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Medieval/Renaissance Workshop, June 28-July 4, 2009

Faculty biographies

Patrick Ball is one of the premier Celtic harp players in the world and a captivating spoken word artist. He has recorded nine instrumental and three spoken word albums and won national awards in both the music and spoken word categories.

Along with "Celtic Harp and Story," his beguiling blend of music and spoken word concerts, Patrick has written and currently performs two acclaimed solo musical theater pieces: "O'Carolan's Farewell to Music," which brings to the stage the legendary life, the turbulent times and the glorious music of Ireland's most celebrated and beloved musician, 17th and 18th century harper/composer, Turlough O'Carolan, and "The Fine Beauty of the Island," a musical journey to Ireland's legendary Blasket Islands in search of a deeply haunting tune and the vanished islanders who played it. Patrick also presents an ensemble performance with Shira Kammen and Tim Rayborn, "The Flame of Love," a spoken word and Early Music retelling of the greatest of medieval legends, The Romance of Tristan and Iseult.

In playing the ancient, legendary brass-strung harp of Ireland with its crystalline, bell-like voice and performing marvelous tales of wit and enchantment, Patrick not only brings new life to two cherished traditions, but blends them in concert to create "a richly theatrical and hauntingly beautiful performance."

www.patrickball.com

Annette Bauer, a native of Germany, holds a diploma in medieval and renaissance performance practice from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, specializing on recorder techniques with Conrad Steinmann (2001). Supported by a scholarship from the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), she pursued an MA in music from UC Santa Cruz (2004), in conjunction with her studies at the Ali Akbar College of Music in California. She has been immersing herself into North Indian classical music under her teacher Maestro Ali Akbar Khan since 1998, studying sarode, a stringed instrument.

As a recorder player, Annette regularly performs with recently formed medieval ensemble Cançonièr, Baroque group Les grâces, Farallon recorder ensemble, and has appeared at the Santa Cruz Baroque and the Carmel Bach Festivals, as well as with early music groups throughout the US. She has served on the recorder faculty for several of the San Francisco Early Music Society summer workshops and the Amherst Early Music Festival, among others. Certified in Orff Schulwerk, she teaches recorder pedagogy to music teachers at the San Francisco Orff Certification Course. Annette was selected for the 2009 recorder residency at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon.

Annette's musical passions include original notation sources in early music, and improvisation in modal music traditions, from the highly intricate and complex Indian ragas, to medieval modes, to the multi-faceted modal repertoire of European, Middle Eastern, and North African music traditions. She is the co-founder of Magic Carpet, a duo dedicated to the art of improvisation. Annette also plays Brazilian percussion with Maracatu Luta, and has studied Maracatu and other rhythms from the Brazilian Northeast with groups in Recife, Brazil, and at the annual California Brazil Camp.

www.annettebauer.com

Frances Blaker received her Music Pedagogical and Performance degrees in recorder from the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen where she studied with Eva Legêne. She also studied with Marion Verbruggen in the Netherlands.

Ms. Blaker has performed as a soloist and with various ensembles in the United States, Denmark, England and the Netherlands. She is a member of Farallon Recorder Quartet and the Tibia Recorder Duo and of Ensemble Vermillian. She teaches privately and at workshops throughout the United States. She is an assistant director of the Amherst Early Music Festival, Inc., and co-director of Port Townsend Early Music Workshop.

Ms. Blaker is the author of The Recorder Player's Companion and the "Opening Measures" column in the American Recorder, and a collaborator and performer on the Disc Continuo series of play-along recordings. She was awarded month-long residencies focusing on music composition at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Otis, Oregon in April 2003 and 2006. Her compositions have been published by PRB Productions and Lost in Time Press. Her new work, Five Poems, based on poems by Chinese Buddhist nuns, was premiered in Carmel Valley, CA, November, 2007.

Ms. Blaker has recorded works by Ludwig Senfl with the Farallon Recorder Quartet, and two CDs of 17th century German chamber music centering around Buxtehude with Ensemble Vermillian — volume I: Stolen Jewels, and volume 2: Buried Treasure.

Karen Clark's evocative contralto has received international acclaim. Her rich, clear, expressive singing commands the stage and has brought rave reviews from the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others: "The most striking astonishing range of expressive subtlety;" "most exciting;" "most beautiful and passionate;" and "filling my soul with a hope for peace and greater longing." Karen's repertoire spans the centuries to include medieval chant, troubadour and trouvere chanson, baroque opera, romantic art song, and new music of the 20th and 21st C.

