CONTRIBUTORS

Gregg formed a new band in the late ’80’s because he wanted to play with the great Raleigh swing pianist Paul Montgomery, and also to arrange swing standards for a band of four horns.  Paul, better known to thousands of North Carolinian’s as famous TV personality Uncle Paul, was also one of the best swing pianists around, sounding no different that Earl ‘Fatha Hines’ and other great players like Mel Powell. But it was Paul’s daughter and vocalist Kathy who soon became a feature of the band, (and soon after that also Gregg’s wife!)  The eight-piece Gregg Gelb Swing Band went on to achieve wide popularity and still continues to this day. Gregg has written 250 arrangements for the group that features Kathy, and long time members Rodney Marsh, Jim Ketch, John Hanks, John Simonetti, and newest members Grant Osborne and Jerald Shynett.

Gregg is a recipient of a Jazz Composers Award from the North Carolina Arts Council and four Regional Artist grants from the Fayetteville/Cumberland County Arts Council.  In addition to leading his Jazz Quartet, 8-piece Swing Band, BIG BAND, Latin Jazz Band and other small groups, he is founder and director of the Heart of Carolina Jazz Orchestra and Jazz Society, and co-founder and player with the North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra. He is director of the Triangle Youth Jazz Ensemble and he teaches Introduction to Jazz online for Central Carolina Community College.

He has been an Interim Assistant Professor of Jazz at UNC Greensboro, NC State, and Francis Marion University, an Adjunct Professor at Fayetteville State and UNC Chapel Hill, band teacher in the Wake County Public Schools, and a Visiting Artist in the North Carolina Community Colleges.

He has a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Berklee College of Music, a Master of Music degree from the North Carolina School of the Arts, and a DMA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Timothy H. Lindeman is Professor of Music Emeritus at Guilford College, where he served as Chair for more than 20 years. He received the Ph.D. in music theory with minors in piano and art history from Indiana University. He is a published author and has presented papers at several national music conventions. For more than a three decades he has written about the Triad music scene in both Triad Style, the News and Record, and for the on-line journal, Culutral Voice of North Carolina. His most recent reviews can read be at www.cvnc.org.
In 2007 he was one of 23 critics from across the country to be accepted in the National Endowment for the Arts sponsored "Reviewing Classical Music and Opera," a ten-day seminar housed at Columbia University in New York City.
His primary research interest is Beethoven. He was one of twelve scholars to participate
in an NEH seminar on Beethoven at Harvard University under the tutelage of Lewis Lockwood. As an outcome, he designed an interdisciplinary senior seminar, "Beethoven: The Age of Revolution." Tim has given both solo and collaborative recitals, usually with his soprano wife, Nancy Walker, a Professor of Voice Emerita at University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
They have performed throughout the US, in China, and in Europe. In his spare time, Tim likes to cook, exercise, walk the dog (Ladaie), and spend time with his two daughters, Kelsey, a veterinarian technician in Greensboro, and Chloe, a Ph.D. student in physics at the University of Chicago. (Both are musically inclined….)

Michelle Medina Villalon has been with CVNC since 2021. She began as an intern, covering events in her college town of Salisbury and the surrounding area. Now a proud alum of Catawba College Theatre, she mostly writes for the Charlotte region. Some of her favorite events to cover are intimate theatrical productions, vocalists, and the educational performing arts. A director, playwright, and theatre educator herself, she finds joy in uplifting artists through her reviews as she looks to help bolster the community support around local productions. Michelle is a 2023 National Critics Institute (Charlotte) Fellow.

Now a retired music teacher, Moorman is spending more time in the garden, reading and with great joy, grand parenting.

(Revised 5/21)

In Spring 2021, she was accepted to become a member of Duke University’s Bass Connections Research team, strengthening partnerships between Durham public schools and local universities during the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 academic school years. On this team, Duke University partners with North Carolina Central University to connect students, parents, faculty, and staff in Durham Public Schools with resources within the Durham Community such as health clinics, anti-racism curriculums, and an informative dashboard consisting of resources such as child-care facilities, farmers’ markets, etc. During summer 2022, Melanie coded and researched on Duke University’s Data+ team. She is a 2022 Eileen Southern Travel Grant Recipient, and will attend the 2022 American Musicological Society’s Annual Meeting.

Having been on both the North Carolina and Washington State Visiting Artist rosters, Maggie has performed throughout the United States in both classical and jazz genres and as well in musical theatre and dance. Some of her most noted local performances include the soprano soloist of Stravinsky’s Les Noces and spearheading a concert for Sights and Sounds at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Maggie is a member of the North Carolina Master Chorale.

Maggie has worked for professional organizations within the arts including the Thelonious Monk Institute, WHR-Wilmington, Performance Support Services of Seattle, Long Leaf Opera Company. Maggie has held the position of music and dance editor for CVNC since 2015. She is now honored to be moving into the role of Editor in Chief for the organization as of 2021. Maggie is also currently the business development manager for choral music in North America for Oxford University Press.

Barry Salwen has recorded nine CDs, some in the U.S. and some in Europe. He was the first artist to record the complete solo piano works of the American master Roger Sessions and remains the only pianist to have done this. In 2005, the CD was re-released on Albany Records.

In earlier times, he served for four years as music reviewer for the Star News newspaper in Wilmington, and now is most pleased to be back writing about concerts.

