Composer Members
For photos from our last concert, go to the bottom of this page...
Carol Belcher played piano throughout childhood and sang and accompanied school and church choirs. She studied classical piano with Alberta K. Meadowcroft (Berwyn, Pennsylvania), and presently studies Cuban and Brazilian music. She began composing in Professor Gerald Mueller’s composition class at City College of San Francisco, and experiments in a variety of musical forms. The local chamber chorus Creative Voices performed two of her pieces in their 2003 Women Composers of the World concert.
Harry Bernstein has been involved in the Bay Area for many years as a composer, performer and teacher. He began his musical training on the trumpet, later learning the recorder as well as the Baroque flute and the modern flute. Not long after earning a D.M.A. in early music performance from Stanford University, he moved 30 miles north to San Francisco where he has lived ever since. He has studied composition with Jerry Mueller and has written vocal and instrumental music. Mr. Bernstein is co-founder of the Golden Age Ensemble, a duo presenting varied programs of instrumental and vocal music around the San Francisco Bay Area and is a partner in Micro Pro Musica Press in San Francisco, which offers music engraving, arranging and transcription services. He is currently active with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra (flute), the San Francisco Civic Symphony, and that unpredictable composers' circle known as the Irregular Resolutions. He is an instructor in both the Music and Older Adults Departments at City College of San Francisco, and also teaches privately. A few years after beginning his association with City College, he took on the challenge of learning the viola in order to explore both orchestral and chamber music, and to learn how to write more effectively for strings. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, playing chamber music and traveling, and maintains a fascination with words. For more about Harry's marvelous exploits, click here and here.
John Bilotta was born in Waterbury, Connecticut but has spent most his life in the San Francisco Bay Area where he studied composition, theory, and orchestration with Frederick Saunders. A recipient of multiple commissions, grants, and awards, John's works have been performed and recorded at concerts, festivals, and workshops around the world by such outstanding international soloists, ensembles, and orchestras as Rarescale, the Kiev Philharmonic, Earplay, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, the Bakersfield Symphony, the Talea Ensemble, VocalWorks, and the Oakland Civic Orchestra. His Concerto for Wind Quartet and Orchestra was released on CD by ERMMedia in a performance by the Kiev Philharmonic under Robert Ian Winstin as part of the series Masterworks of the New Era. Other recently released recordings include Shadow Tree, for alto flute and guitar, on Capstone Records, as well as a piano work on the VoxNovus label, and upcoming chamber music releases on the New Music North and Beauport Classical labels. In June, 2007, his comic opera Quantum Mechanic won the 2007 Opera-in-a-Month Challenge and was premiered in August in American Fork, Utah, by VocalWorks. The opera will receive three Bay Area performances at the Fresh Voices VIII Festival in November, 2008. John has served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Society of Composers, Inc., for the past five years. He also serves as Music Director of the San Francisco Chamber Wind Festival, and co-directs with Brian Bice and C. Michael Reese the Festival of Contemporary Music. You can find out more about John here.
Edward Dierauf retired ten years ago from a career as an instructor in Engineering and Physics at City College of San Francisco. He then studied harmony and composition with Gerald Mueller of the same college. He has composed music ranging from solo to chamber orchestra using a variety of musical instruments, including voice.
Gary Friedman was born in 1934 and raised in University Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, Gary Friedman received his higher education at Antioch College, The University of Chicago (B.S. and M.D. degrees), and Harvard University (M.S. degree). His main career has been as a physician-epidemiologist. He worked in the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research for 30 years including 7 years as its Director. Since retiring from Kaiser Permanente in 1999, his current position is Consulting Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Friedman's musical education started with piano at age 5. He also played trumpet in junior high and high school and studied organ and music theory during teen age. Playing and improvising on the piano only occasionally during adulthood, he returned to music seriously at age 54, studying oboe and English horn with Janet Popesco Archibald. He currently plays these instruments in the San Francisco Civic Symphony, the College of Marin Orchestra, the Bohemian Club Band and a woodwind quintet and octet. Starting at age 64, he studied composition for four years with Alexis Alrich in the Adult Extension Division of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His musical compositions, mostly chamber works, are described in his web site www.garyfriedmanmusic.net . Two of them have won awards in the Music Teachers Association of California statewide competition.
David A. Graves initially studied electronic music composition at the University of Nebraska. He has composed music for multiple genres, including "neoclassical," ambient, jazz, and rock. He has also scored music for film and theatre, including A Period Piece, a play by Rachael Kerr, performed in San Francisco and New York (1995-1998) and ICON: The Photography of Gordon Parks (2003), a movie by PCTV. In 2003 and 2005, he was a resident composer at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program where he was awarded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellowship. His large-scale ambient piece, tree/sigh, was installed in a redwood canyon during Djerassi's 2003 Open House. Deciduous, his most recent electronic work, was a large-scale multimedia performance, part of last July's SURROUND>SOUND series. In the past four years, in addition to electronic and rock works, he has been scoring a lot of chamber music, especially in conjunction with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. His latest work for the SFCCO, Life Is Like That , was performed last September, shortly before the last I.R. concert. He has studied composition with Alexis Alrich at the Conservatory (2004-2007) and Gerald Mueller at the City College of San Francisco (2002). He is presently an Emerging Composer in Residence with the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. More information can be found here.
Steve Mobia has a long standing interest in dreams and symbolic ideas. Until 1995 when he developed an interest in writing concert music, most of his creative output was in the realm of fiction and film. He chose the accordion as an instrument to explore in his music study and has written several pieces for it. He is currently completing a full length documentary movie on the accordion. For more information, visit here.
Walter Sanchez had his first piano lessons when he was thirteen. He majored in Music at San Francisco State University, studying piano under the guidance of Wayne Peterson, the winner of the Pulitzer Price in Music in 1992. For more information on Walter’s compositions visit here.
William Severson at age 8 negotiated piano lessons before informing his parents in a small mountain town in California, but waited until he was 27 to begin vocal lessons in Hawaii when singing with the Honolulu Chorale. His vocal lessons were somewhat successful as he sang 1976-7 season with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which is a volunteer professional chorus associated with the Boston Symphony in Massachussetts. His parents insisted that he have a livelihood so he has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and worked in the computer field for forty years. He really has not mixed computers with music except to be one of the partners of Micro Pro Musica Press. It uses computers to engrave music including his own compositions and arrangements and offer them over the internet. He is performing around the greater Bay Area with the Golden Age Ensemble. He has had permanent singing gigs in churches in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 20 years. He started to compose in 1979 and was a founding member of the Society of Gay and Lesbian Composers [no longer active]. He has studied composition under Rebeca Mauleon-Santana at CCSF. He has had some compositions performed by local choruses.
Davide Verotta studied music and piano in Milano with Isabella Zielonka, Ernesto Esposito, Giacinto Salvetti, and taught piano and musicianship in the Italian middle school. After a long interruption, dedicated to the study of mathematical applications to biology and his academic career, he restarted studying piano in San Francisco, Florida and Kensington with Renee Witon, Peggy Salkind, Robert Helps, and Julian White. He teaches piano in his piano studio in San Francisco’s Richmond district, at the Community Music Center in San Francisco, and he is an active piano solo recitalist in the Bay Area. He is working toward a Ph.D. degree in composition, investigating fairly arcane (and most likely irrelevant!) music theory venues and... studying counterpoint. For more information visit here.
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