Golandsky Institute - Presenter Bio

The 2008 Golandsky Institute Summer Symposium Biographies

Edna Golandsky
Artistic Director

EDNA GOLANDSKY is the person with whom Dorothy Taubman worked most closely.

In 1976 Ms. Golandsky conceived the idea of establishing an Institute where people could come together during the summer and pursue an intensive investigation of the Taubman Approach. She encouraged Mrs. Taubman to establish the Taubman Institute, which they ran together as co-founders. Mrs. Taubman was Executive Director and Ms. Golandsky served as Artistic Director.

Almost from the beginning, Mrs. Taubman entrusted Ms. Golandsky with the planning and programming of the annual summer session. She gave daily lectures on the Taubman Approach and later conducted master classes as well. As the face of the Taubman Approach, Ms. Golandsky discusses each of its elements in a ten-volume video series.

Mrs. Taubman has written, "I consider her the leading authority on the Taubman approach to instrumental playing."

John Bloomfield

John Bloomfield is an award winning solo and chamber pianist. He earned a Master’s Degree from the Manhattan School of Music and later studied with Dorothy Taubman and Edna Golandsky. He has taught at Adelphi University and in the pre college division of the Manhattan School of Music. In demand as a clinician around the country, he has lectured at many universities and workshops. He performed regularly at Symposia in Portland, OR and For the Love of Music in Greenville, SC. He has been a featured presenter at the Breckenridge Music Institute, state MTA conventions, and the 2005 MTNA convention in Seattle. He maintains a studio in New York City and travels regularly to Portland, San Francisco and Atlanta to consult and give lessons. He served as faculty chairman for the Taubman Institute of Piano from 1991 to 2002. He is a co-founder and senior director of the Golandsky Institute.

Scott Burnham

Scott Burnham, Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Princeton University, is the author of Beethoven Hero (Princeton, 1995), translator of A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven (Cambridge, 1997), and co-editor of Beethoven and His World (Princeton, 2000). More recent writings include "Schubert and the Sound of Memory" (Musical Quarterly, 2001), "On the Beautiful in Mozart" (Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. K. Berger and A. Newcomb, 2005), and "Haydn and Humor," The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, ed. C. Clark, 2005).

Sylvie Courvoisier

Composer/pianist, Sylvie Courvoisier was born and raised in Lausanne, Switzerland. She started to play piano at age of six initiated by her father, an amateur jazz pianist.
She moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1998, where she currently resides.

She has played and recorded with John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Tim Berne, Joey Baron,Mark Feldman, Tony Oxley, Yusef Lateef Dave Douglas, Joëlle Léandre, Herb Robertson, Butch Morris, Tom Rainey, Mark Dresser, Ellery Eskelin, Lotte Anker, Fred Frith, Michel Godard, Mark Nauseef among others.

She has been commissioned to write music for concerts, radio, dance and theater. Her works include:” Concerto for electric guitar and chamber orchestra" ; "Balbutiements" for vocal quartet and soprano ;"Ocre de Barbarie", a musical performance for metronomes, automatons, barrel organ, piano, tuba, saxophone, violin and percussion.
Commissions include the Vidy Theater of Lausanne, Pro Helvetia and Germany's
Donaueschingen Musiktage Festival.

Her debut recording "Sauvagerie Courtoise" on Unit Records was released in 1994. Her second recording ''Ocre" on Enja Records (Music for barrel organ, piano, tuba, bass and percussion ) led to appearances on concert stages all over Europe. In the following years, Courvoisier released 6 CDs as a leader, and 10 CDs as a Co-leader, and more than 20recordings as a side person or as a guest. Her latest releases as a leader are: "ABATON” with Mark Feldman and Erik Friedlander on ECM Records (2004), “LONELYVILLE” with her new quintet on Intakt Records (2007) and a solo piano album, SIGNS AND EPIGRAMS, on Tzadik Records (2007).

Since 1995, she has been touring widely with her own groups and as a side person in USA, Canada and Europe including Jazz and New Music Festivals such as Berlin, Willisau,
Donaueschingen, Banlieue Bleue, Saalfelden, Groningen, Visions NY, Nürnberg, Taktlos, London LMC, Bath Festival, Muenster and Victoriaville Festival, among others.