In 2008, Karen premiered four new song cycles composed for her and the Galax Quartet on poems by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Gary Snyder. The San Francisco concert was a "dazzling display" of musical influences by composers Robert Morris, Fred Frith, Allaudin Mathieu, and Roy Whelden.

In 2009, Karen premieres "Journeys" by Ka Nin Chan and performs again with Gary Snyder in Grass Valley, California. She performs music of Machaut and Solage with Ciaramella at The Getty Museum and Town Hall Concerts series in Los Angeles. In recital, Karen performs with pianists Lucinda Carver, and Marilyn Thompson, singing lieder of Haydn, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms at University of Southern California and on San Francisco's Old First Concerts.

In early music, Karen has performed with such notable groups as Ensemble Sequentia, the Rifkin Bach Ensemble, Newberry Consort, Pomerium Musices, American Baroque, Magnificat, Ensemble Alcatraz, the Waverly Consort, New York Early Music, and Boston Camerata. Karen is featured with many of these fine ensembles on the Erato, New Albion, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Dorian, Musica Omnia, Focus, and MHS record labels.

Karen teaches singing in the Early Music Program in the Thornton School at University of Southern California and is Lecturer in Voice at Sonoma State University. She is certified as a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method and presents lectures and workshops for musicians throughout the U.S. Her articles have appeared in the Feldenkrais Journal and the Recorder Education Journal. Karen holds degrees from the Indiana University School of Music and studied Early Music with Thomas Binkley and Andrea von Ramm. Karen lives mostly in Northern California where petals fall in Petaluma.

www.karenclark.com

This August, Julie Jeffrey will celebrate the 33rd anniversary of her first viola da gamba lesson. In the intervening years since that day she has developed a career which has taken her all over the world, performing, recording, teaching and inspiring enthusiasm for that instrument and its music. She began her life in early music performance while pursuing graduate studies in Musicology at the University of Chicago. Now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is a member of Sex Chordae Consort of Viols, is the founder and creative mastermind of the acclaimed trio Wildcat Viols, and is half of the viol duo Hallifax & Jeffrey. Ms. Jeffrey also freelances locally and abroad, appearing with such ensembles as Magnificat Baroque, American Bach Soloists, the Newberry Consort in Chicago, the Catacoustic Consort in Cincinnati, Scaramella in Toronto, and has toured domestically and abroad with the Terra Nova Consort. She has performed at the Carmel Bach Festival, the California Shakespeare Festival, the San Francisco Early Music Festival, the Regensburg Tage Alter Musik, the Melbourne Autumn Music Festival, and the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato, Mexico. Devoted to promoting all aspects of interest in her instrument, Ms. Jeffrey is a frequent instructor at early music workshops across the country, is a co-founder and active member of the Viola da Gamba Society, Pacifica Chapter, and currently serves on the board of directors of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. In 2009, she and her cohort Peter Hallifax launched a new concert series, Barefoot Chamber Concerts, aimed at expanding performance opportunities for the Bay Area's thriving early music community, reaching new audiences and redefining the traditional concert experience.

Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Shira Kammen has spent well over half her life exploring the worlds of early and traditional music. A member for many years of the early music Ensembles Alcatraz and Project Ars Nova, and Medieval Strings, she has also worked with Sequentia, Hesperion XX, the Boston Camerata, the Balkan group Kitka, the Oregon, California and San Francisco Shakespeare Festivals, and is the founder of Class V Music, an ensemble dedicated to performance on river rafting trips. She has performed and taught in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Israel, Morocco, and Japan, and on the Colorado, Rogue and Klamath Rivers.

Shira happily collaborated with singer/storyteller John Fleagle for fifteen years, and performs now with several new groups: a medieval ensemble, Fortune's Wheel: a new music group, Ephemeros; an eclectic ethnic band, Panacea; as well as frequent collaborations with performers such as storyteller/harpist Patrick Ball, sopranos Anne Azema, Susan Rode Morris, medieval music expert Margriet Tindemans, and in many theatrical and dance productions.