Artistic Director of the North Carolina Dance Institute for the past 20 years, Kirstie has taught thousands of dancers at North Carolina Dance Institute.  She is a frequent visiting artist for the Carolina Ballet Summer Intensive, UNCSA Festival of Dance, WCPSS Professional Development Series, and the NC Dance Educators Conference. She has traveled to China for DDC’s Talented Youth Program in Beijing and Shanghai, directing and choreographing productions of Madagascar The Musical!, Seussical and The Wizard of Oz. Kirstie was featured in Walter Magazine May 2022.

Kirstie enjoys seeing live theatre at DPAC, ADF, UNC-Carolina Performing Arts and mentoring talented young artists at North Carolina Dance Institute.

He has more extensive practice as a cultural historian reflected in 30 years of performance and curation of cultural programs of the Black Experience – the Celluloid Sounds: Black Music Traditions in Film among others for the Black Diaspora Film Festival; a 10 month long series of panel discussions and programs on Afrofuturism; the, co-hosted with Doris Betts, 14-week nationally broadcasted public radio program “Storylines Southeast” that examined southern literature; 5 years of curation and booking of the Bull Durham Blues Festival; curation of the African-American Music Trail of Eastern North Carolina photo exhibition and musicians directory; curation of Sci-Fi Noire – Discussions with Black Science Fiction Writers; 15 years as a member of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival selection committee; management of the first ever partnership between the state of North Carolina and the Smithsonian Institution Museum on Main Street program touring New Harmonies – America’s Musical Heritage through rural communities in their examination of their regional musical heritage as Program Director of the North Carolina Humanities Council; and 8 years of teaching close to twenty sessions of AFS 346 Black Popular Culture – From the Blues to Afrofuturism, a very popular course on campus at NCSU which brings into discourse an interdisciplinary scholarship that embraces cultural history, performance studies, art history, and intersectionality.

Perry Tannenbaum has been covering the performing arts for Cultural Voice NC since 2009. He has nurtured the arts scene in Charlotte, NC, with reviews, features, and interviews since the inaugural issue of Creative Loafing in 1987, continuing at Queen City Nerve when its inaugural issue was published in 2018. He also contributes regularly to American Record Guide, Broadway World, All About Jazz, and Classical Voice North America. Beyond Charlotte, he regularly reviews Spoleto Festival USA and the New York City scene – Broadway, off-Broadway, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, and various jazz clubs. A devout believer in the busman’s holiday, Perry has also published review roundups from the Aspen Music Festival, Santa Fe Music Festival, Verbier Festival, Spoleto Italy, SeixalJazz International Festival, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Edinburgh International Festival, BBC Proms, Stratford Festival of Canada, Shaw Festival, the Jazz Cruise, and the Savannah Music Festival. He is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America and the American Theatre Critics Association.
Born in New York, where he completed his undergraduate work at Queens College of CUNY, Perry holds an MA in English from Western Washington University. He has been a Southerner since 1972 when he came to teach at the University of South Carolina and study writing under the guidance of poet James Dickey. He traces his love of music to his parents, who met at the Met in the early ’40s and were proudly loyal – and opinionated – subscribers until his father’s death in 2012 at the age of 97. Mom, now nearing 104, resides in Charlotte these days, still able to summon weekly Met Opera broadcasts via her Google Hub.
Perry’s love of music has withstood successive frustrating attempts to master piano, clarinet, and guitar. With more success, he has tackled acting roles with Innovative Theatre and Children’s Theatre of Charlotte. He has sung in musicals staged at Rock Hill Little Theatre and Columbia’s Town Theatre. He is still called frequently into service at Temple Israel, where his aging baritone remains in reasonable vicinity of the traditional cantillation for Torah and Haftarah readings on Shabbat and the cantorial melodies of morning and afternoon prayers during the High Holy Days.

Selected honors include two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in theater and dance criticism, two National Critics Institute fellowships at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and awards from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, the North Carolina Press Association and, most recently, a 2022 Green Eyeshade Award in arts criticism from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Woods has served six times (so far) as critic in residence and clinician in short-course intensives on theater criticism in various regions of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, and taught arts journalism and criticism at UNC Greensboro and in private seminars. He earned an M.A. in Communication Studies with a Performance Studies concentration from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1995.

Dr. Arcus holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the School of Music at Yale University, where he earned his Doctor of Musical Arts degree. He has received awards in composition and improvisation competitions, and he is in demand as a solo recitalist, having performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Great Britain.  He has also toured with the Duke Chapel Choir in Great Britain, Poland, The Czech Republic, Spain, Greece, Turkey, and China, and he has appeared as organist with the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra. He has served on the faculties of St. Mary’s School, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Dr. Arcus’ recitals have included premieres of new works by well known composers such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Dan Locklair, and Marianne Ploger. He is frequently commissioned to write new works for organ and choir, and he is also active as clinician, teacher/lecturer, and conductor. He has presented workshops and masterclasses on service playing and organ improvisation for the American Guild of Organists, and has served as Course Organist for RSCM (America) training courses. His compositions are published by Concordia, Hinshaw, and Wayne Leupold Editions. His CD, The Organs of Duke Chapel, is on the Gothic label.

Kate was a 2009 NEA Fellow in Dance Criticism at the American Dance Festival. She holds an MFA degree from Syracuse University in studio art and a BFA in design from UNC-Greensboro. Her “way in” to the performing arts is intensely visual, and her writing is often marked by its descriptive qualities. She has loved ballet and dance since age five and discovered the power of theater at fifteen. She sees as many performances as she can, both imported and local.

