The Vincent Persichetti Society Board of Directors (as of January 26, 2023)

Larry Thomas Bell, Vice President and Secretary

Composer/pianist Larry Thomas Bell studied with Vincent Persichetti from 1974-82 earning MM and DMA degrees from The Juilliard School. He has recorded Piano Miniatures, the piano works of Persichetti for Arabesque Recordings. For more information, visit www.larrybellmusic.com.

Daniel Dorff

Daniel Dorff is a composer and woodwind performer. He has run the editorial department at Theodore Presser Company since 1985, where he met weekly with Vincent Persichetti to discuss incoming submissions, and where he edited and proofread Persichetti’s later publications. www.danieldorff.com

Andrew Mast

Andrew Mast is the Associate Dean of the Conservatory at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, Kimberly-Clark Professor of Music and Director of Bands and has taught at Lawrence since 2004. Only the third person to hold the title of Lawrence University Director of Bands since 1951, he conducts the Wind Ensemble and has also taught courses in band history, conducting and the first-year studies program. Prior to his appointment at Lawrence, he was Director of Bands at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa where he conducted the Symphonic Band, Orchestra, served as department chair, conducted the Quad City Wind Ensemble and founded the Quad City Area Youth Wind Symphony. In the fall of 2013 he co-founded and became music director of Vento Winds, an ensemble of excellent adult musicians from the Fox Valley committed to the highest performance standards of the finest wind band repertoire. He has been recognized for his teaching via the Freshman Studies Teaching Award in 2011, Young Teacher Award at Lawrence in 2009 and the Faculty of the Year award at St. Ambrose in 2004.

Bands under his direction have appeared at several conferences, including the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA) National and North Central Regional conferences and the Wisconsin Music Educators Association. A 2012 CD released on the Mark Records label features music commissioned and premiered by the Lawrence Wind Ensemble. Mast taught for seven years in the public schools of Iowa and Minnesota, teaching at the elementary, middle and high school levels of instrumental music.

Mast is an elected member of the American Bandmasters Association. Other professional affiliations include the College Band Director’s National Association, National Band Association, Conductor’s Guild and the World Association of Symphonic Bands and Ensembles. He is a co-founder and Past President of the Vincent Persichetti Society. He has made scholarly contributions to The Instrumentalist, Journal of Band Research, the Teaching Music Through Performance in Band series and The Annals of Iowa.

Andrea Olmstead

Andrea Olmstead is the author of seven books and five book chapters, including four books about the modernist American composer Roger Sessions: “Roger Sessions: A Biography” (Routledge, 2007), “Roger Sessions and His Music” (UMI Research Press, 1985), “Conversations with Roger Sessions” (Northeastern University Press, 1987), “The Correspondence of Roger Sessions” (Northeastern, 1992), as well as the “Revised New Grove Dictionary” (2001) and “New Grove Dictionary of American Music” (2013) Sessions entries. She is also the author of “Juilliard: A History” (University of Illinois Press, 1999) and of numerous articles in The Journal of Musicology, Perspectives of New Music, The Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, Tempo, Musical America, and The Musical Quarterly.

Her “Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Daisy?” (2012) is available as an eBook. Olmstead’s most recent book, “Vincent Persichetti: Grazioso, Grit, and Gold” won the 2019 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Outstanding Musical Biography.

The recipient of three national Endowment for the Humanities Awards, she has also been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome ten times and a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts on five occasions. She taught Music History at The Juilliard School, the Boston Conservatory, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and at the New England Conservatory of Music. Olmstead was the Christopher Hogwood Research Fellow for the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra and Chorus. In 2009 she wrote the libretto for and produced the opera “Holy Ghosts,” music by Larry Bell based on the play by Romulus Linney (www.holyghoststheopera.com). Also a CD producer, she is married to Rome Prize composer Larry Thomas Bell.

Visit her Amazon Author page, Amazon Author Page.

Lauren Persichetti

Lauren Persichetti is the daughter of Vincent Persichetti and Dorothea Flanagan Persichetti. She danced with Meredith Monk, Elizabeth Keen, Phoebe Neville and Rudy Perez before finding a dance home with James Cunningham and the Acme Dance Company. As principal dancer and co-artistic director of the company, she co-choreographed a number of works, including her father’s Aesop’s Fables. After retiring from dance, she became a social worker and counselor at the Reece School, an elementary school for children with special needs. She is now the clinical coordinator at the Reece School, where she has worked for 25 years. She was recently awarded the first Reece School Knights Award of Excellence.

Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta

Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta, pianist, has appeared as piano soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States, Peru, and Mexico. As a winner of Artists International Young Musicians Auditions, she was presented in two solo recitals at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York. Of her debut, The New York Times review called her “a thoughtful musician; her playing was full of intelligence and poetry…a pianist well worth hearing.” Ms. Rodríguez-Peralta has performed at Alice Tully Hall in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Seiji Ozawa Hall in Tanglewood, and in the Dame Myra Hess Concert Series in Chicago and Los Angeles. She has also given recitals throughout Peru, her father’s native country, under the auspices of the American Embassy. As a chamber musician, she frequently performs with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Her recordings include Teresa Carreño: Solo Piano and Chamber Works, her collaboration with cellist Luis Leguía in Music for Cello and Piano from Latin America, and A Peruvian Sojourn: Music Inspired by Andean Indigenous Melodies, Rhythms, and Traditions, which was released by Albany Records in 2022.

Ms. Rodríguez-Peralta has given piano master classes at the Conservatorio Nacional in Lima, Peru and the music school Artes Revueltas in Cholula, Mexico, and she has presented numerous lecture recitals on Latin American music, including at Harvard University, Cornell University, Wellesley College, Tufts University, and the University of Maine. She is the editor of Piano Works by Teresa Carreño published by the Hildegard Publishing Company, and her chapter “Teresa Carreño: Triumphant Artist in a Man’s World of Music” appears in A Woman’s Gaze: Latin American Women Artists published by White Pines Press. Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta is also dedicated to performing new American music and has given many premieres of works by New England composers. In March 2020 she participated in the world premiere of Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues by Larry Bell in Boston. (The complete set was played by four pianists, and she played the first six.) The Boston Musical Intelligencer wrote that she “carried exceptional clarity of line.” She performed these pieces again at Merkin Hall in New York in January 2022.

Carmen Rodríguez-Peralta holds a Bachelor of Music from Temple University, a Master of Music from The Catholic University of America and a Post-Graduate Diploma from The Juilliard School. Her teachers include Maryan Filar, Ney Salgado, and Beveridge Webster. While at Juilliard she was the teaching assistant of Vincent Persichetti. She is currently the Chair of the Music Department of Middlesex Community College in Bedford, MA and Director of A World of Music Concert Series.

Larry Alan Smith, President and Treasurer

Composer, conductor, pianist, educator and arts executive Larry Alan Smith studied with Vincent Persichetti at The Juilliard School from 1976-81 while earning his BM, MM and DMA degrees. For more information, visit www.larryalansmith.com.

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Rosanna Persichitti, ex officio – President, Associazione Musicale Vincent Persichetti in Italy

Caterina Serpilli, ex officio – Vice President, Associazione Musicale Vincent Persichetti in Italy

Roberta Serpilli, ex officio – Artistic Director, Associazione Musicale Vincent Persichetti in Italy