From the Top - San Francisco Contemporary Music Players

The Ensemble Staff
Th e San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP), now in its
39th year, is a leader among America’s most distinguished and successful
chamber music organizations, performing, commissioning, and recording
the music of today’s composers. Th e group presents works written for both
large and small chamber ensembles. A ten-time winner of the prestigious
national ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming
of Contemporary Music, the San Francisco Contemporary Music
Players has won this award more times than any other ensemble. It has
commissioned 74 pieces and performed over 1,150 new works, including 72
U.S. and 141 world premieres.
Each season the ensemble performs a subscription series in the Bay Area. It
has also toured widely throughout California, with performances on such
concert series as San Francisco Performances, Cal Performances, the Stern
Grove Festival, the Other Minds Festival, Los Angeles’ Monday Evening
Concerts, the Ojai Festival, and the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento.
SFCMP made its European debut at the Cheltenham Festival of
Music in 1986 and its East Coast debut at the Library of Congress in 2001.
Th e ensemble has recorded eleven albums of its own and contributed to
nine others. Its musical outreach programs include presentations in public
high schools and its Contemporary Insights series of intimate performances
with conversation.
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Christopher Honett, Executive Director, has served as Director of the
Harvard Group for New Music, as North American representative for
music publisher Editions Henry Lemoine, and as Executive Director of the
Manhattan Sinfonietta, where among other projects, he produced the US
premiere of Martin Matalon’s 1995 score for the classic Fritz Lang silent
fi lm, Metropolis. A PhD recipient in music composition from Harvard
University, Chris’s musical mentors have included Julian Anderson, Sir
Harrison Birtwistle, Chaya Czernowin, Mario Davidovsky, Joshua Fineberg,
Magnus Lindberg, and Bernard Rands. His music has been performed by
the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Arditti String Quartet, the Boston
Conservatory Wind Ensemble, and others. Mr. Honett is co-author of Th e
Listen, a book geared toward anyone curious about new music regardless of
his or her musical education.
Carrie Blanding, Director of Operations and Marketing, joined the San
Francisco Contemporary Music Players in 2007, after six years as co-owner
and Administrative Director of Next Big Th ing Children’s Th eatre, a popular
performing arts camp for children in the East Bay. She has also worked
at the Mountain Play Association and trained through internships at the
San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Performances. An accomplished
singer, Ms. Blanding has performed with the San Francisco Symphony
Chorus and was a soloist with the U. C. Jazz Ensembles. She obtained her
B. A. degree in Comparative Literature from the University of California
at Berkeley, where her work was honored with the department’s academic
achievement award.
William Quillen, Project Developer, is a Ph. D. candidate in musicology
at the University of California, Berkeley, writing a dissertation on contemporary
Russian music. He earned a master’s degree in musicology at U. C.
Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in history and music at Indiana University,
Bloomington. During 2007-08, he was a Fulbright scholar at the Moscow
Conservatory, where he spent the year working with contemporary Russian
composers. He has been the assistant director of the University Chorus at
U. C. Berkeley, an intern with the San Francisco Symphony, and has coorganized
symposia and concerts in California and Moscow. He joined the
San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in September 2008.
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