Currently, Kate divides her time between Durham and Washington, DC, which allows her the opportunity to put the Triangle’s artistic offerings in a larger context.

Jayanthi Balachandran trained for many years in Bharathanatyam under Padmashri Mrs. Chitra Visweswaran (one of India’s respected Bharathanatyam exponents). She is the Artistic Director of Rasa Dance Creations and offers workshops in universities, schools and arts organizations wherein she promotes her message – “Dance Transcends Barriers.” Through “Speaking Through Dance” sessions, she incorporates eloquent narration coupled with dance movements to educate audiences on thought-provoking, cross-cultural works of literature. She served on the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Dance Alliance. She received a Regional Artist Grant awarded by United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County and collaborated with Indian Classical Music and Dance Society (ICMDS) and the North Carolina Museum of History to launch “Shiksha” (“education”) – a series of lecture-demonstrations on Indian classical dance presented by various local artists, with an aim of bringing to life the myriad nuances from the world of Indian classical dance. She enjoys choreographing solo and group dance programs. She also presents her public speaking talents to host dance programs. (8/2009)

While working in the music library at East Carolina University Mrs. Barber maintains an active performing schedule as a free-lance horn player. Her role as pianist for the weekly chapel services at Greenville’s Vidant Medical Center inspired her to establish the monthly concert series “Good Music Good Medicine,” in which ECU School of Music students and faculty perform at the hospital as a community service.

Judy and her husband Chuck live in Greenville, North Carolina, where all four sons have come and gone and none but Jake the dog remains. There’s a garden with limitless possibilities and stacks of good books to be read, but for now, there’s a concert tonight that just shouldn’t be missed.

Equally at home in the rehearsal rooms of theatres and orchestras, Cooper debuted as a guest conductor with the Durham Symphony in November 2015. He studied theatre criticism and conducting at UNCG, working as an assistant director on several university and community productions and serving as a rehearsal conductor for UNCG’s Opera Theatre. In the Summer of 2015 he received an undergraduate research grant to study musical theatre conducting with the company Greensboro Light Opera and Song. He also helmed UNC-Chapel Hill’s acclaimed production of A Chorus Line in November 2015. Follow Jackson Cooper on Twitter at @CrampedCritic.

At Meredith, Julie-Kate was President of the student organization, Extra Theatre Company, and a member of Alpha Psi Omega, the National Honorary Theatre Society. She worked on productions with local companies and youth theatre companies, while also performing and designing as a student at Meredith. She was nominated for the Irene Ryan Acting Award for her senior capstone role as Prospera in an adaptation of The Tempest and the Barbizon Costume Design Award for her design for Intimate Apparel.

After college she worked in Arts Administration and assistant directing for Lexington Children’s Theatre in Kentucky. Happy to return home, she is now the Managing Director for a local non-profit theatre company in Raleigh and began teaching at a local high school in the fall of 2013.

Julie-Kate is a Goodman Fellow through Leadership Triangle College Edition 2010 and is an advocate for education and the arts.

Cope was musical as a child and performed on a variety of instruments until finally settling into what has become a life-long career as a classical guitarist. He has served as orchestral soloist, concert performer, recitalist, lecturer, recording artist, and, since 1978 a college-level educator. For nine years he was a member of the Affiliate Artist Faculty at Brevard College (NC), serving as Director of Guitar Studies and Director of the Guitar Ensemble. He is currently a Lecturer and member of the Music Studio Teaching Faculty at California State University at Bakersfield where he also directs the Guitar Ensemble, and serves as coach for chamber music groups.

Cope has premiered new music for guitar by Karen Thomas, David Leonard, Paul Elwood, and Bertil Van Boer. In North Carolina he has performed at Thomas Wolf Auditorium, the Diana Wortham Theatre, and Biltmore Estate in Asheville and at the Porter Center for Performing Arts in Brevard, the Henderson County Library in Hendersonville, the Muses Gallery in Flat Rock, the School of Music of Appalachian State University, and High Hampton Inn at Cashiers. He has also performed at the Dock Street Theater in Charleston, SC, and as soloist with the Charlotte Repertory Orchestra, the Hendersonville Symphony, and the Asheville Symphony.

A native of Pittsburgh, Curry started conducting and composing music at age 14. His first major appointment was at age 21 when he was named Assistant Conductor of the Richmond Chamber Orchestra. On the same day, he was called in to replace a conductor who suddenly became ill for a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Maestro Curry’s unexpected debut was hailed by the critics and audience alike. He went on to serve as Resident Conductor with the Baltimore Symphony for six years (1978-1983) and with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for two years (1983-1985).

Maestro Curry was appointed Associate Conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony in 1983, a post he held until 1988, the same year he was named winner of the Leopold Stokowski Conducting Competition and performed in Carnegie Hall. He was feature conductor for the tour and recording of Anthony Davis’s Grammy-nominated opera X. He has also conducted opera productions with the New York City Opera, the Houston Grand Opera and the Chicago Opera Theatre.

Maestro Curry has conducted over forty orchestras, including appearances with the Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, National, Detroit, Denver, American and San Diego symphonies and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In November of 1997 he made his debut in Israel with the Israel Camerata Jerusalem orchestra; he has also conducted orchestras in Bangkok and Taiwan. In the 2002-03 season he made appearances as guest conductor with the Indianapolis, Detroit, and New Jersey orchestras. He made his conducting debut in December 2002 with the New York City Ballet in their famed Balanchine production of The Nutcracker. Guest conducting reengagements include a return to the Indianapolis Symphony and the New York City Ballet, as well as debut performances with the Chicago Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Maestro Curry is also a composer, and his works have been played by many of America’s finest orchestras. On June 13, 1999, the Indianapolis Symphony premièred his work, Eulogy for a Dream. This work, based on the speeches and writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a tremendous success and received a standing ovation. This piece was broadcast nationally in January 2000 on the National Public Radio program Performance Today.

