Gwyneth Bravo

Gwyneth Bravo, Ph.D., is active in the fields of musicology, music education, and cello pedagogy. She earned a doctorate in Historical Musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles (2011) where she was a recipient of a President's Fellowship. Gwyneth has a broad background in the field of education and holds a state of California teaching credential in Crosscultural, Language, and Academic Development (CLAD), with a specialization in elementary music, which she earned from the Bilingual/Multicultural Education Department (BMED) at California State University, Sacramento in 2001. Influenced by the principles of Waldorf education, the pedagogical approach of Shinichi Suzuki, and the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire, Gwyneth worked as a bilingual (Spanish) and ESL elementary school teacher in Sacramento public schools. As a recipient of several Artists in Schools Grants from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission, Gwyneth taught literacy through poetry as well as music in inner city public schools for two years, also establishing the Martin Luther King Jr. Cello Program with a Neighborhoods Art Grant from the commission in 1998. Founded as a non-profit organization the following year with the support of attorney Nancy Lee, this after-school music program provided group and private cello lessons to students at the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School and surrounding community for a period of four years and was featured on the television program Good Day Sacramento.

Gwyneth began her cello studies in Los Angeles with Gretchen Geber at the age of twelve. She was a student of Yehuda Hanani at Peabody Conservatory and later worked with Janet Horvath and Tanya Remenikova in Minneapolis where she earned her B.A. in Music from the University of Minnesota. While working in Japan for NHK Spring Co. Ltd, Gwyneth studied Japanese taiko and shinobue music and performed with the drum group Nippatsu Taiko. Gwyneth holds an M.M. in Cello from California State University, Sacramento where she was a student of Andrew Luchansky, also working as a cello instructor for the Community Music Division of the university and performing with the Mariposa Piano Trio. She completed her pedagogical training as a cello teacher at the Chicago Institute of Music and at Ithaca College in New York between 2002 and 2007 where her principle mentors were Pam Devenport, Jean Dexter, and Nancy Yamagata.

As a cello teacher in the Los Angeles area, Gwyneth maintains a private studio and has been active on the board of the Suzuki Music Association of California/Los Angeles, serving as its president from 2007-2009. Presently, Gwyneth works through the So La Academy as the cello teacher and pedagogical advisor for the strings program at the St. Anne’s School, which serves children from underprivileged communities. Inspired by the vision of El Sistema, the program was created as a sustainable model for music education where students receive music lessons as part of their school curriculum but are additionally mentored in an after school context by high school cellists and violinist. These students receive community service credit for their work and additionally participate in a year-long pedagogical training under the direction of So La Academy Director Margaret Lysy (violin) and faculty members Javier Orman (violin) and Gwyneth Bravo (cello). Begun in Fall 2010, the strings program at the St. Anne’s school is featured in the forthcoming PBS documentary Arts and the Mind. A link to Gwyneth’s most recent student cello concert on June 25, 2011, and including children from the St. Anne’s School, can be seen @ Cellobration 2011.

Gwyneth’s research in the field of musicology focuses primarily on issues relating to exile, nationalism, technology, and war in twentieth-century European music. As a Fulbright scholar to Germany, she worked and published with the research group Exilmusik. Recently, she served as the Visual Research Assistant to Music Director James Conlon for the Los Angeles Opera's 2007 Recovered Voices Project. A winner of a Collegium of University Teaching Fellowship, Gwyneth taught her own seminar on Music and War at UCLA in 2009. As a development of the course, Gwyneth is currently working on two related projects: a co-edited volume on Music of War with ethnomusicologist Benjamin J. Harbert and a collaborative, documentary film with filmmaker David Leaf.
Gwyneth is a member of UNESCO’s International Society for Music Education (ISME), the American String Teacher’s Association (ASTA), the Suzuki Association of the Americas (SAA), the Suzuki Music Association of California/Los Angeles, the American Musicological Society (AMS), and the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM).

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Gwyneth Bravo