PRESIDENT NOMIMEES:

            Sarah Bryan Miller became the classical music critic at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in September 1998. Before coming to the Post, Bryan was a professional opera singer, based in Chicago, and a frequent contributor to publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Opera News, and many others.

            A member of MCANA since 1992, Bryan is a former member of the board and a participant in numerous MCANA panels and symposia.

            Donald Rosenberg has been writing about music for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland since 1992. He previously served as music critic of the Akron Beacon Journal and The Pittsburgh Press. He holds degrees in French horn performance from the Mannes College of Music and the Yale School of Music. He was a participant in the Aspen Music Festival and the Marlboro Music Festival. Rosenberg has played under such conductors as Pablo Casals, Aaron Copland, Pierre Boulez, Georg Solti, Robert Shaw and Herbert Blomstedt. He has written reviews and articles for Gramophone, Opera News, Opera (London), Musical America, Symphony Magazine and many other journals. He is the author of "The Cleveland Orchestra: Second to None" (Gray & Co. Publishers) and president of the Music Critics Association of North America. 

VICE PRESIDENT NOMIMEES:

Janelle Gelfand, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, has a B.A. in music from Stanford University. She has a Masters Degree in Piano Performance (1976) and a Ph.D. in Musicology (1999) from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM), where she was an instructor in music history for three years. Her dissertation is on the life and works of French composer Germaine Tailleferre, one of Les Six.

        Janelle was named Classical Music Critic for The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1993, and has written for the paper since 1991. She has contributed articles and reviews to Symphony (the magazine of the American Symphony Orchestra League), Opera News, The Wall Street Journal, BBC Music magazine, Contemporary Music Review, Inside Arts, Opera (UK),Opera Canada, Journal of the International Alliance for Women in Music, Chamber Music America, Clavier and other magazines and journals. For three years, she authored the Teacher's Guide to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Young People’s Concerts, and was editor for Music Research Forum, a musicology journal at CCM. She contributed chapters to the anthology, Women Composers: Music Through the Ages, published by G.K. Hall, and wrote two articles for the most recent edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

         Her awards include the Distinguished Alumnae Award from Friends of Women’s Studies and the University of Cincinnati Alumni Association, and the Corbett Award from the National Federation of Music Clubs for work in her dissertation area. She has won many awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Cincinnati Enquirer, as well as a “Well Done” award from Gannett and two best feature awards from the Cleveland Press Club for her articles about Cincinnati’s June Festival for Negro Music and “State of the Arts” in 2010. She has been named to Who’s Who in America, and is past president of the Stanford Club of Cincinnati, and a past board member of the University of Cincinnati’s Friends of Women’s Studies.

            Joshua Kosman has been a music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle since 1988, and was named chief music critic in 1993. He received a B.A. in music from Yale College and an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. A past winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for music criticism, he is a contributor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, 2nd Edition, and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, and his writing has appeared in Gramophone, Opernwelt, Bookforum, Smithsonian, Piano & Keyboard, Symphony, the Journal of Musicology, and other publications. He blogs about music at pacificaisle.blogspot.com.

TREASURER NOMIMEES:

            Susan Elliott has for 11 years been the editor of MusicalAmerica.com, the
ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award winning website covering the performing arts with
an emphasis on classical music. She has written articles for The New York
Times, BBC Music, The Washington Post, Opera News, Hemispheres and others.
Based for a time in Atlanta, she served as a critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, covering dance, theater and classical music. Previously she was chief classical music critic for The New York Post.  A composer by training, Elliott has had several Off-Broadway musicals produced, is an historical-recordings producer and served on the Grammy awards classical screening committee. In her spare time she sings in several
small choruses.  She has been chair of the MCANA Education Committee and MCANA treasurer for the past two terms.

            Bill Rankin has been a member of MCANA since 2003. He has written reviews and features for the American Record Guide, Opera Canada, Gramophone and BBC Music, as well as the Edmonton Journal, where he was classical music writer from 2003 to 2006. He has a couple of degrees in English from the University of Toronto, and completed all but a PhD dissertation at the University of Alberta. He lives in Edmonton, where he helped raise three children, two of whom will be lawyers with decent musical educations, and the third envisions getting a big break on Broadway. He has some famous Facebook friends.

SECRETARY NOMIMEES:

            Roy C. Dicks has been writing for the daily Raleigh (NC) News & Observer (190,000 Sunday circulation) since 1997. As a contracted freelancer for the paper, he writes performance reviews, interviews and feature articles on classical music, opera, dance and theater. Roy previously wrote music, theater and dance reviews for the weekly Spectator in Raleigh for eight years (1979-1986). Roy has been published in Opera Quarterly and Pointe Magazine, and also writes for the online review website, Classical Voice of North Carolina. He has written two commissioned opera librettos for productions at Meredith College. He has directed three operas and has sung onstage in six. Roy received non-degreed musical training from East Carolina University, from which he received BA degrees in English and Drama. He also has a masters in Library Science from UNC. Roy has been the MCANA board secretary since September 2010, when he was asked to fill out the rest of the term after the previous secretary resigned.