Maestro Curry is also committed to new music and has conducted premières by, among others, Schwantner, Bolcom, Foss and Hailstork. The range of artists Maestro Curry has worked with in his career run the gamut from Zubin Mehta and Aaron Copland to John Williams and Ella Fitzgerald. In addition, he has been a beacon for promising young musicians both as an instructor at the Peabody Conservatory and the Baltimore School for the Arts, and as a mentor.

A published composer with C. Alan Publications, DeCristofaro’s concert works have been performed in New Zealand, China, Sweden, and all over the United States, and he has been a featured guest composer with the Symphony of the Mountains and the Asheville Ballet. He is also the founder and artistic director of Asheville Composer Concerts. DeCristofaro has presented at Harvard University for the International Journal of Arts and Sciences (IJAS), Virginia Tech for the Conference on Higher Education Pedagogy (CHEP), and Black Mountain College Museum.

The winner and recipient of the 2011 Yamaha/Percussive Arts Society Terry Gibbs Scholarship, an international scholarship competition for jazz vibraphonists, DeCristofaro has been invited to perform as a clinician and guest artist at numerous jazz festivals, conferences, and universities throughout the Southeast, including the Brevard Music Center (Brevard, NC), Furman University (Greenville, SC), The Eastern Trombone Conference (Washington, D.C.), Jazz on the Square (Spartanburg, SC), Jazz on Main (Greenville, SC), Western Carolina University Jazz Festival (Cullowhee, NC), Appalachian State University (Boone, NC), and North Greenville University (Tigerville, SC). His original Jazz compositions are featured on three albums, Live at the Altamont (featuring Swiss flutist Calen Gayle), Dialogues (with pianist and UNC-Asheville Jazz Studies director Dr. William Bares), and Magic Numbers (a trio recording with bassist Daniel Iannucci and drummer Micah Thomas).

Jason holds a Master of Music Performance from University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a Master of Liberal Arts and Sciences from UNC-Asheville, and is currently working towards his Doctorate in Music Education at Boston University.

Mark Evans literally grew up in the world of film music in Hollywood. He was a private pupil of such renowned composers as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Roy Harris. His book, Soundtrack: The Music of the Movies, has been recognized as the definitive book on the history of film scoring. As a writer and lyricist, he is the author of numerous books for adults and children and has collaborated on books with such varied personalities as Robert Stack and Xavier Cugat.

He began his broadcasting career on radio, producing 500 radio programs under his trademarked title, Mark! My Words, also the name of his newspaper column in the New York City Tribune. Many of the world’s most prominent figures in fields ranging from music, art, and literature to government, diplomacy, and education have been guests on radio and programs he has hosted and produced. Mark! My Words programs are devoted to the best of the past which shouldn’t be forgotten, the best of the present, which shouldn’t be ignored, and the best of the future, which shouldn’t be undiscovered. He is widely in demand as a speaker.

His book, also titled Mark! My Words, is subtitled “How to Discover the Joy of Music, the Delight of Language, and the Pride of Achievement in the Age of Trash Talk and MTV” (reviewed here). It was the first major book to address our current cultural crisis and to provide positive solutions that can impact your life and the state of our culture.

His most recent book is Our Musical Heritage: From ‘Yankee Doodle’ to Carnegie Hall, Broadwayv and The Hollywood Sound Stage. It is a guided tour through four important genres of music, concert works, jazz, musical theater, and film scores. The book was written to provide parents, grandparents, and teachers a resource to share the story of how music played an important role in the development of our country and to introduce their children and grandchildren to our true musical heritage

She holds a B.S. in secondary education and an M.A. in English from the University of Tennessee; a B.A. in vocal performance from Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; and an M.A. in musicology from UNC-Chapel Hill. She has sung as a soloist as well as with numerous choral organizations in Knoxville, Tennessee; Newport News, Virginia; and Chapel Hill and Asheville, North Carolina. She taught English at U-T, Christopher Newport, and Richlands Virginia Community College in Richlands, Virginia, and music appreciation courses at UNC. In Asheville she has taught voice at UNC-A, had roles in Oliver, My Fair Lady, and Sweet Charity at the Asheville Community Theatre, was assistant manager for the Radio Reading Service, and wrote music reviews for the Asheville Citizen-Times.

Bryan Gilliam has been at the Duke University Department of Music since 1986 and joined the Department of German and German Literature in 2013. In 1995 he was appointed to the Bass Society of Fellows. Gilliam serves as Associate Editor at The Musical Quarterly, is on the board of advisers for the Kurt Weill Edition, as well as the editorial board of the new Richard Strauss Edition.

Gilliam’s book publications include four on Richard Strauss, one on music during the Weimar Republic, and has recently completed a book (Rounding Wagner’s Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera), which is in production at Cambridge University Press.

His principal areas of interest include: late 19th and early 20th-century German music; Richard Strauss; Anton Bruckner; Kurt Weill; Erich Korngold; German opera; fin-de-siècle Vienna; film music; German musical aesthetics; poetry and music.

Education: Harvard PhD, 1984

Max passed away on Oct. 6, 2014. For details, click here.

