculty & Staff
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Caroline Mallonee
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D. J. Sparr
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Dahlia Riddington
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Francesca Hellerman
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Loretta Notareschi
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Michael Ballard
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Osnat Netzer
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Renée Favand-See
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Rodier
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Sammi Stone
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Seth Brenzel
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Stephen David Beck
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.
D. J. Sparr
Faculty, Creative Musicians Retreat
Composer and electric guitarist D. J. Sparr, who Gramophone 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). In addition, 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 recording with JoAnn Falletta and the London Symphony Orchestra. He has performed electric guitar concertos as soloist with more than twenty orchestras on two continents across a fifteen-year career. 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. D. J. was the Young American Composer-in-Residence with the California Symphony from 2011-2014. His music has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, New Music USA, and the League of Composers/ISCM. Sparr is a faculty member at The Walden School Creative Musicians Retreat in Dublin, New Hampshire. His composition works and guitar performances appear on Naxos, Innova Recordings, Albany, Centaur Records, and Neuma Records. Sparr was named one of NPR Music’s favorite 100 composers.
A passion for musical performance grew from family encouragement at a young age. Three-year-old D. J. mimicked playing the guitar by holding his great-grandmother Violet Bond’s straw broom in hand. Noticing this, Violet gave him a toy guitar for his third birthday and a Ukulele for his fourth birthday. By age five, D. J. was taking guitar lessons and was soon performing at his local music store, Coffey Music, in Westminster, MD.
In high school, D. J. spent his late-night and weekend hours writing and recording music with a Fostex X-26 4-track recorder. He attended Baltimore School for the Arts as a jazz guitar major. Surrounded by classical music, he began to write compositions for various instruments. A proud alumnus of The Walden School’s Young Musicians Program, D. J. continued honing his compositional craft at the Eastman School of Music (BM) and the University of Michigan (MM, DMA) studying with composers William Bolcom, Michael Daugherty, Christopher Rouse, Joseph Schwantner, & Augusta Read Thomas.
D. J. lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with his wife Kimberly, son Harris, and Bundini the boxer. He teaches music composition at LSU’s Ogden Honors College.
Dahlia Riddington
Staff, Creative Musicians Retreat
Francesca Hellerman
Staff, Creative Musicians Retreat
Faculty, Young Musicians Program
Loretta Notareschi
Faculty, Creative Musicians Retreat
Michael Ballard
Michael Ballard is an enthusiastic and passionate conductor and educator serving as an Assistant Professor of Music and the Director of Choral Activities at Regis University. In this role, he conducts the Collegium Musicum and the University Choir, teaches Introduction to Singing, Social Justice in Music, and serves as the Voice Area Coordinator. Before joining Regis University, Michael directed several community and church choirs, sang in professional choirs, and taught in the K-12 school system. In the classroom, he advocates a holistic approach to music-making to foster well-rounded musicianship. He strongly believes in empowering young musicians through musical literacy and employs active learning and applied engagement strategies. His scholarly interests include analyzing and demystifying post-tonal choral music by composers such as Herbert Howells. He is also interested in using solfège as an analytical tool to enhance music theory skills in choral rehearsals. Michael holds degrees from MSU Denver, the University of Denver Lamont School of Music, and the University of South Carolina, where he studied Music Education, Music Composition, Conducting, and Music Theory Pedagogy.
Osnat Netzer
Faculty, Creative Musicians Retreat
Israel native Osnat Netzer is a composer, performer, and educator. Inspired by performers’ bodies, personalities, and their relationship to their instruments, Osnat creates her compositions collaboratively, tailoring her work to the performer’s sensibilities, physicality and improvisational inclinations. Drawing from cognitive linguistics and the embodied experience of physical forces—such as potential and kinetic energy—her works are rich in musical languages and connected to the fulsome pursuit of tension and relaxation.
Netzer’s works have been commissioned and performed by Del Sol Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, ~Nois, International Contemporary Ensemble, Patchwork, mezzo-soprano Lucy Dhegrae, bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward, saxophonists Kenneth Radnofsky, Doug O’Connor and Geoffrey Landman, Spektral Quartet, and Winsor Music, among many others.
Her works are published by Edition Peters and earthsongs, and recorded on Bridge Records and New Focus Recordings.
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 world premiere in a sold-out run at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre in 2015.
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, and as of 2023 is Associate Professor of Composition and Musicianship at DePaul University in Chicago, IL.
Renée Favand-See
Faculty, Creative Musicians Retreat
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—especially delving into grief as a vehicle for individual and communal transformation. 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.
