SFCV Writers

Alex Rosenfeld is an orchestral hornist living in San Francisco. He holds a B.M. from Northwestern University, and an M.M. from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Contact him through his website at: www.adrhorn.com

Allan Kozinn (@kozinn) began writing about music for The New York Times in 1977, and served on its culture staff from 1991 to 2014. He was born in New York and studied music and journalism at Syracuse University.

Anatole Leikin is Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has published in various musicological journals and essay collections worldwide and recorded piano works of Scriabin, Chopin, and Cope.

A Los Angeles native based in the Berkeley area since 1996, Andrew Gilbert covers jazz, international music and dance for KQED's California Report, The Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeleyside and other publications.

Barbara Bogatin has been a cellist with the San Francisco Symphony since 1994. She can be heard in numerous SFSymphony+ productions this season. She has led workshops on meditation and music practice at Spirit Rock, Esalen, Stanford University, the Juilliard School, and at conferences in Italy, Spain, and South Africa. She attended the SF Conservatory of Music and received Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from Juilliard.

Be'eri Moalem (www.beeri.org) is a violist, teacher, writer, and composer.

Ben Kutner is a Los Angeles-based composer, music writer, and lecturer. His music has appeared at venues across the U.S. and he is the founder of the New Parnassus Ensemble.

Benjamin Frandzel has written on music and the arts for a wide range of publications. He has a background as a guitarist and composer, and has collaborated with dance, theater, and visual artists. 

Brett Campbell is senior editor at Oregon ArtsWatch, a frequent contributor to SFCV and many other publications, and coauthor, with Bill Alves, of Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick (Indiana University Press 2017).

Brett Campbell writes about music for The Wall Street Journal, Willamette Week, Oregon Arts Watch, SFCV and many other publications.

Brett Campbell writes about music for The Wall Street Journal, Willamette Week, Oregon Arts Watch, SFCV and many other publications.

Brin Solomon writes words and music in various genres and is doing their best to queer all of them. Their work appears in the National Sawdust Log, VAN Magazine, and San Francisco Classical Voice.

Carlyn Kessler is an actively performing cellist and teacher in the Bay Area. She recently relocated from Cleveland, where she wrote for ClevelandClassical.com. She holds an M.M in Cello Performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Los Angeles-based writer Catherine Womack covers classical music and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, Alta, SFCV, and more. Womack earned a B.M. (Queens University of Charlotte) and M.M. (Southern Methodist University) in piano performance and pedagogy and spent 10 years as a piano instructor and professor of music history before pivoting to journalism. Dog lady. Will travel for opera.

Catriona Barr is a musicologist and music teacher based in San Francisco. She holds a B.M. from Peabody Conservatory and a M.M. from King’s College, London.

Charles Shere is a composer and writer, the retired art and music critic of The Oakland Tribune, and the author of books about the composers Robert Erickson and Virgil Thomson. Learn more at www.shere.org.

Charlise Tiee is a writer and painter. She reviews performances of classical music and audience behavior at The Opera Tattler.

Claudia Bauer is a dance writer and critic in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in Dance Magazine, Pointe magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Mercury News in San José, and numerous other publications. Instagram: @rainbowpixiedust

Claudia Campazzo is executive director of San Francisco Classical Voice. Before joining SFCV, she worked in marketing for Strings magazine and was active as a freelance violist and teacher in the Boston area for 15 years. She has a Masters of Music from the New England Conservatory and a Masters of Education from Antioch University.

Cristina Schreil is a Bay Area-based award-winning arts and culture journalist. She has written for BBC Music, Acoustic Guitar, Strings, Nob Hill Gazette, and more.

Albany-based Danny Carnahan has been performing folk, pop, and traditional music on various stringed instruments for 40 years and has been writing music and writing about music for 35 years. For more information, visit his website.

David Bratman is a librarian who lives with his lawfully wedded soprano and a wall full of symphony recordings.

David Lazoff is a patent agent and former software engineer. He plays and teaches classical and jazz piano and lives in San Francisco.

Don Kaplan is the author of several books including See With Your Ears: The Creative Music Book. He has contributed to Early Music America, Strings magazine, Music Educators Journal, Copper magazine (PS Audio's journal of music and audio), The Monthly, The New York Times and other publications.

Edward Ortiz is an arts and science writer who has written for The Sacramento Bee, The Boston Globe, and The Providence Journal. He is also a contributor to Symphony Magazine and www.newmusicbox.org.

Emily Wilson lives in San Francisco. She writes for radio, print, and the web, including Smithsonian.com, Daily Beast, 48 Hills, Hyperallergic, Latino USA, Women’s Media Center, California Magazine, and SF Weekly. She also teaches adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.

