Staff

Carrie Blanding, Executive Director
Carrie Blanding joined the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in 2007, after six years as co-owner and Administrative Director of Next Big Thing Children’s Theatre, 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 avid singer, Ms. Blanding has performed with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus and was a soloist with the UC Jazz Ensembles. She obtained her B.A. degree, summa cum laude, in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, where her work was honored with the department’s academic achievement award.

Mason Dille, Director of Operations and Marketing
Mason Dille joined the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in September 2010. He was an arts administrator in Los Angeles for eight years and most recently served as Program Manager of the American Youth Symphony, a renowned pre-professional orchestra based at UCLA. Mason graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and has performed and recorded as a freelance cellist with a variety of ensembles and orchestras in Southern California. He has produced concerts at major venues including Royce Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Mason has also taught string instruments in outreach classes at underserved schools in Los Angeles.

Beth E. Levy, Program Note Writer
Beth E. Levy has been writing program notes for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players since 2000. She joined the musicology faculty at UC Davis after spending one year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan and completing her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley (supported by fellowships from the American Musicological Society, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities). She is presently completing a book titled Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West (UC Press), and her contribution to Copland and His World (Princeton UP, 2005) won the Irving Lowens Article Award for the best article on American music.