About PMP: Program Descriptions: Staff

Matthew Levy, Director
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Matt joined the Philadelphia Music Project in 2000 with an extensive background in music performance, composition, and arts administration. Hailed by the Saxophone Journal as "a complete virtuoso of the tenor saxophone" and by the New York Times for his "energetic and enlivening" performances, Matt is a current and founding member of the PRISM Quartet, an award-winning, critically-acclaimed chamber ensemble specializing in new classical music and modern jazz. Winners of two Chamber Music America/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming and the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, PRISM has concertized extensively throughout the Americas, including a five-country tour of Latin America under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. PRISM has been presented by Carnegie Hall, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and as soloists with the Detroit Symphony and Cleveland Orchestras. PRISM has commissioned over 100 works by the nation's leading composers, including William Bolcom, Martin Bresnick, Bright Sheng, Zhou Long, Bernard Rands, Steven Mackey, and Chen Yi. PRISM has also led collaborative projects with an eclectic range of partners, including Music From China, Ethel, Cantori New York, Talujon Percussion Quartet, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and jazz artists Ben Monder, Larry Goldings, Rick Margitza, Gerald Cleaver, and John Riley. Matt serves as executive director of PRISM's nonprofit organization and has successfully developed the ensemble's concert series, commissioning, recording, and residency programs.

Matt holds three degrees from the University of Michigan, where he was a James B. Angell Scholar and a recipient of the Lawrence Teal Award. He has served on the faculties of Settlement Music School and the Universities of Michigan, Redlands, and Toledo. He received two fellowships in composition from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and composed works for orchestra, choir, musical theater, dance, and jazz and electronic music ensembles. Matt has scored four motion pictures, including PBS's Diary of a City Priest by Emmy nominee Eugene Martin, featured at the Sundance Film Festival. His music has been described as "gorgeous and ethereal" by Classical Magazine and "pulsing and wittily colored" by the Philadelphia Inquirer and has been broadcast on NPR's "Performance Today" from Washington DC, WQRS's "Around Town" from Detroit, WQXR's "The Listening Room" from New York City, WFMT's "Dame Myra Hess Series" from Chicago, CBC, and "Voice of America." He has recorded for Koch International, Albany, Naxos, Deutsche Grammophon, Tzadik, Innova, and Grammavision and is an artist/clinician for the Selmer Company.

Elizabeth Sayre, Program Specialist
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Elizabeth Sayre joined PMP as Program Specialist in September 2009.  She holds bachelor’s degrees in humanities (French and music) and engineering from M.I.T., a master’s degree from the Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University, and has completed several years of graduate studies in ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University.

As a percussionist, Elizabeth has apprenticed with masters in Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, and West African drumming. In Afro-Cuban music, she studied with Omomola Iyabunmi, Olori Oriyomi, W. Paul Lucas, Clifford “Peache” Jarman, Leonard “Doc” Gibbs, Ron Howerton, John Amira, Orlando Fiol, Amelia Pedroso, Lázaro Pedroso, Michael Spiro, and Michel Aldama in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, and Havana, Cuba, where she also performed with Amelia Pedroso’s Ibbu Okun in 2000.  Since 1999 she has accompanied dance classes in New York City for former dancers from the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional, Yoruba Andabo, and Cutumba, some of Cuba’s top professional folkloric companies.  Elizabeth is musical director of Okan Iloro, an all women's folkloric group, and was percussion captain for Obini Ashe, a 17-woman ensemble that appeared at Symphony Space in New York and the Painted Bride in 2003.  She has been a member of the Philadelphia dance band sensation Alô Brasil since 2001, and has played and recorded with a variety of groups since 1993.

Elizabeth has performed, taught, written about, and organized events around music in Philadelphia since the early 1990s. She is Visiting Instructor, teaching world music classes at Swarthmore College, and has taught Afro-Cuban percussion in the Fetter chamber music program there.  She taught world music lecture classes and coached the Latin music ensemble at Temple University; consulted for, directed, and taught percussion at the bilingual community music school at AMLA (Artistas y Músicos Latino Americanos) for eleven years; and was a grant writer, researcher, and staff member at the Philadelphia Folklore Project for twelve years.  She has given demo-lectures on Afro-Cuban percussion at universities in the northeast, south, and southwest, and has been a teacher at the annual multi-tradition Born to Drum Women’s Drum Camp in Petaluma, California, since 2007.

Elizabeth has published articles in the Center for Black Music Research Digest, the Yearbook  for Traditional Music, and the Philadelphia Folklore Project’s magazine, Works In Progress.  She also co-authored a chapter on Afro-Cuban batá drumming, with Robin Moore of the University of Texas, in Analytic Studies in World Music (Michael Tenzer, editor), published by Oxford University Press in 2006.

Willa Rohrer, Program Associate
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Willa Rohrer joined PMP as Program Assistant in May 2007. Before joining PMP, she worked as a research and production assistant for documentary filmmaker (and Pew Fellow) Glenn Holsten. Willa graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in English literature. Her honors thesis, ‘Stinging Red, Smarting Pink’: The Ethics of Representation in Nabokov’s Lolita, received a President’s Award for Undergraduate Research. Her essays about live arts, books, and public transportation have appeared in the Philadelphia Weekly. She is currently avoiding work on a collection of short stories.