About Master Classes

A master class is a special opportunity for students and guests to watch and learn from a guest teacher and expert in their area. Guests work with students as a group or one at a time in front of an audience. The guest can engage with students and audiences in various ways, often providing feedback on how to improve their technique, expression, and interpretation.

Guests may also share stories about their experiences such as their career, learning a piece, working with a composer, demonstrating how to play certain passages, and pointing out common issues and ways to improve.

All spectators and students can benefit from observing a master class and learning master’s teaching and listening to the different versions of the piece.

Master Classes are always free and open to the public to observe.

About the Artist

Ben Fingland, clarinet

With performances conveying “spiritedness and humor”; “unflagging precision and energy”; “eloquence and passion”; “dazzling technique” (The ​New York Times) and playing described as “something magical” (The Boston Globe), “compellingly musical” (The New York Times) and “thoroughly lyrical...expert” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Benjamin Fingland interprets a diverse range of clarinet literature.

A proponent of the music of our time, he works closely with living composers. In addition to being a founding member of the critically-acclaimed new music collective counter)induction, he plays with many of the leading contemporary performance ensembles on the East Coast: NOVUS NY, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Network for New Music, the Argento Ensemble, the Locrian Chamber Players, and Sequitur. He is an artist-faculty member of the annual Composers Conference and a guest faculty member of the Bennington Chamber Music Conference.

He has performed worldwide as a recitalist and soloist and has also collaborated, recorded, and toured with a wide variety of other artists — ranging in scope from the Brooklyn Rider string quartet and the Horszowski Trio to Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, to jazz legend Ornette Coleman and pop icon Elton John.

Mr. Fingland is the principal clarinetist of the New Jersey Festival Orchestra, has held principal clarinet positions with the Prometheus Chamber Orchestra and the New Haven Symphony, and has also played with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. He is a member of the renowned Dorian Wind Quintet, which will soon celebrate 60 years of groundbreaking commissions and performances of wind chamber music. He has Bachelor’s and Master of Music degrees from the Juilliard School and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York City.

Amy Griffiths is a woodwind specialist based in New York City. She plays flutes, clarinets, saxophones, bassoon, Irish flute/whistles, and uilleann pipes (Irish concert bagpipes).

She is grateful for a performance life that involves playing in Broadway orchestras, klezmer bands, Irish traditional settings, jazz ensembles, wedding bands, classical chamber groups, rock/pop/soul bands, cabaret shows, New Orleans brass bands, and anything else that fits in her wheelhouse.

Amy is from Maryland and has lived in North Carolina, Paris (France), Arizona, Georgia, and Louisiana before settling in NYC. Amy studied at The North Carolina School of the Arts, Arizona State University, and Louisiana State University.

In addition to her performance live, Amy teaches woodwinds with the New York PopsEd and at The Third Street Music School in the East Village. For more information, please visit her website: amygriffithsmusic.com.

Jeff Nichols

Time: 5:00-7:00 PM EDT

Free!

Registration