Staff

Christopher Honett, Executive Director
Christopher Honett 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.  A Ph.D. 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 many professional ensembles, including Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Arditti String Quartet, and the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble.  Mr. Honett is co-author of The Listen, a book for anyone curious about new music regardless of his or her musical education.

Carrie Blanding, Director of Operations and Marketing
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.

William Quillen, Project Developer
William Quillen 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 UC 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 UC Berkeley, an intern with the San Francisco Symphony, and has co-organized symposia and concerts in California and Moscow. He joined the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in September 2008.

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.