Composer Members
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 G.Bilotta was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, but has spent most his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. After receiving his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, he entered the San Francisco Music & Arts Institute where he studied composition with Frederick Saunders. His works have been performed around the world by outstanding soloists and ensembles including Rarescale, Earplay, Chamber Mix, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, the Talea Ensemble, the Avenue Winds, the San Francisco Cabaret Opera Company, VocalWorks, the Oakland Civic Orchestra, and the Kiev Philharmonic, as well as dozens of university and conservatory ensembles. His works have been released on CD by Capstone Records, Beauport Classical, New Music North, Parma Recordings, Vox Novus, and ERM Media. His first chamber opera Aria da Capo was a finalist in a competition sponsored by the New York City Opera. His second chamber opera Quantum Mechanic won the 2007 Opera-in-a-Month Challenge resulting in eight performances in California, Oklahoma, and Utah with more performances scheduled around the country. He has received grants and awards from the American Composers Forum, the California Association of Professional Music Teachers, the Music Teachers National Association, the R. Ernest and Sylvia Shepherd Family Trust, the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, and the California State College Association, as well as commissions from soloists and ensembles. John is a member of the Executive Committee of the Society of Composers, Inc., and is editor of SCION, the organization’s opportunities newsletter. He is also music director of the San Francisco Chamber Wind Festival held every summer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and he co-directs with Brian Bice the Festival of Contemporary Music now in its seventh year. 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 in the 1970s. He has composed music for multiple genres, including "neoclassical," ambient, jazz, and rock. He has also scored music for film and theatre, most recently Miss Julie, a play directed by Mark Jackson at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre in May 2009. 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, a surround-sound electronic work, was a large-scale multimedia performance, part of the July 2006 SURROUND>SOUND series. Human Street Textures used collected street sounds from the outside of a moving double-decker bus while David modified and merged these with prerecorded works in real time, part of the 2008 MOVE>SOUND Series. During 2008, he wrote six pieces that were performed by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra. He also released albums with ScienceNV (prog rock's Really Loud Noises), AmbientBlack (massively electronic Serpentarium), a collection of pop vocal tunes (The Discontented), a website with audiovisual paintings (Living in the Village of My Dreams), and, in a novel collaboration with Clare Twohy, wrote a piece performed by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra (Fireproof Winds). 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 at Society of Gay and Lesbian Composers concerts here in the San Francisco Bay Area and 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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