Alumnus Gregorio Taniguchi has been offered a contract renewal with the Pacific Chorale and John Alexander Singers for the complete 2012-13 season as a staff singer. He’ll also be returning to Santa Fe in December to join the Santa Fe Desert Chorale for two weeks in their 2012 Winter concert series.

Alumna Monica Ambalal (MM musicology) was recently awarded a grant to establish an archive for the Stockton Symphony. She writes, “We have the third oldest symphony in CA – and we are without an archive. Programs from 1922 are laying in dusty bins in the basement of Pacific’s library (gasp)!  Also our current conductor cannot refer back to a record that shows when the last time Shostakovich (or whatever) was performed. So, I will be constructing a formal database which will reflect every symphony program and performer from its inception. I will also be researching our first symphony conductor and locals who played under his baton, and I will be spearheading the project, and making presentations about my experiences and findings at lectures at our college and museum. Something positive during this time of bankruptcy and extreme crime in this city.”

Monica is on the faculty at Solano College/Delta College.

Alumnus Gerhard Guter designed the jazz theory and class jazz piano sequence currently in use at the Bob Cole Conservatory and is now a consultant for various CSU’s and the Musicians Institute as they look to revise and expand their commercial music offerings.  He earned operator’s certifications in Pro Tools (music) and Icon Worksurfaces and his work for instrumental and vocal jazz ensembles is published through UNC Jazz Press, Walrus Music Publishing, and Sound Music Publications.  He will be teaching his twenty-fourth higher education music course at Cypress College this semester and is completing work on Vocalogy “Refilled” as producer, trumpeter, vocalist, editor, and arranger.  Other current projects include commissions for the Colorado All-State Jazz Choir and an as yet unnamed album project featuring the music of Scott Joplin.

Alumnus Stephen Anastasia has been hired as a lecturer at Cal Poly Pomona, teaching Voice and Voice Class starting Fall ’12. He also received his first contract as a chorister with LA Opera. He will be singing “Der fliegende Holländer” with them in March.

After completing his BM at CSULB, Stephen earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Vocal Performance at UC Irvine. He has performed with Opera Pacific and was a featured alumnus with the UCI Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Stephen Tucker as Marcello in Act III of La Bohème and in the title role of Gianni Schicchi.

Stephen’s solo concert credits include Messiah with the Long Beach Camerata Singers & Orchestra and Carmina Burana with the Inland Valley Sympony & Temecula Valley Master Chorale. Mr. Anastasia has also performed as a soloist with Downtown Opera (a subsidiary of Long Beach Opera), Center Stage Opera, the Music Companie of Hollywood, A Little Dickens, ASCAP Music Theater Workshop, The Verdi Chorus, Chorale Bel Canto and with the Accademia San Felice, Tuscany Amadeus Festival in Florence, Italy.

Alumna Nicola Said has been awarded first place in the Malta Arts Scholarships 2012 organized by the Malta Council for Culture and Arts. The scholarship covers all tuition and help towards living costs. Nicola begins her Masters in Performance studies this fall at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where she will be studying with renowned soprano, Yvonne Kenny.

Alumnus Robert Matheson graduated with a DMA in double bass performance from the University of Arizona this summer. He is beginning his second year teaching bass and theory at Dixie State College in St. George, UT and playing in the orchestra at Tuacahn Amphitheater. His composition, “Desert Fragments” was recently premiered by the Reedy-Hoeflicker Duo at the National Flute Association convention in Las Vegas.

Robert designed a MIDI double bass and composed a work for it which you can view on youtube here: Curiouser and Curiouser. He writes of it: “The title of this piece comes from Alices Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. “Curiouser and Curiouser” does not follow a set program, but addresses topics that have stood out to me while reading, listening to, and watching Carroll’s story with my two young children. The sounds are sampled from various recorded forms of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, manipulated and edited using Digital Performer, Peak, and Metasynth, with additional live manipulation through Reason. This is the first composition for the MIDI double bass, an instrument that I designed and created as part of a minor in electro-acoustic music at the University of Arizona. Work on the MIDI double bass was made possible by partial funding from the Peter Treistman Creative Project Award.”

Alumna Mindi Ehrlich is performing in “Madwomen,” a new musical, presented in concert at the NoHo Arts Center on Tuesday, August 28, 2012 at 8:00PM.

Songwriter Hannah Johnson is astonished to find herself in a psychiatric hospital with the residents who claim to be the very “madwomen” she learned about in her women’s studies class: Vivien Leigh, Zelda Fitzgerald, Mary Todd Lincoln, Camille Claudel, and Queen Juana “La Loca” of Castile.

The NoHo Arts Center is located at 11136 Magnolia, North Hollywood, CA 91601.  Tickets are available through ANMT’s website.