            Brief Biography of Gil French

            As Concert Editor of "American Record Guide", I've been in charge of the section of ARG that deals with live performances (the rest of ARG reviews about 600 CDs, videos, and books per issue).  After 6 years, it's still exhilirating working with a crew of critics who are in love with music, write so splendidly they often leave me green with envy, are low on attitude, and meet their deadlines.  I feel my primary obligations are three: (1) edit their writings in such a way that their style remains intact and their meaning is never changed, (2) make sure that facts are correct, and (3) stay on top of what's coming up across North America (and to some degree internationally) that merits coverage in the USA's only remaining independent publication that covers live performances nationally.

            Reporting accurately and objectively what others say a sine qua non for a Secretary of MCANA.  Also, by being on top of (1) performances coming up a year or so in advance across North America and (2) appointments, awards, and other news items, I should hopefully be able to make a timely contribution as a member of the Board.

            Prior to ARG, for 15 years I was a midday classical music announcer at two public radio stations as well as host and producer of Rochester Philharmonic broadcasts.  As the principal flute of the RPO once said, "Gil, you've got the best job in town--you get to listen to more music than any of us ever will."  Also, I have reviewed classical CDs on a steady basis since 1990.  Listening comparatively has been my main approach to music from the start.

MEMBERS-AT-LARGE NOMIMEES:

            James Bash writes about classical music for Oregon Music News, an online magazine, and many print publications, such as Opera America, Open Spaces, Opera, MUSO, American Record Guide, Symphony, and Opera Canada. The newspapers include the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Oregonian, The Columbian, The Portland Tribune, The Register-Guard, and Willamette Week. James has also written a number of articles for the Oregon Arts Commission and contributed articles to the 2nd edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music. James was a fellow to the 2008 NEA Journalism Institute for Classical Music. His day job as a technical writer pays the bills but limits his time to contribute to Spitvalve on the MCANA web site. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Kathy.

            Susan Brodie has divided her career between words and music, having applied a liberal arts education to both performance and publishing. She is a correspondent for American Record Guide and maintains a blog on MCANA's Classical Voice America website. Currently commuting between New York and Paris, she is an enthusiastic proponent of electronic media as a platform for arts criticism, especially as print publishing opportunities continue to contract.

            Wynne Delacoma was the classical music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times from 1991 to 2006. She continues to write on a free lance basis for that paper, Musical America.com, Chicago Classical Review.com and other outlets.

            Since 1982 she has been an adjunct faculty member at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, teaching arts reporting and criticism as well as general reporting. A Chicago native, she earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Marquette University in Milwaukee and a master’s degree in music history and literature from Northwestern’s School of Music. Before joining the Sun-Times, she was a dance and music critic at the Milwaukee Journal (now the Journal-Sentinel). She is also an adjunct journalism faculty member at Columbia College Chicago. She is a long-time member of MCANA and has served on the board and led workshops for the association.

            Married to an avid sports fan, she knows far more about baseball and college football than she would like. 

            Mary Kunz Goldman is the classical music critic of The Buffalo News, the daily paper of Buffalo, N.Y.  She minored in piano performance at the State University of New York at Buffalo (her major was in English literature) and has kept up her piano chops over the years, competing in the first Van Cliburn International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs, held in 1999 in Fort Worth, Texas. Living in a wings-and-beer town, Mary tries to write about music in a way that will grab everyone, not just the classical music crowd. She won an Associated Press award for a story she did on the hectic life of JoAnn Falletta, the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

            Mary is fortunate in that in Buffalo, the orchestra and the newspaper are both doing relatively well. She is proud of the hundreds of concert reviews she has written, most in less than an hour, to run in the next morning’s paper. Her special interests in music include Mozart, German lieder and Gregorian chant. She is currently finishing up her first book, the authorized biography of the great American pianist Leonard Pennario.

            Michael Huebner has been the classical music critic and fine arts writer for the Birmingham News since 2001. He has written about classical music, dance, world music and travel for about 30 years, first as a freelancer for the Kansas City Star and Austin American Statesman. He has logged nearly 1,400 posts on his blog at al.com, Advance Internet’s Alabama website.

            In 2004, Huebner was among 25 journalists participating in the first Institute on Classical Music and Opera sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Columbia University Arts Journalism Program. Huebner earned bachelors and masters degrees in music composition at the University of Kansas and studied ethnomusicology at the University of Texas. An avid traveler and hiker, he spends much of his vacation time in the Himalayas, where he has taken eight treks. He and his wife, Ritsuko, live in Homewood, Ala., a Birmingham suburb.

