| Twice a member of the Geraldine R. Dodge Master Teacher Collaborative, Elizabeth DiSavino taught general, vocal, and instrumental music in public and private schools for 29 years. A former student of music education innovator Bennett Reimer, Ms. DiSavino joined the faculty of Berea College as Assistant Professor of Music and Music Education in 2011.Ms. DiSavino spent fifteen years teaching at the public Gifted and Talented magnet school Nishuane in Montclair, NJ, whose arts program was recognized as one of the top 15 in the United States by the Department of Education in 1990. A three-year oral history project conducted by her high school choral students in Cherry Valley, New York was accepted into the collection of the New York Historical Association in 2011.Ms. DiSavino performed as a freelance French hornist in New York for ten years and won concerto competitions with the South Orange Symphony and the MetropolitanY Orchestra. She served as hornist and arranger for the 10-piece brass chamber group, Solid Brass, who recorded three albums, an NJN TV special, and toured Canada and the U.S. during her tenure. Some of her arrangements as recorded by Solid Brass have been played in Germany, Austria, Australia, and New Zealand, and are published by Trigram Press.Ms. DiSavino studied French horn with John Cerminaro, Martin Smith, Joel Winter, Albert Schmitter, and David Wakefield and attended Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Music, Montclair State College, Manhattan School of Music, and the Aspen Music Festival. She received advanced training with the Colorado Philharmonic and the National Orchestra of New York, whose regimen included five yearly performances in Carnegie Hall. Through NONY, she had the privilege of playing under the batons of some of the 20th century‘s greatest conductors, including Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, Gerard Schwarz, Loren Maezel, and James Levine.Ms. DiSavino also worked as an accompanist in the New York-metropolitan area and in upstate New York. She studied piano with Dr. Donald Payne while a student in Cleveland.Ms. DiSavino has a long-standing interest in songwriting as well, and is a winner of the Falcon Ridge New Folk competition and runner-up in the American Songwriting competition. Founder and former leader of the New Jersey Songwriter’s Circle, she recorded two solo albums of original music, three with husband and partner A.J. Bodnar, has had her music played on NPR, and may be found on several compilations including Songs From the Garden State on Smithsonian Folkways.
Also a traditional folk musician, Ms. DiSavino has been a faculty member for eleven years at the summer folk arts school Common Ground on the Hill in Westminster, MD. She and A.J. Bodnar researched traditional music of the Catskill Mountains and parlayed that into an album, A Home in the Catskills in 2010.This research became the basis of their 2012 Hutchins Library Sound Archives Fellowship project, Mountain to Mountain, a comparison of traditional music of the Catskills with that of Southern Appalachia. |