Sylvie is currently the leader of her own quintet "Lonelyville" and the Trio Abaton.
She is a member of “Mephista”, an improvising trio with Ikue Mori and Susie Ibarra;” Herb
Robertson Quintet” with Tim Berne, Tom Rainey and Mark Dresser; in Trio along with Ellery
Eskelin and Vincent Courtois : John Zorn’s Cobra. She also performs regularly in Duo with violinist Mark Feldman.

Awards include Switzerland's 1996 Prix des jeunes créateurs and Zonta Club's 2000 Prix de laéation .

Robert Durso

Robert Durso attended the Peabody Conservatory of Music, obtained his Bachelor of Music Degree from Indiana University and received his Master of Music Degree from Temple University. Mr. Durso has performed extensively, including appearances at Carnegie Recital Hall, the Toronto Music Festival, Temple University, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and in a tour of South Carolina sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. In September of 2000, Mr. Durso was invited to Caracas, Venezuela by the US Embassy to present the work of Dorothy Taubman for the first time in South America. He has conducted master classes and concerts at Mount Holyoke College, Portland State University, Berkeley Chapter of the San Francisco MTNA, Spokane Music Teachers Association, NEPTA in Boston, Tel Aviv, Israel and Rome. His engagements abroad have included concerts at La Chiesa della Palma in Cagliari, Sardinia where he premiered a work by Sardinian composer Roberto Mirigliano; the Palazzo Cenci in Rome; the Ehrbarsaal in Vienna; L'Atelier in Brussels, as well as concerts in Zurich, Taiwan and Oxford, England. Mr. Durso has performed with the Yaquina Symphony Orchestra under the baton of David Ogden Stiers in a four-concert tour of the Oregon coast. Mr. Durso has worked with Edna Golandsky and Dorothy Taubman since 1983 and was a faculty member of the former Taubman Institute. Recently, Mr. Durso performed and gave master classes at Castelfranc in France.

Mr. Durso specializes in audition and competition preparation. He has produced several first place winners in national and international competitions, including, The Bartok/Kabelevsky International, Artist International NYC, Ambler Symphony Young Artist Competition, The Cal Rudman Competition and The Marymount Concerto Competition. His students have been accepted and have attended several of the leading conservatories, including the Curtis Institute, Juilliard School, Oberlin Conservatory, Indiana University, New England Conservatory and the Peabody Conservatory.

Kendall Feeney

Kendall Feeney has performed as soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States and Asia. She is the founder and Artistic Director of the Northwest concert series, ZEPHYR, and is a member of the piano faculty and director the Contemporary Music Ensemble at Eastern Washington University. She has been featured on National Public Radio’s “Performance Today” and is the co-creator of the Public Radio Show, “A Fine Frenzy.” Ms. Feeney received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano performance from the University of Southern California. She has studied the Taubman approach with Dorothy Taubman and Edna Golandsky since 1985.

Christopher Hasty

Christopher Hasty, Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University, is a specialist in music of the 20th century. Mr. Hasty received the Samuel F.B. Morse fellowship, 1985; and Paul Mellon fellowship, 1988. Hasty's publications treat problems in the theory and analysis of post-tonal music, particularly in relation to problems of temporality, and his book, Meter as Rhythm, won the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory as the outstanding theory study of 1998. Among works now in progress is a book on problems of musical form conceived as process. Hasty was editor of the Journal of Music Theory (1987-90), and served on the editorial board of Music Theory Spectrum (1982-87). He began his teaching at Harvard in the fall of 2002.

Catherine Kautsky

Pianist Catherine Kautsky is Professor of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and chair of its piano department. She has concertized throughout the United States and abroad as a recitalist, soloist with orchestra, and chamber musician, appearing in venues such as Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Recital Hall in New York, Jordan Hall and the Gardner Museum in Boston, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D. C., and the Chicago Cultural Center. She has soloed with the St. Louis Symphony, Milwaukee Chamber Orchestra, and Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, performed chamber music at the Aspen, Tanglewood, and Grand Teton summer music festivals, and appeared frequently on the radio in Chicago, New York, Washington, D. C., St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Madison. Ms. Kautsky is the winner of the Passamaneck Competition in Pittsburgh, the C. D. Jackson Master Award at Tanglewood, and the Association Amicale d'Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris Prize of the French Piano Institute in Paris. Last November, she was awarded the 2005 Arts Institute Creative Arts Award at UW-Madison for her work connecting music with other disciplines, particularly literature. Ms. Kautsky has traveled widely, performing frequently in France and England, and presenting concerts and classes most recently in China, Korea, and South Africa. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Clavier, American Music Teacher, and International Piano, and her CD of three pieces for piano and narrator, in which she both performs and speaks, was issued by Vox Classics. Very seriously committed to teaching, Ms. Kautsky has held a grant for the last two years to take her studio touring, performing community outreach concerts in collaboration with dancers, actors, and students from other disciplines.

