General Education

Teo Beuchamp is an adjunct professor at the Montclair State University Cali School of Music in New Jersey. Beuchamp also teaches at the Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BA in music from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA in Sonic Arts from Brooklyn College. In 2019 he received the Max Matthews award in Sonic Arts. He continues to work as an artist, producer and engineer in Brooklyn, New York.

Dr. Robert Cart (flute) is flutist with Philadelphia’s Network for New Music and a faculty member of the Atlantic Music Festival where, each summer, he serves as flutist and coordinator of the Contemporary Music Ensemble. He has toured as soloist throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and has worked with Bernstein, Leppard, Muti, Previn, and Zinman. He has performed at festivals, including Tanglewood, Ravello, and Aldeburgh, and as solo recitalist at The Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center. An advocate for new music, he has premiered more than 50 solo, chamber, and orchestral works by Jennifer Higdon, Gary Schocker, and others. His students occupy positions with professional ensembles, including Orquestra Sinfônica do Teatro Municipal de São Paulo, New England Symphonic Ensemble, and the Central City Opera. They have won competitions, including the Emmanuel Pahud Masterclass Competition, Eduardo Tagliatti Chamber Music Competition, Young Soloists Competition of the Eleazar de Carvalho Music Festival, Mid-Atlantic Flute Fair Masterclass Competition, SphinxConnect Fellowship, and they have been accepted into graduate programs at Indiana University, Peabody Conservatory, Eastman, Manhattan School of Music, and SUNY Stonybrook. As a Powell Flutes Artist, Dr. Cart presents clinics and master classes worldwide. HIs degrees include the Bachelor of Music (DePauw University), the Master of Music (Indiana University}, and the Doctor of Musical Arts (University of Maryland College Park). His teachers have included Francis Fuge, Peter Lloyd, James Pellerite, and Gary Schocker, and he has taken additional studies and master classes with Alberto Almarza, Jeffrey Khaner, Marcel Moyse, Michael Parloff, and Jean-Pierre Rampal. Dr. Cart plays a vintage flute made in 1938 by Verne Q. Powell for Joseph LaMonaca, Associate Principal Flute of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Tenor Darian Clonts, a native of Atlanta, Ga., joined the Voice faculty at Montclair State University in the Fall of 2021. He has been seen performing with companies across the U.S. such as Cincinnati Opera, The Utah Festival Opera and Musical Theater, The Princeton Festival, and The Atlanta Opera. Some of his operatic roles include The Witch (Hansel and Gretel), Mingo (Porgy and Bess), Hérrison (L’Étoile), Goro (Madama Butterfly), and El Remendado (Carmen). He holds a B.A. in Music from Morehouse College, where was a member of and an accompanist for the world-renowned Morehouse College Glee Club. Dr. Clonts holds both an M.M. and D.M. in Voice from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He holds a certificate in Vocology, which is the science and practice of voice habilitation and, if necessary, rehabilitation. He is currently on the Voice faculty at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ and the University of Evansville in Evansville, IN. The main focus of his musical research includes opera and African American music, and he has lectured on his research at schools and institutions across the United States.

Rubens De La Corte is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology with an advanced certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Rubens focuses on organology and its intersections with gender, sexuality, material culture, and the cultural geographies of music. Rubens concentrates his research on Latin America and the Lusophone domain. Rubens has a BA in Architecture and Urban Studies from the University of São Paulo, Brazil; a dual BA in Guitar and Jazz Composition from Berklee College of Music; an MA in Jazz Studies from CUNY Queens College; and an MA in ethnomusicology from Stony Brook University. Rubens is also a guitarist, composer, and arranger, having worked with numerous artists, including a ten-year tenure as musical director for West African artist and five-time Grammy-winner Angelique Kidjo and seventeen years in the quartet of two-time Grammy and two-time Latin Grammy-winner Brazilian jazz pianist Eliane Elias.

Drummer and educator Steve DeLuca has been playing drums for thirty-five plus years. He began as a teen playing for his high school big band, was the recipient of various awards, and soon thereafter began playing professionally. In addition to various jazz, rock and musical theater performances, Steve plays with the wedding/special event band Platinum. For the past eleven years, he has been the general music teacher and choir director at Maywood Avenue School in Maywood, NJ teaching 4th through 8th grade. In 2010, the Maywood Board of Education bestowed upon him their Teacher of the Year award. Steve is the author of several educational articles about drumming, music history, and philosophy that have been published in Modern Drummer magazine and Tempo magazine, as well as being a presenter at the 2015 NJMEA Conference. He is a private drum instructor and has taught percussion, theory and song writing at the Glen Ridge Performing Arts Camp for the past several years. He received his BA in jazz performance from Temple University and his MA in Music Education from Montclair State University.

David DeMotta bio to come soon.

Bruce James bio to come.