She has played on several television and movie soundtracks, including 'O', a modern high school-setting of Othello. Some of her original music can be heard in an independent film about fans of the work of JRR Tolkien. The strangest place Shira has played is in the elephant pit of the Jerusalem Zoo. She hopes to spend more time playing music of all kinds in the wilderness.

www.shirakammen.com

Among the world's best known countertenors for nearly three decades, Drew Minter began his musical pursuits at the age of 9 as a boy treble at the Washington National Cathedral. He studied first at Indiana University, where he received his B.S. in Music and Languages in 1977, then at the Vienna Musikhochschule where he received his Diploma in Lieder and Oratorio in 1979. Twice he won prizes at the Bruges Early Music Competition, in 1977 as a member of the Collegium Musicum Budapest, and again in 1983 as a soloist. He also won prizes at the 's-Hertogenbosch International Singing Competition in 1976 and the 1981 Erwin Bodky Prize for Early Music in Boston. Subsequently, he was also awarded Martha Baird Rockefeller and Fulbright study grants.

Drew Minter has been a founding member of The Newberry Consort for 25 years. In addition to a number of acclaimed recordings on Harmonia Mundi USA, the Consort has given a regular season of concerts in the Chicago area and toured internationally. He collaborates frequently with the Folger Consort, ARTEK, and other American early music ensembles. For several seasons in the early 1990s he directed and sang in Ensemble Five/One, a Washington-based vocal chamber music group.

Drew Minter is represented by over 60 recordings of opera, oratorio, recital and chamber music. Known particularly for his recordings of the music of Handel, Minter has performed more than two dozen of Handel's dramatic works on the stage as either singer or director, and sometimes as both. Mr. Minter has also appeared in two films: Peter Sellars's Giulio Cesare (as Tolomeo) on London/EMI, and a biography of the life of Hildegard von Bingen, In the Symphony of the World (as the Devil) by Flare Productions. His oratorio and recital engagements with orchestras and oratorio societies in America and Europe are too numerous to list.

In recent seasons Minter has broadened his activities to include playing early harps. He is a founding member of Trefoil, a trio of early music specialists who both sing and play music of the late 14th century, specializing in the virtuoso French ars subtilior repertoire. He was also a founding member of My Lord Chamberlain's Consort, a renaissance vocal and plucked-string band. His recital, "Sweet Sorrow: Medieval Songs of Parting," is a virtuosic self-accompanied journey of songs of the troubadours and minnesingers.

Since 1994 Minter has become increasingly visible as a director of opera, and to date has directed over seventy productions from the medieval to the modern for such companies as Caramoor, Lake George Opera, The Opéra de Marseilles, the Göttingen Handel Festspiele, St. Luke's Orchestra, Handel and Haydn Society, Boston Early Music Festival, The Folger Consort, and Opera Aperta; and at many schools, in particular Boston University's Opera Institute and The Five Colleges in Northampton. This season Minter's production of The Play of Daniel at the Cloisters in New York was highly acclaimed by The New York Times. Minter is the artistic director of Boston Midsummer Opera, whose production of Peter Brook's The Tragedy of Carmen was a particular success in the summer of 2008.

Minter's knowledge of baroque stage practice, in particular the acting methods of the 18th century, is extensive. In recent years he has taught masterclasses in both the musical and dramatic interpretation of baroque opera, (as well as later opera), especially the physical gestures and ornamentation which were a working part of every baroque singer's arsenal.

Drew Minter is now a professor at Vassar College, where he teaches voice, opera workshop, and conducts the Vassar College Madrigal Singers. In addition, he has taught annually at the Amherst Early Music summer academy for the past six years. Minter is a regular featured reviewer of recordings for Opera News.

An internationally acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, Tim Rayborn has been active in the fields of early and world music for 18 years. He plays dozens of musical instruments from medieval Europe, the Middle East, the Balkans, and Central Asia, including: lutes, plucked strings, flutes, and percussion, as well as being a singer.

In addition to solo work, he currently performs with recorder virtuoso Annette Bauer in their medieval group, Cançonièr, Celtic harpist Patrick Ball, Swedish folk musicians Dråm, and collaborates regularly with Shira Kammen.

Tim lived in the UK for seven years, studying for his Ph.D. in medieval studies at the University of Leeds, and working as a musician. He has toured the U.S. and Europe extensively (from Ireland to Turkey), performing with the medieval group Tintagel and his own group, Ensemble Florata, including concerts at the York and Beverley Early Music Festivals, Alden Biesen Castle in Belgium, and the Spitalfields Festival in London. He has given a number of performances for BBC, toured in Canada and Australia, and worked with folk musicians in Marrakech and Istanbul.