Recent performances include a choral arrangement of We Need Earth premiered by Resonance Ensemble, and an arrangement of esperanza spalding’s City of Roses, commissioned by Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble. Significant projects include: First Flight and We Need Earth for Trio Triumphatrix and Voices of Ascension’s NYC production Astronautica; Ten full moons for Northwest Art Song; Only in falling for Resonance Ensemble; Suffer silently for fixed electronic media; Wie der Katz mit der Maus for fEARnoMUSIC; and Growing for Portland Piano International. Among her other commissions are works for Five Boroughs Music Festival, Lucy Shelton and Eighth Blackbird, Sequitur, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, American Opera Projects, Wet Ink Ensemble, and Outer Voices Festival. Other groups who have performed her music include: members of ICE; David Friend; The Julians; Friends of Rain; Electrogals; Del Sol String Quartet; Peabody Trio; and many singers, including Hai-Ting Chinn, Arwen Myers, Laura Beckel-Thoreson, Jesse Blumberg, Blythe Gaissert, Hannah Penn, Alissa Rose, 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.
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 with 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 at Walden’s Creative Musicians Retreat (CMR) in New England.
Rodier
Technical Director, Young Musicians Program & Creative Musicians Retreat 2025
Rodier is a composer living and working in New York City. His work is often collaborative and has appeared in a range of venues from galleries, to concert halls, to film festivals. The most recent work has been focused on producing contemporary music, film, and works for the stage across many different disciplines and genres. He has a passion for education, film making, public transportation, and he holds a master’s degree in Music Composition from New York University.
Sammi Stone
Director of Operations
Faculty, Young Musicians Program
Sammi Jo Stone is an arts administrator and performer on oboe, English horn, saxophones, and other woodwinds. She lives in Norwich, Connecticut, and is originally from Baker City in rural northeastern Oregon. She studied music at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the University of California San Diego, and has performed with Long Beach Opera, Berkshire Symphony Orchestra, Grande Ronde Symphony Orchestra, La Jolla Symphony, and Willimantic Symphony Orchestra. Sammi discovered Walden as a Creative Musicians Retreat participant in 2017. This is her sixth summer working as Director of Operations.
Seth Brenzel
Executive Director & Director, Young Musicians Program
Seth Brenzel, Executive Director, has been associated with The Walden School for nearly 40 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, board member, Director of Operations, and as the Associate Director from 1996 to 2003, when he became Walden’s Executive Director. Since 1995, he has sung tenor with the Grammy Award-winning San Francisco Symphony Chorus, and is currently a professional (AGMA) member of that ensemble.
In 2023, Seth was appointed by Mayor London Breed to serve on the San Francisco Arts Commission. Seth chairs the board of the PRISM Quartet and serves on the boards of Ensemble Dal Niente and of the San Francisco Friends School, a board he has previously co-clerked. He has also served on the boards of Swarthmore College and Earplay. 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 is a 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 the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco with his husband, Malcolm Gaines, and their daughter, Cora.
Stephen David Beck
Stephen David Beck composes electroacoustic, fixed media, and acoustic music for a wide range of ensembles, theatre, and media. He studied music composition at the University of California, Los Angeles, where his principal teachers were Henri Lazarof, Elaine Barkin, Paul Reale, Alden Ashforth, and Roger Bourland. In 1985, he studied computer music at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) with the support of an Annette Kade/Fulbright Fellowship, where he worked with Xavier Rodet and Jean-Baptiste Barrière. After receiving his PhD in 1988, he joined the faculty of Louisiana State University where he is currently the Haymon Professor of Composition and Computer Music. Since 2003, he has held a joint appointment at the Center for Computation & Technology, where he established the Cultural Computing research group and led the development of the PhD program in Experimental Music & Digital Media (EMDM).
His music has been performed throughout the world, including performances at Weill Recital Hall, Concert Band Directors National Association Biennial, North American Saxophone Alliance, World Saxophone Congress, New Music America, and World Harp Congress. His writings have been published by G. Shirmer, MIT Press, Springer Nature, the Acoustical Society of America and the Computer Music Journal, and his music has been recorded on the SEAMUS, EMF, and Gothic record labels. His work “Wild Rumpus” was the winner of the G. Schirmer prize for young composers in 1999.
About his music, Beck writes:
“…the use of technology in my music is not meant to replace musicians, but rather to enhance and expand a performer’s potential for expressiveness, technique and, most importantly, timbre. There is an uncanny beauty in the physical and mathematical laws of nature, a beauty of intense complexity bound by simplicity, order and logic. For me, this is a constant and powerful source of inspiration, and the use of modern technology seems the perfect tool for expressing that inspiration and awe.”
Summer 2026
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