Carl J. Halperin was born in Chicago but has lived for many years in central North Carolina. He attended the N.C. School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, receiving his B.M. in voice in 1982. Long writing stints at Spectator Magazine locally (where he received his first literary experience) and for Opera News in New York led to work in public radio, as a local NPR affiliate station anchor (also submitting stories directly to the network proper) and time spent writing for Raleigh’s News and Observer and for Durham’s Herald-Sun. Halperin has performed leading baritone roles in operas by Mozart, Pasatieri, and others, and participated in opera productions at Raleigh’s Meredith College, in one of which his role was written for him. He has interviewed leading celebrity singers from opera’s Golden Age (c.1950-75) for a prospective volume and is hoping to do other work with smaller to moderate-sized publishing houses in the Southeast.

Max passed away on Oct. 6, 2014. For details, click here.

Joseph Hartman is a North Carolina native who currently lives in Drexel, NC, with his wife and two children. He is a freelance writer who focuses on the literature and history of the piano and the organ. Though not a trained musician, he grew up in a musical home and has been immersed in music and art from a very young age. He is an avid collector of rare and historical piano recordings.

The landmark event of his life was a 1950 trip with other members of his high school band to Richmond to hear Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra on their last nation-wide tour. The Maestro and the sounds he brought forth from the instruments on stage captivated him, and he has been an avid classical music buff ever since.

In college, he sang in Men’s Glee Club and Chorus and played trombone in the school band and in a jazz ensemble. He sang for two years in Carl Fehr’s “The Common Glory” choir in Williamsburg and in the Chorus of Alumni and Friends of the University of Richmond (CAFUR) with the Richmond Symphony under James Erb. Locally, he sang with the Choral Society of Durham under Larry Cook and Rodney Wynkoop.

Hoover studied music sporadically at University of Richmond and at UNC-Chapel Hill. He studied composition privately with Peter Klausmeyer. He has composed ten choral anthems and a number of service pieces, some performed widely. He is especially interested in choral music and opera and finds passion in all music. He says his favorite piece of music is the one he is listening to right now.

Lynn passed away after a long battle with cancer in November of 2020, and her obituary can be accessed here.

Alexandra Jones is a tuba player, aspiring journalist, and dedicated music fan. After coming of age in Raleigh, she attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to study tuba performance with Professor Fritz Kaenzig. She immersed herself in working for the campus student-run newspaper, The Michigan Daily, where she served as an arts reporter, film and music reviewer, columnist, magazine editor, and associate editor of the Arts section. She graduated with Bachelor of Musical Arts and Bachelor of General Studies degrees in summer of 2006. She became a member of the Triangle Brass Band in Fall 2006.

Jones is interested in 20th-century and avant-garde classical music, the work of the “Moguchaya Kuchka,” the “Mighty Five” (Balakirev , Cui, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov), improvisational/experimental/noise/difficult listening, good pop music, soul, Elvis Costello, orchestral works that feature decent tuba parts, gamelan, American roots music, and psychedelic garage rock from the 1960s, just for starters. She relishes hearing new music and loves writing and talking about it almost as much.

Elizabeth sees the critic’s role as largely educational rather than judgmental. She believes that by explaining something about a program, both its content and performance, she can help readers sharpen their appreciation of music their own critical faculties. As in other areas, Elizabeth is a true musical liberal, believing that there is no such thing as a definitive performance. But that doesn’t mean that performers can get away with just anything.

Joe is Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry from NCSU where he taught for 28 years. For ten years he hosted the classical music request program, first on WKNC and then on WCPE. He was classical music critic with his wife Elizabeth at the Independent Weekly for ten years. He and Elizabeth now write program notes for musical organizations around the country.

He believes that musical criticism should be geared to the interested lay person and aim to be both informative and accessible. Criticism should not only evaluate, but also explain and educate.

She has taught violin and chamber music at the Longy School of Music, the Ecole Ste. Trinite in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and was Professor for Youth at the Fourth International Festival of Music in Lima, Peru. She now teaches violin, viola and chamber music and conducts the Duke University String School Chamber Orchestra. Her playing career includes solos with the Dayton Philharmonic, the Greensboro Symphony, the St. Stephen’s Chamber Orchestra (SCOR; now the Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle), and the Trinite Philharmonic of Haiti. She was Associate concertmistress of the Greensboro Symphony, Principal Second of the SCOR, and, for many years, Principal Second of the Duke Symphony Orchestra. She toured as part of the Kitchen-Nicolson Baroque duo for six years. She has served as String Chairman of the North Carolina Music Teachers Association and is Co-Chair of the Durham Music Teachers Association’s Performance Festival. She is the author of a small book for beginning violinists and has written about music for the Durham Herald-Sun, the Dayton Daily News,and CVNC.

Kitchen has been honored as “Teacher of the Year” by the NCSA, had a day named for her by the City of Durham, and received the Ella Fountain Pratt Lifetime Award for Service to Music from the Durham Arts Council.

Since 1977, John W. Lambert, has written reviews and articles published, variously, by The News and Observer, Leader, Spectator, Fanfare, Fi, Independent, CVNC, and CVNA. His studies included violin, piano, voice, and music history. A sketch of his thesis, on the North Carolina Symphony’s first 50 years, was published by Greenwood Press, in Symphony Orchestras of the United States: Selected Profiles (ed. Robert R. Craven); and his liner notes for several Toscanini Lps were published by Music and Arts Programs of America, Inc. His latest major publication is The North Carolina Symphony: A History, written in cooperation with Joe A. Mobley, with a foreward by Roy C. Dicks.