He has collaborated and performed with many early music groups and performers, including Ensemble Alcatraz; Anne Azema; Susan Rode Morris; Phoebe Jevtovic; Peter Maund; Sinfonye; Kitka; Wyrewood; Gilbert Martinez; and members of the Harp Consort and Theater of Voices. He has recorded to date on nearly 30 CDs for a number of labels, including Gaudeamus, Wild Boar, Magnatune, and Eventide Music Productions, as well as on recordings distributed by Nimbus and Harmonia Mundi.

"Tim Rayborn's playing is quite extraordinary, with all the technique of a virtuoso." ~ Sacramento News and Review

"Tim Rayborn is an amazing singer." ~ Cardiff Early Music Series

"[...] a world-class talent in the field of ancient music." ~ Magnatune

www.timrayborn.com
www.myspace.com/timrayborn
www.myspace.com/canconier

Larry Rosenwald is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of American Literature at Wellesley College, where he has been teaching since 1980. He has written extensively on American literary multilingualism, on translation, on nonviolence, and on diaries, and has done numerous translations from several languages. He has performed and recorded with Schola Antiqua, Pomerium, Christmas Revels, and Jubal's Lyre, has written and performed numerous verse scripts for early music theater pieces all across the United States, and has been coaching singers on language and text at the Amherst Early Music Festival since 1984, and at SFEMS since 2006.

Mary Springfels remembers hearing New York Pro Musica perform early music for the first time when she was 14 years old. She said she immediately fell in love with it and began learning early music instruments in college. She began playing viola da gamba and related early music instruments professionally in 1968, and is one of the most highly regarded interpreters of pre-1800 music. She was Musician-in-Residence at the Newberry Library from 1982 until her retirement from that post in 2007. Besides founding and directing the Newberry Consort, Springfels has performed and recorded extensively with such ensembles as the New York Pro Musica, the Waverly Consort, Concert Royal, Sequentia, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, Music of the Baroque, Musica Sacra, the Marlborough Festival, the New York City Opera, and Chicago Opera Theater, where she has served as an artistic advisor.

In Chicago Springfels has also served as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. She has taught and performed in summer festivals throughout the US, among them the San Francisco, Madison, and Amherst Early Music Festivals, and the Conclave of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. In 2004 she delivered the keynote address to the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition for Early Music America. Over the past few years, Springfels has become very active in baroque opera, and she has performed with organizations such as the New York City Opera and Central City Opera. She will continue this involvement as well as providing lectures. She can be heard on over two dozen recordings, ten of which are critically acclaimed Newberry Consort projects, including Puzzles and Perfect Beauty: Italian Music at the End of the Middle Ages, released in 2007 by Noyse Productions.

Dan Stillman is a founding member and director of the Boston Shawm & Sackbut Ensemble. As a player of Renaissance wind instruments (both double reeds and brass), he has performed with the Gabrieli Consort and Taverner Players (London), Oltremontano (Antwerp), Apollo's Fire (Cleveland), Folger Consort (Washington, DC), La Nef and Les Sonneurs (Montréal), Trinity Consort (Portland, OR), and the avant-garde ensemble Roger Miller's Exquisite Corpse, and has toured extensively with both the Boston Camerata and Waverly Consort. As a player of historical trombone with period-instrument orchestras, he is an ongoing member of Boston Baroque, and has performed with such groups as the Handel & Haydn Society, Washington [DC] Bach Consort, Arcadia Players and the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra. Dan is a highly sought-after instructor of Renaissance wind instruments, having taught at Wellesley College, the Longy School of Music, Tufts University, and the Five College Early Music Program (Amherst, MA), as well as at summer workshops for the Amherst Early Music Festival, the San Francisco Early Music Society, and the Texas Toot. He can be heard on some two dozen recordings for the Telarc, Erato, Harmonia Mundi USA, Deutsche Grammophon Archiv, EMI, Dorian, Eclectra, and SST labels.

Tom Zajac is a multi-instrumentalist praised for his versatility and stylish playing in the performance of music from the medieval and Renaissance periods. He's a member of the wind band Piffaro, and the New York-based theatrical/musical group Ex Umbris, and a regular guest artist with the Folger Consort of Washington, D.C. He has appeared with numerous other leading ensembles in the US including the King's Noyse, Newberry Consort, Boston Shawm and Sackbut Ensemble, Rose Ensemble, Waverly Consort, Texas Early Music Project and Early Music New York.