Giacomo Fiore is an Italian-born guitarist and musicologist specializing in U.S. Experimentalism and intonation. He teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory, USF, and UCSC.

Gil French was concert editor of American Record Guide from 2005 to 2020. He has reviewed recordings and concerts since 1988. He also served as midday classical host in public radio from 1988 to 2003.

Ilana Walder-Biesanz reviews opera and theater for San Francisco Classical Voice, Opera Online, Bachtrack, and Stark Insider. She studied in England as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar (European Literature and Culture) and in Germany as a Fulbright Scholar (theater studies). 

Janice Berman, SFCV’s senior dance critic, has been a dance writer and reviewer since 1978, beginning at Newsday and New York Newsday. She has written on dance for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Ballet Review, and Dance Magazine, where she was editor-in-chief.

Janos Gereben appreciates news tips, corrections, and words of encouragement at [email protected].

Jason Victor Serinus regularly reviews music and audio for Stereophile, SFCV, Classical Voice North America, AudioStream, American Record Guide, and other publications. The whistling voice of Woodstock in She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, the longtime Oakland resident now resides in Port Townsend, Washington.

Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of the National Association of Composers, USA, a former president of Composers, Inc., and has served on the Board of New Music Bay Area. 

Jeff Kaliss has featured and reviewed classical, jazz, rock, and world musics and other entertainment for the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other regional, national, international, and web-based publications. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and is the author of I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone (Backbeat Books) and numerous textbook and encyclopedia entries, album liner notes, and festival program notes.

Jeffery S. McMillan is Senior Communications Manager for San Francisco Opera. He has written for Opera News, Musical America, and is the author of Delightfulee: The Life and Music of Lee Morgan.

Jennifer Gersten is a violinist pursuing her DMA at Stony Brook University. She is a senior editor for Guernica: A Magazine of Global Arts and Politics, and has held internships at NPR Music and The Blade, a paper based in Toledo, Ohio. Her reporting, essays, and music reviews have been published or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review Online, The Awl, NPR Music, Guernica, Harvard Magazine, WQXR, and Bachtrack.

Jeremy Reynolds (@Reynolds_PG) is the classical-music critic and reporter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. A Millennial himself, Reynolds holds degrees in music and English from Oberlin and journalism from Syracuse University.

Jerry Kuderna is a pianist who gives lecture/recitals every Friday at the Berkeley Arts festival.

Jesse Hamlin has written for The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications over the past 30 years on a wide range of music and art, covering jazz musicians and symphonic conductors, sculptors, poets, and architects. He has also written for The New York Times, Art & Auction and Columbia magazines, as well as liner notes for CDs by Stan Getz and Cal Tjader.

Jessica Balik is a flutist and has a PhD in historical musicology from Stanford University.

Jim Farber wrote his first classical music review in 1982 for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. Since then, he has been a feature writer and critic of classical music, opera, theater, and fine art for The Daily Variety, the Copley Newspapers and News Service, and the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (Media News).

Joe Cadagin holds a doctorate in musicology from Stanford University, where he completed a dissertation on composer György Ligeti. He is a regular contributor to Opera News magazine. You can read more of his work here.

Jonathan Leal is a writer and musician from the Rio Grande Valley. Currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is now completing an interdisciplinary humanities doctorate at Stanford University. Twitter and Instagram: @jonathanjleal

Jonathan Rhodes Lee studied harpsichord in New York, San Francisco, and the Netherlands. He is the author of Film Music in the Sound Era  and he currently serves as Assistant Professsor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Katharine Dimitruk is a freelance photographer and music enthusiast based in the East Bay.

Ken Iisaka is a pianist, a software engineer, and bon vivant living in Foster City.

Lara Downes Lara Downes is a critically acclaimed concert pianist praised as "a delightful artist with a unique blend of musicianship and showmanship" (NPR), and for her "loving attention to mood and color" (The New York Times) and "range of drama and nuance" (The Washington Post). You can follow her musical adventures and exploits at laradownes.com.

Laura Clark is a soprano and freelance journalist based in England.

Laura Stanfield Prichard is a musicologist based in the Boston Area. She is a Visiting Researcher at Harvard and gives frequent lectures for the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, and Chicago Symphony.

Lily O'Brien is a freelance writer and editor with a passion for the performing arts. She has written feature articles and previews for a variety of publications including Downbeat, JazzTimes, Marin Arts & Culture, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Marin Independent Journal, and Strings magazine. She is a singer who has performed professionally in a variety of genres, and an avid world traveler and bicyclist.