He is a recipient of the Raleigh Medal of Arts, the Durham Symphony’s “Share the Music” Award, and a Triangle Arts Award.

Lambert is a member of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections and an avid collector of recordings. Ever mindful of his late critical mentor Nell Hirschberg’s oft’-repeated admonition to continue writing (because, as she said, “People die when they use up the number of words allocated to them in their lifetimes”), he hopes to live long enough to annotate “best-available” transfers of all of Toscanini’s NBC Symphony broadcasts (1937-54), a listening (and collecting) project he began when he was 11 – a musical journey that is documented in this valedictory article.

He cherishes the memory of his time in Uncle Sugar’s Canoe Club, including a deployment to Vietnam aboard the Navy’s last 8″ rapid-fire cruiser, the USS NEWPORT NEWS; he retired after 26+ years of combined active and reserve service, the latter including a substantial hitch in military shipping. His civilian “day jobs” were largely in private-sector and government purchasing and technical writing. He retired as a business officer with NC’s Department of Health and Human Services in September 2010.

He is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America and serves on the production team of Classical Voice North America.

(Revised 10/2022.)

Critic Joel Mauger, a guitarist and keyboard specialist, of Raleigh, is currently a graduate student at NCSU. He maintains an active interest in playing music through his continuing study of the classical guitar and its literature in addition to having recently taken up the tenor banjo to play Irish Traditional music. He is a great fan of solo piano recordings of all vintages.

Since 1973, the Columbia, SC, native and 1970 graduate of East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, has written theater, book, and music previews and reviews for the Raleigh News & Observer, The Raleigh Times, North Carolina Magazine of Raleigh, and Spectator Magazine of Raleigh. In April 2001, Robert McDowell established Robert’s Reviews, an e-mail theatrical newsletter, to help fill a growing void in Triangle theater coverage. Triangle Theater Review is an expanded version of the original newsletter, circulated by e-mail.

He also co-edited and supervised the production of Jim Valvano’s Guide to Great Eating (JTV Enterprises, 1984), a 224-page celebrity cookbook; and he served as a fact checker for Valvano: They Gave Me a Lifetime Contract, and Then They Declared Me Dead (Pocket Books, 1991).

McIrvine published for general audiences in Scientific American and Physics Today, and on the impact of technological change on society in the 1967 book Dialogue on Technology edited by Robert Theobald. While living in Rochester, NY, McIrvine was President of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he hired David Zinman as music director, negotiated the first-ever multi-year labor contract with the musicians, and stabilized the finances.

After studying piano and clarinet in his home town of Winnipeg, McIrvine decided at age 14 not to become a professional musician. At age 15, he decided not to become a journalist. However, he rekindled those interests in retirement. He resumed piano study with Joseph Werner in Rochester and Content Sablinsky in Charlottesville, and played chamber music privately. From 2001 to 2008, he wrote Arts Spectrum, a weekly Sunday column on the arts in Hendersonville’s Times-News. After 2007, he taught musical courses at the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement and studied creative writing in the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC-Asheville. He was a critical mainstay in Western NC for CVNC.

Lauren is a section editor for the A&T Register, covering on-campus news. She has written numerous articles published in print and online for the student-run newspaper.

Mitchell plans to reach beyond her comfort zone to explore the endless possibilities for herself, where she can make positive contributions and also be able to hone skills from her peers.

He has recorded with Kim Reighley and Mélomanie for Lyrichord (USA) and with Le Triomphe de l’Amour for Lyrichord and A Casa Discos (Brazil). He participated as flutist and interviewer for the CD released in Oct. 2006 marking ten years of music for flute by Sergio Roberto de Oliveira. Mr. Moore writes about music for BrazilMax.com, Musicabrasileira.org, 21st Century Music, Opera Today, Flute Talk, Flutist Quarterly, and other journals. He has also sung professionally with the Symphonic Chorus of Rio de Janeiro and Concert Royal and Pomerium Musices of New York.

A graduate in political science, she developed her Music Appreciation (101 and -2 and -3) and writing skills at Middlebury College in Vermont. She wrote the first Arts column in her native state: “Des Beaux Arts in New Hampshire,” for the Manchester Union Leader. She often reviewed NH Music Festival concerts for The Telegram.

The “naturalized North Carolinian” initially relocated with her family from New Hampshire to Winston-Salem, where she wrote “Spotlight on the Arts,” in Steve Neal’s The Suburbanite. She also represented performing artists there in the ’70s. Later, she and her husband, Everett, lived in Chapel Hill, where she researched, published and marketed Outdoor Drama and he was, during most of the ’80s, Executive Director of the Medical Foundation of North Carolina, retiring in 1990. Prior to relocating to Maine in the summer of 2004, they lived in Pinehurst and Raleigh. For a couple of years, she was program director for Women of Weymouth and was Dean of the Sandhills Chapter, American Guild of Organists. She wrote occasional reviews for The Pilot. In 1998, she founded the Handel On Hungerannual events in the Sandhills; she hopes that there will be delayed spin-offs to “feed His flock like a shepherd” (Isaiah 40:11) everywhere that Messiah is performed or given in “sing along” readings.

Nordstrom has edited her husband’s manuscript, How The Dome Was Done, which relates his professional fund-raising experience as Campaign Director for the late Hargrove “Skipper” Bowles and the Educational Foundation of UNC.

In 2004, she moved from NC to Maine. She is a founder of Classical Voice of New England.