He has toured extensively, having appeared in concert series and festivals in Hong Kong, Guam, Australia, Israel, Colombia, Mexico, and throughout Europe and the United States. He has performed 14th-century music in the East Wing of the White House during the Clinton years, played serpent in a piece by PDQ Bach on an episode of A Prairie Home Companion, and the sound of his bagpipe awoke the astronauts every morning on a 2001 space shuttle mission (on a recording, of course). He's performed on the sound track of several PBS documentaries for Emmy award-winning producer and composer Brian Keane and has participated in over 40 recording projects ranging from medieval dances to 20th-century chamber music.

In the Winter of '07, he collaborated in a 13th-century music-theater project, the Tournoi de Chauvency (stage direction by Francesca Lattuada) with the French-American company Ensemble Aziman, (music direction by Anne Azema) with performances in France, Luxembourg and the US. Other recent projects include playing onstage recorder for the Boston Early Music Festival production of Lully's Psyché, conducting a program of Polish Renaissance and early Baroque music for the Texas Early Music Project in Austin and performing in the Folger Shakespeare Theater production of the 15th-century Second Shepherd's Play in Washington DC.

Upcoming projects include guest directing the Yale University Collegium Musicum in a program of 18th-C Peruvian music that Tom has transcribed and arranged from original sources, and again performing with the BEMF Orchestra during this year's festival.

He is much sought after as a clinician at recorder and early music workshops throughout the US, having coached students age 6 through 96. Tom directs the Medieval/ Renaissance week of the SFEMS workshops in Rohnert Park, CA and teaches at Wellesley College, near his home in Boston.

Lutenist, musicologist and composer Dominic Schaner grew up on a small organic family farm in Southern California, where he was introduced to early music while in his mother's womb. Discovering Francesco Canova da Milano's music at an early age inspired Dominic to become one of the youngest professional lutenists in America. During degree studies in Musicology, Composition, and Historical Performance at Boston University, he discovered a previously unknown work by Luca Marenzio in the Harvard manuscript, Houghton MS Mus. 183. Dominic has also completed important research further illuminating the music of Francesco Canova da Milano through the music of Enriquez de Valderrabano and the Siena Manuscript. Currently, his projects focus on sixteenth century compositional process, Renaissance ornamentation and the art of intabulation. As a lutenist, Dominic has studied with such luminaries as Catherine Liddell, David Tayler, Paul O'Dette, Hopkinson Smith, Jacob Heringman, and Crawford Young. He has served as guest artist at the San Francisco Early Music Society's Medieval and Renaissance Workshop, and as the lute tutor at the Cambridge Early Music Summer School. Dominic has been sought after as both a solo and ensemble musician in performances throughout California and New England. Most recently, he performed with the Schola Cantorum San Francisco and San Francisco Renaissance Voices. In addition to performance engagements, Dominic has given lectures and taught classes on the lute and its music at Boston University, the University of Dallas, and Palomar College. He is the co-founder, artistic and musical director of the early music ensemble The Euphora Consort. Dominic also enjoys farming and gardening, studying philosophy and religion, reading and writing poetry, growing sprouts and occasional prolific thinking.

Soprano Amy White, an acclaimed opera and oratorio soloist, has recently starred in Wolf-Ferrari's Susanna's Secret with Mendocino Chamber Opera. She has played operatic roles such as Despina in Cosi fan Tutte, Frasquita in Carmen, Papagena in The Magic Flute, Monica in The Medium, and Blonda, in The Abduction from the Seraglio. Equally at home with sacred music, her oratiorio engagements have included solos in Bach's St. John's Passion, B minor Mass, and Faure's Requiem. Amy has performed locally with Pacific Collegium, St. Dominic's choir, Quartet San Francisco, and abroad in the world premiere of Warren's Sai Baba in India. She has studied with Julianne Baird, Laurie Heimes, Jennifer Lane, Kathleen Flynn, and Joyce Farwell. With a BA in vocal performance and an MA in English literature, White is singing mostly early music while looking out for the perfect English teaching job. Amy is also currently working with Wildcat Viols, editing their upcoming CD. She is the co-founder of Voice of the Wood, an ensemble dedicated to the revival of music from the 12th through 16th centuries. As the guest artist with SFEMS summer workshop last year, Amy is delighted to return again this year in a different role.

Last updated 06/05/2009.