Advisory Board

Anna Presler, a longtime member of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and its artistic director for 15 years, teaches violin and chamber music at the School of Music at California State University, Sacramento. She was a member of the New Century Chamber Orchestra for two decades and has been a fellow at the Banff Art Center, the International Music Seminar at Cornwall, and the Tanglewood Music Center, where her chamber music coaches included Eugene Lehner, Gil Kalish and Julius Levine. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a master’s degree in music from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and also studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts. Her primary violin teachers were Elaine Richey, Ian Swensen, and Syoko Aki.

Kurt Rohde [h/h/h/t/t/t] plays viola, teaches and composes, and lives in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land with spouse Tim and dog Hendrix. Kurt is fascinated with finding ways to incorporate notions of failure and catastrophe as part of the pursuit of making something beautiful. Kurt is Artistic Advisor with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Artistic Director of the Composers Conference, and teaches Music Composition at UC Davis. Kurt has received the Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, fellowships from the Radcliffe-Harvard Institute for Advanced Study and Guggenheim Foundation, and awards from American Academy of Arts and Letters, Barlow, Fromm, Hanson and Koussevitzky Foundations, and Chamber Music America and Creative Capital. Kurt has spearheaded two initiatives to help create opportunities for composers: The Kurt Rohde Commission Fund is an ongoing commissioning project supporting composers at different stages of their creative life, and Kurt Rohde’s Farewell Tour Project – PARTS 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6 targets underappreciated creative voices in the new music community by commissioning new works for viola.

Nicolás Lell Benavides is a composer that has worked with prominent groups such as Nomad Session, Elevate Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, The Bay Brass, SopraDuo, The International Orange Chorale, for change dance collective, and Friction Quartet. Nick was 2016's winner of the Heartland Symphony Annual Composition Competition and in 2018 was commissioned by the Washington National Opera for a 20-minute chamber opera as part of their American Composers Initiative. He was invited to be a part of both the Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy in 2018. Formerly the first managing director of Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Nick is now a doctoral student at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music. www.nickbenavides.com

Chris Castro is a composer and double bassist from Brooklyn, New York. He is a recipient of Chamber Music America's 2021 Classical Commissioning Award, where one of the jurors described his music as “On par with Varèse,” giving him the nickname “The New Colossus of Sound.” His new work, Canções dos Desassossego (Songs of Disquiet), will be written for the Lyris Quartet and soprano Sharon Harms and premiered in 2023. His music has been performed by Sharon Harms and the Composers Conference Ensemble under James Baker (Two Songs from Brooklyn Narcissus), the St. Louis Symphony under David Robertson (Choruses III), pianists Sarah Cahill and Eric Zivian (IV - I), piano duo HereNowHear (Beethausenstro - Castockhoven) and the Lydian String Quartet (Choruses IV). He is the 2022 Guest Composer for the James Tenney Memorial Symposium, composing and collaborating with the New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble. Starting in August he will join the faculty of Chapman University as Assistant Professor of Composition. He has a Ph.D. in Composition and Theory from University of California, Davis and a Bachelor's in Music from the Juilliard School in both double bass and composition.

Thomas Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at Berkeley where he has taught since 1973.  His most recent book The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains was published by Princeton University Press in 2016. He wrote the libretto for the opera Death with Interruptions performed by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. Laqueur is an amateur cellist and avid cyclist. When not practicing, riding, walking his dog or working, he tends an orchard in the Santa Cruz mountains with his wife Dean Carla Hesse where they make all things apple, from brandy to vinegar.

Carl Schimmel, winner of the Bearns Prize, the Lee Ettelson Award, and the 2017 Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has received honors and awards from many organizations, including MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Copland House, New Music USA, and ASCAP.  His works have been performed throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, by ensembles such as the Minnesota Orchestra, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, Da Capo Chamber Players, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and many others.  He is Associate Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Illinois State University.