Transitions on the CMA Board

Completing terms on CMA’s Board of Directors as of June 30 are Aaron Dworkin, Mimi Hwang, Karim Nagi, and John Zion. CMA is deeply grateful for their time, talents, and expertise. As of July 1, the newly elected members of the Board are Annie Fullard, violinist of the Cavani String Quartet, educator, and author; vocalist, composer, producer, and educator Sofía Rei; and Rob Robbins, founder and president of Alliance Artist Management.

CMA welcomes the new directors, whose profiles follow.

Annie Fullard

Violinist Annie Fullard is a founding member of the Cavani String Quartet, an ensemble that’s taken home many of chamber music’s biggest accolades in its 40-year career. These include CMA’s Cleveland Quartet Award, the top prize at the Walter W. Naumburg Competition, and Musical America’s Young Artist of the Year honor. In 1988, the ensemble became the quartet-in-residence at the Cleveland Institute of Music, a post it held until 2018. The Cavani has also been the recipient of more than ten CMA Residency Partnership Program grants, many of them supporting work in Ohio-area schools. Through it all, Fullard has been Cavani’s rock, steadying the ship through a series of personnel changes and major shifts in the performing arts ecosystem.

“I love what I do,” she said. “And I’ve been so lucky to work with some of the greatest people—my wonderful, sensitive, hilarious colleagues. Along the way, there have been changes within the group, and we continue to transform. But I think we’ve maintained a core set of values, which is probably a mixture of humor, kindness, and empathy, and just love of music and discovery.”

Fullard fell for music early, latching on to Mozart’s Magic Flute and recordings of Ella Fitzgerald, whose mellifluous vocal tone she later sought to emulate on her violin. Her first encounters with live chamber music were life-altering. “I have a memory of a Julliard Quartet concert that was so intensely moving,” she said. “I remember tears running down my face in the slow movement of the Debussy Quartet.”

In their 30-year tenure at CIM and beyond, Fullard and her Cavani colleagues have helped shape the artistry of many of the young stars of the chamber music field, including members of the Jupiter Aeolus, Aizuri, Daedalus, and Catalyst Quartets. She still relishes the opportunity to work with young artists. “Chamber music playing can unlock so much curiosity, so much knowledge, so much joy, and so much humor,” she said. “You begin learning from the score itself and that experience transforms into a catalyst for connection, empathy, and collaboration.”

Today, Fullard is the Director of Chamber Music and Sydney M. Friedberg Chair at Peabody Conservatory, and the Charles and Mary Jean Yates Chamber Music Chair at Mercer University, in Macon, Georgia. Alongside her Cavani colleagues, she is also co-artistic director of Arts Renaissance Tremont, the Cleveland presenter. On top of all that, she’s just finished a book, The Art of Collaboration: Chamber Music Rehearsal Techniques & Teambuilding, co-authored with the organizational systems-expert Dorianne Cotter-Lockard and due for publication sometime in the next year.

“The goal of this book is to share a quantifiable and uniquely collaborative approach to chamber music rehearsal techniques,” she explained, “that will serve all chamber music lovers and inspire those who wish to improve their ensemble playing experience.”

Sofía Rei

Listening through the recorded output of New York-based, Argentina-born singer Sofía Rei, you’ll hear strains of contemporary jazz, the electronic textures of progressive pop, and the melodic lineages of a wide array of Latin American folk traditions, from Peru to Colombia to Bolivia and beyond. Sometimes, these diverse influences sit together on a single recording, as in 2021’s Umbral, a kaleidoscopic concept album borne of a trek across eastern Chile. Other releases dive deeply into more constrained—but still often slyly expansive—palettes, as in Coplas Escondidas, her recent duo recording with the Peruvian American bassist Jorge Roeder, which blends hidden gems from the songbooks of Brazil and Peru with American jazz.

For all her restless experimentation, Rei got her start her start at the other end of the musical spectrum, singing in the children’s choir of the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires’s historic opera house. It was a performance of Handel’s Messiah that cemented her professional aspirations. “I was like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. It was so clear.”

