Music History

Jeffrey Gall made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1988 – the first countertenor ever to sing at the Met. He sang Tolomeo in Handel’s Giulio Cesare, and in 1994 returned to the Met for Britten’s Death in Venice. He studied voice at the Yale School of Music with Blake Stern, and holds degrees in Slavic languages from Princeton and Yale Universities. He sang with such early music ensembles as the Waverly Consort and Pomerium Musices early in his career and then moved on to solo roles in Baroque and contemporary opera. He has sung principal roles at La Scala, Teatro San Carlo (Naples) and La Fenice in Italy; the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and the Salle Garnier in France; the Monnaie in Brussels; the Netherlands Opera; the Cologne and Frankfurt Operas in Germany; the Canadian Opera, as well as the Spoleto, Edinburgh, Innsbruck, Halle, Schwetzingen, and Bordeaux Festivals. In the United States he has sung at the San Francisco, Chicago Lyric, Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Boston Operas, and has made many concert appearances at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York, as well as at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He has recorded for CBS, Harmonia Mundi, Erato, Nonesuch, Titanic and Smithsonian Records, and appears in the title role on the London video of Peter Sellars’ production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. Prof. Gall has conducted clinics and master classes in both standard repertory and early-music techniques at music schools across the United States. In addition, he is a founding member of the Italian vocal ensemble Il Terzo Suono.

Pianist David Witten has performed extensively in Europe, Russia and South America. As a 1990 Fulbright Scholar, he spent five months in Brazil. Witten has recorded piano music of various Latin American composers. Witten’s involvement in music has not been limited to performance. He is editor of Nineteenth-Century Piano Music: Essays in Performance and Analysis (Garland, 1997), which includes his landmark analytical study of the Chopin Ballades. Born in Baltimore, Witten studied at Peabody Conservatory and Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. His undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University led to a degree in Psychology. Later graduating with high honors from Boston University, he earned the DMA degree in piano performance. Witten is currently Coordinator of Keyboard Studies at the Cali School of Music at Montclair State University.

David DeMotta is a pianist and music scholar specializing in jazz. He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and M.M. and B.A. degrees in Jazz Studies and Performance from William Paterson University of New Jersey. His research focuses on the musical and historical analysis of modern jazz and his work has been published in Jazz Perspectives. Dr. DeMotta is active as a freelance jazz pianist in the New York City area. He leads a trio and an octet, and has performed with Eliot Zigmund, Steve Wilson, Steve Slagle, Steve Johns, Alexis Cole, Andromeda Turre, Bill Moring, Erica Seguine, Meg Okura, The Meeting House Jazz Orchestra, The Greg Ruvolo Jazz Collective, Haruna Fukuzawa, and others. 

David Salkowski is a musicologist whose work explores issues of aesthetics, religion, and community formation, particularly in Russia, the Russian diaspora, and Southeastern Europe. He received his PhD in musicology from Princeton University in 2021, where he was a Graduate Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion. His dissertation, “Music for an Imagined Liturgy: Rethinking the Sound of Orthodoxy in Late Imperial Russia,” is based on extensive archival research in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, and was supported by a grant from the Fulbright Foundation. He has presented this research internationally, in both English and Russian, and his publications appear in Twentieth Century Music and the edited volume Sacred Contexts in Secular Music of the Long Nineteenth Century (Lexington, forthcoming). Dedicated to the intersections of performance and the academic study of music, Salkowski collaborated with the Princeton University Chamber Choir to stage forgotten works by the Russian émigré composer Arthur Lourié in 2016. At the Cali School of Music, Salkowski teaches online as an instructor of American Music.