Photos courtesy of Javier DiazPercussion instructor Javier Diaz originally was tapped just to play rehearsals for one of the most iconic scenes in Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed West Side Story remake.But Diaz – who has wowed audiences of philharmonic...
Aaron Vaders-Collins is a first-year doctoral student at Mason Gross School of the Arts pursuing a degree in music composition and the emerging field of ludomusicology, the scholarly analysis of video game music. A mashup of technology and music theory, engineering, and production, the subject is a perfect blend of Vaders-Collins’s interests.
Composer Tom Nazziola, a 2019 PhD graduate, has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Instrumental Composition category for “Cat and Mouse,” a piece from his 2021 album Distant Places. Nazziola describes the album as “a collection of works...
Music alumni Osiris (Ozzy) Molina and Adonis Gonzalez-Matos have teamed up to create Cuba, Alabama, an album of contemporary Cuban music. The title is both a play on an actual town in Alabama and a reflection of the coincidences that brought them together in a most...
Photo: Victor NechyAfter a historic 15-month shutdown, Broadway shows are steadily reopening throughout September. Mason Gross alumni Ben Jeffrey (The Lion King), Rachel Zatcoff (Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, pictured), musicians John DiSanto and David Ashton, and...
Yerko Difonis is the first student born blind and partially deaf to pursue a master of music in piano performance at Mason Gross School of the Arts. A process developed by Rutgers to transcribe music to braille for the prodigy will open doors for other musicians with disabilities.
Photo: Left – Adrienne Baker, a member of The Broadway Sinfonietta and a doctoral student at Mason Gross, played in Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical’s orchestra. Photo courtesy of Adrienne Baker. Right – Kevin Chamberlin, a three-time Tony Award...
Jason Geary, dean of the Mason Gross School and Distinguished Professor of Music, recently had chapters appear in The Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and Richard Strauss in Context, both published by Cambridge University Press.Both...
“I know of so many people in music schools, and people who have jobs in orchestras later on, who develop medical issues from singing or playing, and it’s so hard to find doctors who understand what it means to spend five hours in the practice room,”...
Richard Deane played his last concert with the New York Philharmonic on March 12, and then, like the rest of the city, hunkered down to endure the COVID-19 crisis.Four months later, with New York reeling in the pandemic’s aftermath, Deane, the orchestra’s...