Ms. Kautsky holds a bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory, a master's degree from the Juilliard School, and a doctoral degree in performance from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she studied under Gilbert Kalish. Following her New York debut, The New York Times called her "a pianist who can play Mozart and Schubert as though their sentiments and habits of speech coincided exactly with hers. . . . She gave these pieces nuances that made them meaningful on a human everyday level. The music spoke directly to the listener, with neither obfuscation nor pretense."

Mark Love
Senior Vice President , Jacobs Music Company

A twenty-year music retail and wholesale veteran with national and international experience, Mr. Love has shown a special passion for working with music educators throughout his career.

In his current role with Jacobs Music Company, he consistently works to promote active music-making within our communities with a specialty toward Steinway & Sons networking, master classes and artist relations.

Mr. Love is a current member of multiple boards and fundraising committees including: Musicopia; The University of the Arts: The Haviland Society; The Philadelphia Orchestra Corporate Partners Committee; Immaculata University Friends of Music; and the Settlement Music School “Settlement 100" Corporate Committee.

Mary Moran

Mary Moran has been on the adjunct faculties of Russell Sage College and Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, New York teaching applied piano, music appreciation, and arranging. She has studied the Taubman Approach to Piano Performance since 1977, primarily with Edna Golandsky. She was a faculty member of the Taubman Institute of Piano from 1981 through 2002, and has been recognized for her application of this approach to children’s pedagogy. She has been invited to lecture on technical training for students and give master classes by many music teachers’ organizations in Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, at Portland State University, and at Williams College. She performs frequently as a soloist, a duo-pianist, and a collaborative pianist. A founding director of the Golandsky Institute, Ms. Moran has taught in Lecce, Italy at the Symposium on the Taubman Approach in 2003 and in Grenoble, France in March of 2004. She frequently teaches and gives master classes in the Montreal area. In addition to maintaining a private studio at her home in the Capital District of New York State, she regularly speaks at teacher training events sponsored by The Golandsky Institute, and mentors teachers in The Golandsky Institute’s Professional Training Program in Massachusetts, and in Kingston, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec.

Marc Steiner

Marc Steiner is a native of Los Angeles, California. He earned Bachelor, cum laude, and Master of Music degrees from the University of Southern California. His teachers have included Mildred Portney Chase, Robert Ward, Nina Scolnik and Edna Golandsky. He has studied the Taubman Approach since 1984. Mr. Steiner has performed extensively as soloist, chamber musician and duo pianist in recitals in Los Angeles, Berkeley, San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, the Midwest and New England. He is pianist for the Sierra Trio, a Bay Area based violin, horn and piano ensemble. An active teacher, coach and clinician as well as performer, Mr. Steiner has presented lectures and Master Classes on the Taubman Approach to music teachers' organizations in the Northern and Southern California regions. He served as a faculty member of the Taubman Institute and has been a member of the Golandsky Institute faculty since its inception. He maintains his private studio in San Pablo, California, and teaches on a regular basis in Los Angeles and Chico, California.

Aliza Stewart

Aliza Stewart has been a Feldenkrais practitioner for 19 years. For the last 10 years she has also been an Assistant Trainer and in that capacity has been training new practitioners in various professional training programs around the country. She has given classes, workshops and presentations for many institutions and organizations including T. Rowe Price Associates Inc., The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, The Maryland Medical and Chirurgical Society, The University of Wisconsin at Madison, The Multiple Sclerosis Society of Maryland, George Mason University, and Carroll County General Hospital. She has taught Feldenkrais classes to medical students at the University of Maryland Medical School.

Originally trained as a concert pianist, Ms. Stewart has a great affinity for the needs and problems of performers. For fifteen years she has taught a Feldenkrais class at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and currently started to teach at the Mannes School of Music. She has been in residence at the Yellow Barn and Marlboro music festivals and has given special workshops at the Juilliard school, Manhattan school of Music and the Mannes School of Music.

Ms. Stewart also applies the Method to working with children with various challenges and often works in conjunction with physicians, physical therapists and mental health professionals to coordinate the care given to a client. She has a private practice in Baltimore and in New York City.