Phil Freihofner has been a composing and performing member of SFCCO since 2004.

Loren Jones began experimenting with composition as a child. He spent his early years dividing his time between film-making and music, and some of his film work was periodically broadcast on local San Francisco television. Eventually choosing to pursue music instead of film, Loren formed and was part of several bands performing and creating different genres of original music. To this point largely self-taught, in the 1980's Loren returned to serious study to acquire greater depth musical education in order be able to create the kind of music that he had always been the most passionate about. Loren has studied with Tom Constantine, Alexis Alrich and is currently working with David Conte at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he is also a member of the chorus. 

His music has been performed by his own chamber group, by the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, and by students and teachers from around the Bay Area. He has produced several recordings, worked in radio and film, including creating the sound track for an animated short which won a special Academy Award. His 2006 release, Woodward's Gardens, features two guitars, piano, flute, oboe, harp, and cello.  He was the recipient of a 2007 Meet the Composer Grant. His project, Dancing on the Brink of the World, a fourteen movement piece for chamber orchestra and period instruments, on the history of San Francisco, has been an ongoing part of the repertoire of the past three seasons of SFCCO concerts. 

Lisa Scola Prosek, Composer, Librettist, Soprano, Pianist “ A gifted local composer” The San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2008 was raised in Rome, Italy, and graduated from Princeton University, where she studied with Edward Cone and Milton Babbitt, and privately with Lukas Foss in New York. During this time, Lisa studied singing with Margherita Kalil of the Met. After Princeton, Lisa returned to Italy, where she attended the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini, and studied with composer Gaetano Giani-Luporini. To date, Scola Prosek has composed two oratorios, and 5 operas, in Italian and English, including Satyricon, reviewed by the San Francisco Observer as a “Tour de Force” and featured on KRON TV; and Leonardo's Notebooks, in Italian, both of which premiered to capacity audiences, and were featured on NPR's West Coast Live.. The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly writes:” This composer's work is steeped in the Mediterranean world of gestures, writ both big and small. Her vocal writing references bel canto and the madrigal, and the instrumental writing, with its shadowy inner voices, has character and point. Intricate and highly expressive music.” Sequenza 21. Lisa Scola Prosek is the recipient of numerous commissions, grants and awards, including from the Argosy Foundation, for Belfagor, and from the LEF Foundation, Meet The Composer, The Hewlett Foundation, the Argosy Contemporary Music Fund, and the American Composers Forum for her opera Trap Door. Look for Lisa's new opera, Identity Theft, in 2010. Visit Lisa and her work on the web at lisascolaprosek.com, where video excerpts from Belfagor and Trap Door are posted.

Lisa Scola Prosek, Composer, Librettist, Soprano, Pianist “ A gifted local composer” The San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2008 was raised in Rome, Italy, and graduated from Princeton University, where she studied with Edward Cone and Milton Babbitt, and privately with Lukas Foss in New York. During this time, Lisa studied singing with Margherita Kalil of the Met. After Princeton, Lisa returned to Italy, where she attended the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini, and studied with composer Gaetano Giani-Luporini. To date, Scola Prosek has composed two oratorios, and 5 operas, in Italian and English, including Satyricon, reviewed by the San Francisco Observer as a “Tour de Force” and featured on KRON TV; and Leonardo's Notebooks, in Italian, both of which premiered to capacity audiences, and were featured on NPR's West Coast Live.. The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly writes:” This composer's work is steeped in the Mediterranean world of gestures, writ both big and small. Her vocal writing references bel canto and the madrigal, and the instrumental writing, with its shadowy inner voices, has character and point. Intricate and highly expressive music.” Sequenza 21. Lisa Scola Prosek is the recipient of numerous commissions, grants and awards, including from the Argosy Foundation, for Belfagor, and from the LEF Foundation, Meet The Composer, The Hewlett Foundation, the Argosy Contemporary Music Fund, and the American Composers Forum for her opera Trap Door. Look for Lisa's new opera, Identity Theft, in 2010. Visit Lisa and her work on the web at lisascolaprosek.com, where video excerpts from Belfagor and Trap Door are posted.

Davide Verotta was born in a boring mid-sized Italian town close to Milano (Gallarate, one can Google-earth it), and moved to the much larger and very much more exciting San Francisco in his late twenties. He studied piano, and music, in Milano with Isabella Zielonka, Ernesto Esposito, and Giacinto Salvetti, and in San Francisco with Renee Witon, Peggy Salkind, Robert Helps, and Julian White. Composition is a more recent endeavor (with graduate studies at SFSU and UC Davis with Richard Festinger, Josh Levine, Kurt Rohde, and Laurie St. Martin), but it is little by little coming to dominate as his main musical interest. As a pianist he teaches, in his home and at the Community Music Center in San Francisco, and performs regularly in the Bay Area as a soloist, with multiple appearances at the Trinity Chamber, St. Timothy, Piedmont Piano, Chapel of the Chimes, and Lakeshore Presbyterian concert series. As a composer/pianist he studies the craft, performs his and others works (in particular, for the last three years, as a pianist with the San Francisco Composers' Chamber Orchestra), and writes for solo instruments, chamber, orchestra, and voice. Davide's interest in music is intertwined with a lifelong academic occupation in mathematical modeling of biological systems. Although this might generate the familiar reaction (Ah! Musicians and Math!), he admits that the relationship of music and mathematics still eludes him. Acoustic phenomena can of course be described, up to a certain point, using mathematics, but when it comes to music (how we organize those sounds) the suspicion is that ‘math' can be as poor a descriptive tool as it is for literature, painting, or other art forms … this is just to say that, unfortunately, there is little connection between his two careers: those two main occupations do not talk too much to each other! More generally, Davide looks at music as a way to explore his self and his relationships with others, and to reflect on reality. It is a highly metaphorical way, which gives only hints, intuitions, and often, especially if one is honest, some surprising and disconcerting insights. It is a vague, mysterious, and sometimes confusing endeavor: a mirror of our life that might bring some light on it, or cast more shadows.