Her death in Maine in September 2021 at the age of 95 was noted in Legacy, here: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/concordmonitor/name/mary-nordstrom-obituary?pid=199514687.

Powers assisted Donald L. Oehler, artistic director, in various capacities for about 20 years in UNC’s Adult Chamber Music Workshop. As a member of the Raleigh Chamber Music Guild board for six years, she served on the Masters committee and also helped initiate the September Prelude Festival and the master classes for young chamber musicians.

Powers received a B.A. in music education (University of Washington), M.M. in violin performance with a specialty in baroque performance practices (Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS), and a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century musicology with areas of expertise in north German intellectual history, including rhetoric, and late eighteenth-century performance practices, and troubadour music (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). She belongs to the American String Teachers Association; Chapel Hill Cooperative Suzuki Project; American Federation of Musicians Local 500, Professional Musicians Association; American Musicological Society; American Bach Society; and Phi Beta Kappa.

Bill Robinson was born into a musical family in Denton, Texas, in 1955. He started piano lessons at age three and violin at ten and moved to Massachusetts in 1961. Composition started in 1972 while a student at Phillips Academy Andover. After that came a year at Eastman School of Music, then many years at NTSU in Denton (now UNT). He earned a BM in composition there in 1984. In 1987, he moved to North Carolina, coming to Raleigh in 2001 to study physics at NCSU, where he earned a BS in 2004. He graduated with a PhD in May 2010 and promptly joined the physics faculty as a lecturer. He retired in 2017 and now lives in senior housing in Garner.

His compositions include ten solo violin or viola sonatas, sonatas for various other instruments, chamber works of many kinds, seven concertos for several kinds and combinations of instruments and orchestra, full orchestral pieces, two large works for chorus and orchestra, and pieces for concert band. He has produced a dozen CDs and video DVDs independently, written and recorded his Autobillography, and has a website at billrobinsonmusic.com that has all his scores and recordings, as well as a YouTube channel.

Rossman attended the 2005 National Arts Journalism Institute at Columbia University, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Rossman grew up in Brooklyn, New York; he says, “As anyone from there will tell you, no matter how long you’ve been gone, you are always ‘from Brooklyn.'” After the obligatory family pilgrimage from New York to Miami, he attended Florida State University. A teaching assistantship at Ohio State University led to the one bright spot of that tenure – he met his wife, Monica. In 1982, she was offered the position of Assistant Organist at Duke Chapel, so the Rossmans loaded up their truck and moved to Durham. They have two daughters: Jessica, a nursing student at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Natalie, a junior at UNC-Greensboro.

Mr. Rossman earned a Juris Doctorate degree from North Carolina Central University School of Law and was admitted to the North Carolina State Bar in July, 1990. Rossman’s “real” job is Information Technology Senior Analyst with Duke University Health System.

Geoffrey Simon retired in April, 2021 from being Director of Music and Organist of Holy Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Raleigh, NC, in order to concentrate on performing as organ recitalist and conductor. A Fellow of the College of Church Musicians at Washington National Cathedral, where he studied with Leo Sowerby and Paul Callaway, he holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University. He was Director of University Choirs at The American University in Washington, DC before becoming Professor of Church Music at Wesley Seminary. He has played or conducted in twenty US states and Canada, and in European capitals including Berlin, Copenhagen, and Warsaw. He is one of few Americans to play a recital at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, where J.S. Bach served as Cantor. Also a harpsichordist, he has performed at the Smithsonian Institution (Bach’s D-minor concerto), the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, and the National Cathedral (the 5^th Brandenburg Concerto), under conductor Alexander Schneider).

As Organist-Choirmaster for Christ Lutheran Church in Washington, DC for thirteen years, he guided the process resulting in installation of the first major 20^th-century mechanical-action organ in the city, built by the firm of Rudolf von Beckerath, of Hamburg, Germany. That organ, of 30 stops and 45 ranks of pipes (2180 in all) has been critically acclaimed and used in recitals for conventions of the American Guild of Organists. Among its many recitals was a series of sixteen concerts of the complete organ works of J.S. Bach, shared by Dr. Simon and Marian Ruhl Metson, then Organist at The Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill.

As Music Director for the Martin Luther Jubilee in 1985, Simon played and conducted massed choirs for a televised service and dramatic production from the Nat’l. Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC and conducted 80 members of the National Symphony Orchestra plus the Howard University Choir in a gala concert at the Kennedy Center. During the Kennedy Center’s Mozart Festival under conductor Julius Rudel, he and Donald Sutherland presented the complete Mozart organ works. For a decade, he was organist and choral conductor for Adas Israel, the DC area’s largest Conservative synagogue. He has served as a resident musician at Holden Village, the Lutheran retreat center in the North Cascade mountains.

Dr. Simon is a contributing music critic for the Classical Voice of North Carolina, that state’s online arts site. He lives in Raleigh with his wife, Sarah Morgan; their home features a concert hall seating 75, where they regularly host solo and chamber music programs.

Larry Reni Thomas, a native of Wilmington, North Carolina, is a writer/radio announcer/lecturer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who has worked at seven radio stations and whose journalistic work has appeared in downbeat magazine and The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of The True Story Behind The Wilmington Ten (KHA Books, 1993)) and Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!: A Fictional Account of The Wilmington Ten Incident of February 1971(KHA Books, 2006). Thomas also wrote “The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan,” an article that included an exclusive interview with North Carolina native, Helen Morgan, who killed the 33-year-old jazz trumpet legend in 1972. Later, Larry published a book called The Lady Who Shot Lee Morgan (KHA Books, 2014).