            Barbara Jepson is a longtime contributor to the Leisure & Arts page of the Wall Street Journal and the author of hundreds of articles and essays about classical music topics.  Her credits include the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Business World, the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, Connoisseur, Opera News, Chamber Music Magazine, Musicalamerica.com and New MusicBox.org

            She is the winner of a Deems Taylor Award for music journalism and has been interviewed for television segments about pianists for "CBS Sunday Mornings" and CNN's "NewsNight."  A member of the American Society of Journalists & Authors, she has served two terms as MCANA's vice president and a couple of terms as member of the board.  She is also currently serving on the MCANA web committee.

            Laura Kuhn enjoys a lively career as a writer, performer, scholar, and arts administrator.  She worked during graduate school years in the early 1980s with the Russian-born infant terrible of American musicology, Nicolas Slonimsky, becoming successor editor, upon his death in 1996, of his acclaimed music dictionaries Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and Music Since 1900.  In 1986, upon completion of her M.A. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (her thesis a comparative study of the theoretical ideas of German composer Richard Wagner with the montage film theory of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein), she also began working with the American composer, poet, visual artist, and philosopher John Cage in New York on a variety of large-scale projects, including his six “mesostic” lectures for Harvard University as holder of the Charles Eliot Norton Chair in Poetry (published as I-VI, Harvard University Press, 1990) and his first full-scale opera, Europeras 1 & 2, for the Frankfurt Opera (subsequently the subject of her 1992 doctoral dissertation from U.C.L.A., John Cage’s “Europeras 1 & 2”: The Musical Means of Revolution).  From 1991 to 1996 she served as one of ten founding faculty members at Arizona State University West in Phoenix, where she helped to develop and implement an innovative Interdisciplinary Arts & Performance program.  Simultaneously, upon Cage’s death in 1992, she worked with Cage’s long-time friends and associates Merce Cunningham, Anne d’Harnoncourt, and David Vaughan to found the John Cage Trust, which she continues to serve as Executive Director.  In this capacity, Kuhn travels extensively, lecturing and conducting performance workshops in venues as diverse as the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Warsaw’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Brussels’ “International Arts Festival.”  In 1999 she even prepared a macrobiotic dinner for 80 (using Cage’s recipes) to celebrate the first-ever installation of Cage’s celebrated Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake at Belfast’s “Queens Festival”!  Other projects for the John Cage Trust under her direction have included a CD-ROM of sampled piano preparations from Cage’s landmark composition, Sonatas & Interludes (1946-48) for use by MIDI keyboard musicians, and the adaptation of Cage’s whimsical 1982 radio play, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet, to the stage, which in 2000-2001 she directed in seven venues around the world, including the U.S., Australia, Germany, and the U.K.  In 1999, on a bit of a lark, she also joined the cast (as an onstage singing guest) of Mikel Rouse’s irreverent “talk-show” opera, Dennis Cleveland, last mounted at New York’s Lincoln Center in May 2002.  In 2007, the John Cage Trust went into residential placement at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson New York, where Kuhn became the first John Cage Professor of Performance Arts.  In celebration, she directed a fully staged version of Cage’s softly political theater piece, Lecture on the Weather, with an all-star cast that included Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, John Ashbery, Leon Botstein, John Ralston Saul, John Kelly, and others.  She is currently working with the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ken Silverman on The John Cage Correspondence Collection for Wesleyan University Press (2011).

            Jean Jacques Van Vlasselaer has been music critic with the newspaper "Le Droit" since 1972. He covers concerts and operas and writes editorials on music-related topics. He has written for several magazines, such as BBC Music and Opera International, and comprehensive articles as introductions to music festival program, including the Edinburgh Festival, Festival Canada, Strings of the Future. He has written in the field of musicology and been an annual guest of the four music universities in Austria: Vienna, Graz, Linz and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. He has made a DVD on the life of composer Viktor Ullmann and is in the process of writing a book on the composer’s life (1898-1944). In addition, he has organized more than 15 symposiums on music-related matters, including several in the works: "Music of Survival" (2008), "Haydn’s Creativity" (2009) and "Mahler Between Two Worlds" (2010).  He is organizing an international conference for the University of Waterloo on "Challenging the Digital Media: the Performing Arts" to be held September of 2011 and has co-edited a book on Mahler’s Eight symphony.

            Heidi Waleson is the opera critic for the Wall Street Journal, covering opera performances and news around the US. She is also a regular contributor to Symphony Magazine, Opera News, Opera Now (London), and other national and international publications. Her hundreds of articles include criticism, commentary, personality profiles, and articles on current issues in classical music, including such topics as how American orchestras are rethinking their missions and the role of cultural institutions and working musicians in music education. Special interests include contemporary opera and historical performance. She lives in New York City.