Lisa Hirsch is a technical writer. She studied music at Brandeis and Stony Brook, and blogs about classical music and opera at Iron Tongue of Midnight.

Lisa Houston is a feature contributor to Classical Singer magazine and San Francisco Classical Voice, and the founder of SingerSpirit.com, a website for singers.

Lou Fancher is a San Francisco Bay Area writer. Her work has been published by WIRED.com, Diablo Magazine, Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, InDance, East Bay Express, Oakland Magazine, SF Weekly, and others.  She is a children's book author, designer and illustrator, with over 50 books in print. Also a choreographer, ballet master and teacher, she coaches professional ballet and contemporary dance companies in the U. S.

Lucy Caplan is the recipient of the 2016 Rubin Prize for Music Criticism. She is a doctoral candidate at Yale, where she is writing a dissertation on opera and African American culture in the early 20th century. 

Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical music repertoire. His works span the transition from the classical period to the romantic era in classical music.

Mark MacNamara, a writer and journalist based in Asheville, North Carolina, has written for such publications as Nautilus, Salon, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Vanity Fair.

Michael Zwiebach is the senior editor/ content manager for SFCV. He assigns all articles and content, manages the writing staff and does editing. A member of SFCV from the beginning, Michael holds a Ph.D. in music history from the University of California, Berkeley.

Journalist Molly Colin writes about the arts and cultural trends.

Nicholas Jones, Professor Emeritus at Oberlin College, is a teacher and lecturer in the Bay Area. He sings and plays recorder, violin, and viola da gamba in a number of early music groups, is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and serves on the board of Early Music America. 

Niels Swinkels is a freelance journalist, musicologist, sound engineer, and radio producer. Born and raised in the Netherlands, he studied English and Musicology at the University of Nijmegen.

Paul Kotapish is the managing editor for SFCV.  You can learn more here or at guitarfish.net.

Peter Feher is an editor at SFCV. He can be reached at [email protected].

Rebecca Wishnia recently earned her master’s degree in violin from UC Santa Cruz, where she studied with Roy Malan. A passionate chamber musician, she has performed in a variety of ensembles around the Bay Area, in addition to studying and teaching chamber repertoire at festivals each summer.

Richard S. Ginell writes regularly about music for the Los Angeles Times, Musical America.com, Classical Voice North America, and American Record Guide.  He has also contributed to Gramophone and The Strad, among many other publications. In another lifetime, he was chief music critic of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Rodney Punt writes music criticism for SFCV, Classical Voice North America, Huffington Post, and LA Opus, the latter of which he also publishes. He is a career arts management professional.

Roger Wallace earned his B.A. in Music, focusing on composition, from Reed College. He currently teaches writing at Napa Valley College.

Scott Cmiel is Chair of the guitar and musicianship departments at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division and Director of the guitar program at San Francisco School of the Arts.

SFCV Editors are Michael Zwiebach, Paul Kotapish, and Peter Feher. Click on individual names for more information about each editor.

Steve Osborn, a children's writer by day, moonlights as a violist and music critic.

Steven Winn is a San Francisco based free-lance writer and critic and frequent City Arts & Lectures interviewer. His work has appeared in Art News, California, Humanities, Manhattan, Symphony Magazine and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Tamzin Elliott is a composer and writer based in Los Angeles, and a doctoral student at University of Southern California.

Tim Greiving is an arts journalist in Los Angeles who specializes in film music. He regularly produces radio features for NPR and Classical KUSC, and writes for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Tom Jacobs is a former senior staff writer for Santa Barbara-based Pacific Standard magazine, and a former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and Santa Barbara News-Press. He tracks and analyzes trends in the arts and social sciences, with an emphasis on psychology, the role of culture and the cultivation of creativity. A native of Chicago, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University.

Tysen Dauer studies musicology at Stanford University. His current research focuses on the reception history of early American minimalism.

Victoria Looseleaf is an award-winning international arts journalist who covers dance, music, theater and the visual arts. Publications she has contributed to include the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and KCET Artbound. Her feminist novella in verse, Isn’t It Rich? is being adapted for the stage, and her children’s/coffee table book, Russ & Iggy’s Art Alphabet, will soon be published by Red Sky Presents.

Wynne Delacoma was classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1991 to 2006. She is currently a freelance arts writer, lecturer, and adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Yoshi Kato is an independent journalist from the South Bay who covers both popular and performing arts-oriented music and arts and entertainment in general. He tweets and is on Instagram as @yoshi140.