Thomas’s lecture, The Carolina Jazz Connection with Larry Thomas, has been presented at schools, colleges, universities, libraries and public places since 2008. He was named Jazz Hero in 2014 by The Jazz Journalists Association; received the Fifth Annual Donald Meade Legacy Jazz Griot Award at The Jazz Education Network (JEN) conference in 2016, and has been a downbeat magazine jazz critic since 2012. Larry is presently writing a book titled: Carolina Shout: That Wonderful, Soulful Blessing: The Carolina Jazz Connection! He is featured in the documentary films: Wilmington On Fire and I Called Him Morgan. He received a MA in History from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) and has done further study at UNC-CH's Journalism graduate school. Thomas is also the host of “Sunday Night Jazz” on WCOM-FM, Chapel Hill-Carrboro, North Carolina.

A lover of all things dance, Jessica gained her formal training under the guidance of teachers from the National Ballet of Canada, Atlanta Ballet, Washington Ballet, Jazz Dance Theatre of Atlanta, Kansas City Ballet, and Intercity Ballet Company where she performed as a soloist. She spent two summers of ballet and theatre training with Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Chernov. Her jazz and hip hop training is rooted in her studies with dancers and choreographers from the stages of Broadway, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Jessica continues to dance and teach in the Charlotte area.

In 2009, Jessica founded Speak Your Design, a communications and project management firm that serves clients in the fields of architecture, engineering, higher education and the arts, among others.

Note: Walker’s pre-CVNC  guest restaurant reviews are compiled in Kent’s Carolina Barbecue Book from what was the #1 ranked by Google website from 1998 until its retirement in 2008 with an average of over 10,000+ unique visitors per month.

Marvin J. Ward has degrees in French and English: BA (62) & MA (72, English), SUNY Albany; MA (68, French), Université Laval, Québec; Ph.D. (specializing in their medieval literatures, 84), UNC-CH; is bilingual, was a HS French teacher, then a translator and interpreter for 20 years.

He was a choral singer, radio announcer, retail music recording salesman and department manager, member of boards of presenter organizations, and is a collector of recorded classical music.

He relocated from Raleigh, NC, to Western Massachusetts upon retirement in 2003, now residing in Easthampton, and continues to contribute to CVNC. He was a founder & Executive Editor (2006-2009) of the now defunct Classical Voice of New England.

Since April 2011, he is a Five Colleges Associate with Five Colleges, Inc., based at Smith College in Northampton, MA. His research and writing focus on music, especially French, early music, and performances on historic pianos, particularly at the Frederick Collection in Ashburnham, MA.

Other interests include art/art history, history (with a forthcoming book about Easthampton’s earliest industries), historical sites, museums, and reading.

He has written for CVNC since 2001, and for CVNA since 2013.

Cecilia Whalen is a freelance arts writer based in NYC. She is a practicing dancer, pursuing a career as a modern dancer and choreographer. She is currently enrolled in a choreography program with Martha Graham Studios, and she is an active contributor in dance commentary with Fjord.

As a student at UNC Charlotte, Cecilia was a staff writer for the UNCC Niner Times covering artistic events on-campus and city-wide. She has written numerous reviews, previews, and interviews published in print and online for the student-run newspaper. As a high school student, Cecilia was the Editor-in-Chief of her high school newspaper, The Eagle, and a winner of several writing awards, including the Blumenthal Performing Arts and Charlotte Observer “Best Student Critic” Blumey Award in 2017, and a Scholastic Art and Writing Award “Gold Key” in 2018 for her personal essay on jazz. Cecilia holds a strong interest in jazz music and is also a practicing jazz drummer.

With CVNC, Cecilia covered many events in Charlotte, NC and the Western part of the state; she served as Calendar Editor from 2021 – 2022.

Scholarly articles include “From Salonière to Social Activist: Muriel Draper and the Popular Front,” in the Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians, Vol. 6-7, Fall 1998-Fall 1999; “A Little Republic Filled with Grace: The Nineteenth-Century Music Salon,” in Women of Note Quarterly Vol. 3, No.4, November 1995; and “Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Sunday Musicales,” in Women of Note Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1994, reprinted in the Journal of the Conductors’ Guild Vol. 14, no. 1, Winter/Spring 1993.

Since 1994, Whalen has taught music history and music appreciation courses at Queens University of Charlotte. She is currently the Director of Communications and External Relations for the College of Arts + Architecture at UNC Charlotte.

In 2016, Krista formed her own string quartet which performed together for two years. Managing this quartet was what led Krista to discover her passion for management. Currently, Krista works as an intern for the Philharmonic Association. She was also recently hired to be the operations manager of a startup arts organization focused in Johnston County, The Around Town Singers & Orchestra. Her dream is to one day work as a manager for an arts organization like the North Carolina Symphony.

He was a graduate of Furman and Auburn universities. He retired from the electronic computing industry, and later from a secondary career teaching mathematics and computer courses at Shaw University. He also taught in adjunct status at Auburn University, Georgia State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

His interest in music sprung from early studies in high school and college, but still more so from a lifetime of listening and appreciating. That time spread included multiple years as a choral performer. In fact, vocal music tended to move him like no other form. (To fill out his all-time favorite vocal spectrum, he would choose soprano Zinka Milanov, contralto Christa Ludwig, and tenor Richard Crooks. Innate modesty forbade that his identifying his favorite baritone.)