Lisa Scola Prosek, Composer, Librettist, Soprano, Pianist “ A gifted local composer” The San Francisco Bay Guardian, 2008 was raised in Rome, Italy, and graduated from Princeton University, where she studied with Edward Cone and Milton Babbitt, and privately with Lukas Foss in New York. During this time, Lisa studied singing with Margherita Kalil of the Met. After Princeton, Lisa returned to Italy, where she attended the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini, and studied with composer Gaetano Giani-Luporini. To date, Scola Prosek has composed two oratorios, and 5 operas, in Italian and English, including Satyricon, reviewed by the San Francisco Observer as a “Tour de Force” and featured on KRON TV; and Leonardo's Notebooks, in Italian, both of which premiered to capacity audiences, and were featured on NPR's West Coast Live.. The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly writes:” This composer's work is steeped in the Mediterranean world of gestures, writ both big and small. Her vocal writing references bel canto and the madrigal, and the instrumental writing, with its shadowy inner voices, has character and point. Intricate and highly expressive music.” Sequenza 21. Lisa Scola Prosek is the recipient of numerous commissions, grants and awards, including from the Argosy Foundation, for Belfagor, and from the LEF Foundation, Meet The Composer, The Hewlett Foundation, the Argosy Contemporary Music Fund, and the American Composers Forum for her opera Trap Door. Look for Lisa's new opera, Identity Theft, in 2010. Visit Lisa and her work on the web at lisascolaprosek.com, where video excerpts from Belfagor and Trap Door are posted.

Dr. Erling Wold is a composer and man-about-town. He recently premiered two large works, his Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi in St Gallen, Switzerland, and his solo opera Mordake for tenor John Duykers as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival. He is currently working on a personal autobiographical theater piece detailing his corruption and death with the help of James Bisso, which may never be finished, and just finished a more tractable violin sonata for the Denisova-Kornienko duo in Vienna. He is best known for his operas, including Sub Pontio Pilato, an historical fantasy on the death and remembrance of Pontius Pilate, a chamber opera based on William Burroughs' early autobiographical novel Queer, and his critically acclaimed work A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the Max Ernst collage novel.

Dr. Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is a multiple-award-winning ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. His compositions are generally assembled or gridded over pieces ranging from ancient and world music, to postmodern art and vernacular sources -- 174 opus numbers (markalburgerworks.blogspot.com), including 16 concertos, 20 operas, 9 symphonies, and the four-hours-and-counting opera-oratorio work-in-progress, The Bible. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra (sfcco.org) and San Francisco Cabaret Opera / Goat Hall Productions (goathall.org), Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal (21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com and 21st-centurymusic.com), Instructor in Music Literature and Theory at Diablo Valley and St. Mary's Colleges, and Music Critic for Commuter Times. He studied at Swarthmore College (B.A.) with Gerald Levinson and Joan Panetti, Dominican University (M.A., Composition) with Jules Langert, Claremont Graduate University (Ph.D., Musicology) with Roland Jackson, and privately with Terry Riley. Alburger writes daily at markalburger2009.blogspot.com and is in the fifth year of an 11-year project recording his complete works for New Music Publications and Recordings.

The multi-instrumentalist Michael Cooke is a composer of jazz and classical music. This two-time Emmy, ASCAPLUS Award and Louis Armstrong Jazz Award winner plays a variety of instruments: you can hear him on soprano, alto, and tenor saxophones, flute, soprano and bass clarinets, bassoon and percussion. A cum laude graduate with a music degree from the University of North Texas, he had many different areas of study; jazz, ethnomusicology, music history, theory and of course composition. In 1991 Michael began his professional orchestral career performing in many north Texas area symphonies. Michael has played in Europe, Mexico, and all over the United States. Cimarron Music Press began published many of Michael's compositions in 1994. After relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area, he has been exploring new paths in improvised and composed music, mixing a variety of styles and techniques that draw upon the creative energy of a multicultural experience, both in and out of America. In 1999, Michael started a jazz label called Black Hat Records (blackhatrecords.com) and is currently on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. The San Francisco Beacon describes Michael's music as "flowing out color and tone with a feeling I haven't heard in quite a while. Michael plays with such dimension and flavor that it sets (his) sound apart from the rest." Uncompromising, fiery, complex, passionate, and cathartic is how the All Music Guide labeled Michael's playing on Searching by Cooke Quartet, Statements by Michael Cooke and The Is by CKW Trio. His latest release, An Indefinite Suspension of The Possible, is an unusual mixture of woodwinds, trombone, cello, koto and percussion, creating a distinct synergy in improvised music that has previously been untapped