General Education

Jillian Ballow has been playing in a concert band every year since she was 12 and never plans on stopping. She attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where she majored in saxophone and oboe performance. She then went on to study music education at the State University of New York at Fredonia with a concentration in oboe performance. After graduating Fredonia, Jillian began and continues her music education career at P.S.105 in Brooklyn, NY. At PS105 Jillian teacher k-5 general music and is the director of the 4^th and 5^th grade band. On Saturdays, Jillian also is the co-director of the intermediate band for the Salute to music program. A program where students from all over Staten Island, NY, grades 4-8 get up bright and early on a Saturday morning to play music and hone their skills in band. While teaching, Jillian also completed her masters in music education through Kent State University’s online program. Jillian also participates in the Staten Island community band and has performed with the Staten Island philharmonic and the Manhattan Wind Ensemble.

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

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

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

Dr. Warren Gramm is currently the Senior Manager of Program Outreach for Little Kids Rock, an adjunct professor of music technology at Montclair State University, an online instructor at Thomas Edison State University, and the Journal Administrator for The Journal of Popular Music Education. His areas of research include peer mentoring, modern band, student agency, teacher as facilitator, and student autonomy. His presentations include state MEA conferences and guest lectures at multiple higher education institutions.

Warren received his bachelor’s in music from The College of New Jersey and his master’s in music from The Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins. Both of his degrees were received with a concentration in classical guitar. He completed his doctorate in music education at Boston University. Warren has been with Thomas Edison State University since 2006 working in both the PLA and Music departments. Warren’s teaching experience includes private guitar instruction since 1999 and K-12 certified public-school teaching of general music, choir, and modern band in the Jersey City, NJ Public School system from 2006 to 2017.

Ryan Howard is active as a composer, scholar and educator in the New York metropolitan area. His music has been performed by acclaimed soloists and ensembles in the United States and Europe including Cygnus Ensemble, the Mivos Quartet, percussionist Gwendolyn Burgett, organist Gerd Rosinsky, duo JustMusic, and the Vigil Ensemble, and in recent years he has presented scholarly papers on the music of American composer Morton Feldman at music theory conferences in the United States. He holds degrees from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (PhD), Yale University (MM, MMA) and Indiana University (BM), and currently serves as an instructor of music at Montclair State University and at William Paterson University.

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

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

Darren O’Neill is that rare combination of scholar and performer. Mr. O’Neill earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from Castleton State College in Castleton, VT and his Master of Arts degree in Music from Montclair State University. Both degrees centered about guitar performance. He earned his Master of Library Service degree from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. As a member of Trio Brioso (flute, viola, and guitar) he gave his Carnegie Hall debut in 1997 as the result of winning the Artists International New York Debut Competition that same year. As a member of the Nova Segno Duo (with Dennis Cinelli), he has performed and recorded on antique instruments from the historic collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was featured in the
2011 exhibition, Guitar Heroes! He has also spent significant time editing and proofreading the re-engraving of works by Fernando Sor (1778-1839) under the
supervision of Dr. Brian Jeffery, Tecla Publications. His career as a librarian has seen him working in the Music Research Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. He is an honorary member of both Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia (music) and Alpha Psi Omega (theatre).

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

Charles Rudig is a composer, scholar, and performer currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. His primarily electroacoustic chamber music explores terrains of obsolescence, decay, and poesis in capitalist ruins. His research interests include Japanese noise music, process ontology, Marxism, and European modernism in the 1950s and 1960s. His dissertation in progress is on the music of Sylvano Bussotti, French social theory, modernist canon formation, and connections to the rise of neoliberal governmentality in France and the United States in the late 1970s.

Charles has been a composition fellow at various festivals in the US and Europe including Nief-Norf in Greenville, South Carolina, Synthetis in Radziejowice, Poland and Etchings in Auvillar, France. He holds master’s degrees in composition and music theory from The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University where he received the Denes and Mary Agay Piano and Composition Scholarship and the Randolph S. Rothschild Award in composition. He is currently a PhD candidate in music at the CUNY Graduate Center.

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