Double bassist David Kingsnorth received his MA in Music from Montclair State University, studying with Linda McKnight and twice winning the Cali School Writing Award. He holds bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Music from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an active performer in both the jazz and classical music genres, having performed with Oscar Brown Jr., Richard Wyands, Frank Jackson, New Jersey Ballet and the Summit Symphony.

Amalia Mallard bio to come.

Praised for her “magical virtuosity” and “tremendous poise and warmth,” Mariel Mayz is a composer, pianist, and educator whose work bridges classical, contemporary, and interdisciplinary performance. Her album, Leo Brouwer: Cuban Sketches for Piano (ZOHO, 2022), features premiere recordings of Brouwer’s piano music alongside her own compositions and arrangements, and was celebrated in her debut performance at the Americas Society. She has
since appeared at Dizzy’s Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall and other major venues.

Her music has been performed by acclaimed artists including Anthony Roth Costanzo, Lara Downes, and João Luiz, and her one-act opera was premiered at the 2018 New York Opera Fest. Mariel is Adjunct Professor of Music Theory & History at Hunter College and Co-Founder and Associate Director of Porto Pianofest, an international music festival now in its tenth season. She is currently completing a PhD in Composition & Theory at Brandeis University.

Mariel Mayz bio to come.

Angelique Mouyis graduated with a Master’s degree in Music Composition at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Music Composition at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts under Dr. Robert Aldridge. Angelique is the recipient of a Southern African Music Rights Organisation (SAMRO) post-graduate studies scholarship as well as the prestigious Ernest Oppenheimer Overseas Scholarship for the Performing Arts. Her opera ‘Bessie: The Blue-Eyed Xhosa’(written with Mkhululi Z. Mabija) was produced by Cape Town Opera at the Artscape Theatre in 2015 as part of their Four:30 – Operas Made in South Africa series. Other productions include Forget this City (Enthuse Theatre, New York, NY) and The Boy Who Never Grows Up (Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, New York, NY). She is the author of Mikis Theodorakis: Finding Greece in his Music (Kerkyra Publishers, 2010).

Eleni Oikonomou is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology at CUNY’s Graduate Center. She earned her combined Master’s in Musicology and Ethnomusicology from Athens’ National Kapodistrian University. Her formative years spent between Athens (Greece) and island life on Aegina, amid festivals, performances, and daily cultural traditions, developed the perspective that now infuses her research connecting greater Mediterranean influences with contemporary sound studies and media analysis.

Eleni has delivered lectures at Brooklyn College on the topics of music, history, and identity. She has mentored a vibrant mix of aspiring musicians through her inclusive piano and performance instruction, fostering a multicultural environment. As an accomplished singer-songwriter of popular music herself, Eleni has collaborated with esteemed musicians worldwide and has composed for film. This firsthand insight into the intersection of music, performance, and identity are perspectives integrated into her teaching and research on popular culture and music history.

Through scholarly work, Eleni weaves musical understanding into a tapestry that reveals connections between communities and illuminates how musical expression shapes our everyday existence.

Ryan Pratt completed the DMA in composition at Columbia, where he is currently a lecturer in Music Humanities. His dissertation: Composition in Relative Intonation details an improvisational approach to form and microtonality, for which he invented a musical interval conversion device. While at Columbia, Ryan studied under George Lewis, Fred Lerdahl, Tristan Murail, Richard Carrick and Fabien Lévy. Stemming from a background in percussion, his compositions tend to evade meter as well as intentional motivic and developmental narrative. His works favor the inner exploration of the unique sonic structures inherent to the instruments involved. Recent compositions have been premiered by New Thread Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse and Yarn/Wire, in addition to a few soloists who have performed his pieces around the country and abroad.

Ian Ranzer bio to come.

Joseph Turrin is active as a composer, orchestrator, conductor, pianist and teacher. He studied composition at the Eastman School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. His works have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, St. Martin-in-the-Fields Academy Orchestra. Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, Baltimore Symphony, Gewandhaus-orchester (Leipzig, Germany) and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Turrin has appeared as a conductor with the Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit and New Jersey Symphonies; he has performed as a pianist on many recordings and as orchestral pianist for the New Jersey Symphony. His compositions for film and theater include scores for Alan Alda’s film A New Life, Little Darlings, Weeds (with Nick Nolte), Tough Guys Don’t Dance(Directed by Norman Mailer), Verna-USO Girl (with Sissy Spacek and William Hurt and nominated for three Emmy Awards), Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Kingdom of Shadows (narrated by Rod Steiger), Broken Blossoms (1919 silent film classic directed by D.W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish) and for the restoration of the silent film classic Sadie Thompson. Other silent film classics that he has scored include, Diary of a Lost Girl, Intolerance and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. His work in musical theater includes performances on Broadway with Michael Feinstein as well as the score for Frankie, with a libretto by Broadway legend George Abbott.