musiConnects Guild of Musicians & Educators

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Joshua Addison
Violin

_ Violinist Joshua Addison graduated with a B.A. in History, Summa Cum Laude, from Boston University, where he served as concertmaster of the All-Campus Orchestra. He has performed with various orchestras in the New England region and has appeared as soloist with the Keene Chamber Orchestra. Joshua has been active in musical outreach programs in the Boston area, most notably as second violinist and founding member of the Chittick String Quartet (now Boston Public Quartet). In addition to a wide range of classical concerts, Joshua sometimes plugs in a pearl-white electric violin and performs with rock groups Main South and Montague. In December of 2010 he received a Master’s Degree in Violin Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles. His teachers include Movses Pogossian, Guillaume Sutre, Daniel Phillips, and Rohan Gregory.

Megan Koch
Cello

Megan completed her Masters Degree in chamber music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Jean-Michel Fonteneau.  She holds a Bachelor of Music degree in cello performance from the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, where she studied with Alan Stepansky.  Megan currently lives in Boston, and is a member of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and Cape Cod Symphony. She teaches at the Community Music Center of Boston, and has a private studio. 

Megan is committed to performing new music and has attended the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she worked with composer Jonathon Harvery.  She has also worked with Joan Tower, and premiered many new works.  In addition to her interest in new music, Megan has also gained an interest in early music, playing baroque cello in Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra, under the direction of Phoebe Carrai, in addition to attending the International Baroque Institute at the Longy School of Music.
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Megan began her studies at the age of four in Rochester, New York.  As a founding member of the Rivendell String Quartet, she performed throughout the United States as well as in Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Singapore.  As an avid chamber musician, she has performed alongside Robert Mann, Michael Kannen, Ian Swenson, and Steven Dann, and has worked extensively with many of the world’s foremost musicians, among them Pamela Frank, Menahem Pressler, and the Tokyo String Quartet.  She has also coached chamber music at Summer Music West and at the PACO camp.

Elizabeth Stefan
Viola

Originally from Bel Air, MD, Elizabeth Stefan is currently a free lance violist in the Boston area.  She recently graduated with her master’s degree from the New England Conservatory where she studied with Dimitri Murrath.  Previous studies were with George Taylor at the Eastman School of Music, where she earned her BM, and an Arts Leadership Certificate with a focus in contemporary orchestral issues.  She also received the Robert L. Oppelt Viola Prize for the class of 2009.  Elizabeth has been coached by artists such as Lucy Chapman, John Graham, Mikhail Kopelman, Cynthia Phelps and members of the Ying and Borremeo String Quartets.  She has attended various chamber music and orchestral summer festivals, including the National Repertory Orchestra, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, the Chautauqua Institute and the Quartet Program.  
Elizabeth is drawn to working with children and inspiring them through music.  Currently, she teaches at the Pope John Paul II Academy’s Columbia Campus.  Through the Community Partnerships Program at NEC she was the founder and teacher of the beginning strings program at the Mission Hill School.  She has also volunteered with the Greater Baltimore Youth Orchestra’s Bridges program.  Outside of music she enjoys experimenting with new recipes for cooking and baking, running and spending as much time outside as possible!

Nina Vansuch
Artist/Educator

A Boston native and “ham” since childhood, Nina Vansuch has performed with many musical groups and as a solo performer, singer, director, comedian, and actor.  As a self-taught musician with learning disabilities, Nina loves the learning and teaching process, especially working with children who start out saying ”It’s too hard” and helping them discover that “I can play music”.  (She’s been there.). She extended the self-taught route to study with Karen Shepard, Kate Judd, Ric Poulin, and Marla Blakey among others.   

Nina has worked extensively with arts organizations, and educational programs as a consultant, teacher, grant writer, and as director of arts programming and curriculum for children and adults.  
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She is the recipient of 15 grant awards, including one from the American Business Collaboration for excellence in children’s arts programming.
Nina is currently resurrecting a program she developed in the 1990s, the Neighborhood Arts Exchange, which places college student interns in after school programs and community centers and also serves as a consulting resource for these organizations.  www.ninavansuch.com

Daniel Sedgwick
Composer/pianist

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Dan Sedgwick is a composer, pianist, and teacher living in Somerville, MA.  His current composition projects include a work for two bassoons and string orchestra (inspired by late chamber music of Gabriel Fauré, and commissioned by the Keene Chamber Orchestra of Keene, NH,) and a series of canons for mixed voices and instruments (flexible instrumentation), composed in collaboration with Marjorie Gere for the Sagittal Songbook, a collection of microtonal music soon to be published by Oddmusic of Urbana, IL.  Dan’s other recent and ongoing musical activities include singing and puppeteering with music/puppetry collective An Exciting Event in Charlestown, MA; touring internationally as keyboardist/vocoderist with disco-pop artist Kelley Polar; and performing piano chamber music at the Apple Hill Summer Workshop in Nelson, NH. 

Dan graduated with doctoral and master’s degrees in composition from Rice University, and A.B. degree with concentration in music from Harvard.  He has studied composition with Bernard Rands, Mario Davidovsky, Elliot Gyger, Shih-hui Chen, Kurt Stallmann, Anthony Brandt, and Karim Al-Zand, and piano chamber music performance with Eric Stumacher, Robert Levin, Jeanne Kierman-Fischer, and Brian Connelly, among others.  
He currently works as a teaching assistant in music theory at the Harvard Music Department.