Rei continued her opera studies at Argentina’s National Conservatory of Music through early adulthood, leaving for a short period to try her hand at being “a punk rocker and a punk drummer,” she said. (Rei still jokes that she is a “frustrated drummer” at heart.) Around the same time, she discovered—and fell hard for—jazz and contemporary classical music. But opportunities to pursue a wide-ranging musical education in Argentina were limited. “For many years, I was on my own trying to find more resources to explore this new path,” she explained.

Feeling a need to “go to the mouth of the beast,” Rei enrolled at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Mass. There, she fell in with a small cohort of Latin American musicians—Roeder among them—who introduced her to many of the folkloric traditions of the diaspora. “I started to do a lot of research, particularly on the percussion instruments and the different styles, and started traveling a lot to Peru, to Colombia, to different parts of Latin America, to really get to know and understand—from the roots—what these styles of music were about.”

In the years since, Rei has collaborated with the likes Marc Ribot, John Zorn, Maria Schneider, Pedrito Martinez, and Bobby McFerrin. She also performed on pianist Geoffrey Keezer’s Grammy-nominated 2009 release, Áurea.

Today, Rei juggles a full-time teaching job at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute (where she is also director of global studies) with an active recording and performance schedule.

She is also a co-founder of two advocacy groups—El Colectivo Sur and the Ori-Gen Collective—in support of forward-thinking South American artists. She hopes to expand that advocacy via her work on the CMA Board, particularly for Latin American women. “There are so many people out there that are incorporating folk traditions from all over the world into contemporary chamber music,” she said. “That broader diversity is out there and it’s happening.”

Rob Robbins

Rob Robbins is the founder of Alliance Artist Management, the venerable firm that’s counted innovative ensembles like Imani Winds, Sō Percussion, and Anonymous 4 as long-term clients. The company’s long-running specialty is “artists that combine mastery with curiosity,” and the roster has always been heavy on small ensembles. “I’ve never been as drawn to individual artists as much as ensembles, and their desire to create something collectively,” he said recently.

A lifelong music lover, Robbins always knew he wanted to work behind the scenes. “I started in arts management pretty much right out of college,” he recalled. “I was tracking towards a career in broadcasting. But the more I learned about the record industry and broadcasting, particularly radio, the more drawn I was to live music.”

After a few early gigs working in production for big pop acts—The Grateful Dead, The Jackson’s Victory Tour—he found his way into a large talent agency, where he began working with the Tokyo String Quartet, Cleveland Quartet, and other heavy-hitters of the chamber music world. “I saw the opportunity to work with musicians whose careers span decades, rather than years,” he explained.

He then spent five years on the staff of ICM Artists—now Opus 3—before moving to Herbert Barrett Management, where he stayed for 17 years. At Barrett, his proudest moments included helping to bring to life a significant collaboration between the Billy Taylor Trio and the Juilliard Quartet—Taylor’s Homage—an experience he described as “extremely challenging and gratifying and exhilarating.”

The Taylor septet wasn’t the only major classical-jazz crossover Robbins had a hand in. In 2005, he helped kickstart saxophonist the commissioning of Wayne Shorter’s Terra Incognita, composed for Imani Winds. “It was the first time Wayne Shorter had ever written a piece for an ensemble that he was not a member of, which was, to me, very significant.”

With his decades-long vantage of the industry, Robbins is clear-eyed about the challenges ahead. During a difficult decade in which many management firms folded, Alliance’s roster evolved, bringing in acts in the worlds of theater and beyond. By joining the Chamber Music America Board, he hopes to help pull presenters together for overdue conversations. “My greatest concern is that the people who are responsible for putting music on stage are not engaged enough with each other,” he explained. “Chamber Music America is in a great position to make that happen.”

This news item was originally published in the Summer 2024 issue of Chamber Music magazine, a CMA member benefit.