Carmean Music Series

From 1996-2001, Rhine was the Assistant Professor of Horn at Wichita State University and Principal Horn with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra.  While in Wichita, she was a member of the Lieurance Woodwind Quintet and Wichita Brass Quintet.   Rhine has also held the Principal Horn position with the Louisiana Philharmonic in New Orleans to which she made significant administrative contributions in that cooperative ensemble.

An enthusiastic chamber musician,  Amy Jo joined the Mountain View, CA based horn ensemble, QUADRE, in 2008.  She performed on and helped produce their albums, Our Time and Horns For The Holidays.   Rhine is also a founding member of the female horn ensemble, Playdate, which was formed for the 47th International Horn Symposium Los Angeles to celebrate the deep pool of female talent who contribute to the LA horn sound.  She is active in the LosAngeles recording studios and frequently performs at Horn workshops throughout the United States.

Rhine received her training from Verne Reynolds at the Eastman School of Music earning a BM degree and Performer’s Certificate and with James Decker at the University of Southern California graduating with a MM degree.  She was highly influenced by her first horn instructor, Suzanne Fox, in her formative years.

Amidst busy performance schedules, Amy Jo and her husband, Greg Roosa, reserve ample family time to spend with their sons, Norty and Sutton.

Born in Dallas and raised in Richmond, Indiana, Mr. Vaughn earned a Bachelor of Music degree with high distinction and a Performer’s Certificate from Indiana University in 1992, continuing with graduate work in education and conducting at Indiana University and George Mason University. He was also honored to be a Chancellor Scholar at Indiana University, singularly representing the School of Music.  His varied musical background has included being the winner of the Eastern Trombone Workshop solo competition and being a member of the Disneyland All-American College Jazz Band, in addition to performance on stage with many of the world’s most famous conductors and soloists. An accomplished music educator, Mr. Vaughn teaches trombone, coaches brass chamber music, and conducts orchestral repertoire classes at the Curtis Institute of Music and Temple University. He was the founder and Artistic Director of Bar Harbor Brass Week, an intense summer festival for high school and college brass players from 2000 through 2016. Mr. Vaughn credits most of his success to his former teachers, including David Brumfield in Richmond, M. Dee Stewart at Indiana University, former trombonist with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the late Dr. Milton Stevens, former principal trombone of the National Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Vaughn is a Bach Artist, and Ultimate Brass artist, playing on Bach and Conn trombones, and Ultimate Brass mouthpieces.

Dr. Niepoetter was accepted into the clarinet section of “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band in Washington, DC in 1988 at the age of 22. At that time, he was the second youngest member of the band. From Presidential Inaugurations to a memorial service at Ground Zero on the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attack, Dr. Niepoetter has performed for many of our nation’s recent historic events. Over his twenty-eight-year career he has performed in all forty-eight continental states, Norway, England, Switzerland and participated in a three-week tour of the Soviet Union in 1992. He retired with the rank of Master Gunnery Sergeant in August of 2016.

As an educator, he currently teaches at the Jim Henson Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts at Northwestern High School (Maryland). He has given masterclasses at Eastman, Northwestern, Indiana, Michigan and dozens of other universities and high schools across the country. For ten years he was the Marine Band’s Educational Outreach Coordinator and organized hundreds of masterclasses and clinics for students of all ages.

Dr. Niepoetter is a member of the Maryland Symphony Orchestra and has performed with most regional orchestras in the Washington, DC area. He has been a regular substitute with the National Symphony Orchestra and was invited to perform with the NSO on three national concert tours. He has also performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Mariinsky Orchestra and the Smithsonian Chamber Players. Dr. Niepoetter has performed with a wide variety of artists including Kathleen Battle, Aretha Franklin, Denyce Graves, John Williams, Marvin Hamlisch, Marilyn Horne, Quincy Jones, Patti LuPone, Yo-Yo Ma, Miley Cyrus, The Oak Ridge Boys, Mstislav Rostropovich, Leonard Slatkin, Frederica von Stade, Osmo Vänskä, André Watts, and Trisha Yearwood.

Highlights of his 2023/24 season include a performance with the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra, solo performances in Lebanon Valley, New York City and San Diego, and a three-concert tour of New Zealand.

An accomplished recording artist, Henry Wong Doe has released seven recordings on the Trust, Rattle, Klavier and HR Recording labels. Four of the seven albums feature new or recently composed New Zealand music. His performances and albums have been featured on New Zealand’s Concert FM radio program, WNYC (New York), WFMT (Chicago) and WQED (Pittsburgh) radio stations. Jed Distler of Classics Today gave his album Landscape Preludes (Rattle RAT-D046) a 9/10 rating for both artistic and sound quality, writing “the selections are appreciably varied, well-crafted for piano… [Wong Doe] mastered the notes and assimilated the music to the highest standards.” Henry’s chamber recordings include an album for Klavier Records (K11193) of woodwind chamber music with the Keystone Chamber Winds, and two recent albums (E161HR and E162HR) for HR Recordings of rediscovered works for cello and piano with Michael Kevin Jones.

In 2023, Henry was awarded an Arts Grant from Creative New Zealand (Arts Council of New Zealand) for his latest commissioning and recording project, Perspectives. The project features six new works for piano by New Zealand composers, with the goal to illustrate each composer’s perspective of events of the previous few years. Perspectives was premiered in April at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and then recorded and released on Rattle Records.

Henry Wong Doe studied at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and Indiana University Bloomington before earning a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from The Juilliard School in New York. His teachers have included Susan Smith-Gaddis, Bryan Sayer, Evelyne Brancart, Leonard Hokanson and Joseph Kalichstein. Wong Doe holds a faculty position as Professor of Piano and Keyboard Area Chair at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. When not playing the piano, he enjoys snow skiing, jogging and playing tennis.

For more information, please visit henrywongdoe.com.

Throughout her career Jan has performed as both a solo and collaborative musician, taught workshops on a variety of topics, and inspired audiences and congregations. While in high school in Colby, Kansas, she was invited to play her first European piano recital in Andover, England.  Since then she has performed in many venues in North America and Europe, as well as in Australia, Russia, South Korea, and Tahiti. In 2015, she designed and led a hymn festival at the International Gathering of Hymn Societies at Cambridge University.  She has been a featured artist and presenter at regional and national conventions of the American Guild of Organists (AGO), the Hymn Society in the U.S. and Canada, the American Choral Directors Association, and other musicians’ organizations, and on American Public Media’s Pipedreams and other broadcasts.  Several solo and collaborative recordings are available, including her Grammy-nominated album The Orchestral Organ, released by Reference Recordings in 2019 and nominated as Best Classical Instrumental Solo and in two other categories in 2020. Her most recent solo disc is Marked for Grace, released by Naxos in 2021.

Dr. Kraybill has degrees in music education and piano and organ performance. She attained the AGO’s Fellow certificate, organists’ highest certification level, in 2010.  She has served in local, regional, and national roles in the AGO and other non-profit organizations.  Her extra-musical interests include lacemaking, painting, and riding her Harley-Davidson motorcycle. You are welcome to visit www.jankraybill.com for more information.