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Faculty

The newly hired faculty come from highly reputable programs all around the country and abroad, from the east and west coast, as well as the Midwest. They bring with them an array of expertise and up-to-date qualifications in the ever-changing music industry in the fields of performance, music theory and history, composition, jazz studies, recording, and the music business.

Isabelle Bélance Rodney Grisanti Matt Shevitz Adriana Tápanes-Inojosa

Isabelle Bélance

ibelance@ccc.edu (312) 553-5728

Isabelle Bélance's musical interests are both academic and artistic. She pursued two concurrent degrees at McGill University as an undergraduate (earning the Bachelor of Music Degree in Honors Music History and the Licentiate in Piano Performance). She continued her academic studies in Musicology at Duke University (earning the Master of Arts Degree and completing all but the dissertation towards the doctorate). As a graduate student, she actively performed, both on the piano and in choral groups. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century pianists, particularly the much-maligned rival of Franz Liszt--Sigismund Thalberg. Her teaching experience includes two summers at Hartwick College Music Camp, a one-year visiting Fellowship at St Lawrence University, and five years as full-time Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Music.

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Rodney Grisanti

rgrisanti@ccc.edu (312) 553-5989

Rodney Grisanti considers himself a musical explorer of sorts. He has traveled many parts of the world including North Africa, Sumatra, Java, Singapore, many parts of Europe, as well as North America in search of unique and interesting cultures and music. He is a classically trained musician with a Doctorate in composition from the University of Michigan. He has spent a great deal of time in the deep south recording and working with blues musicians such as R. L. Burnside, Asie Payton, Charles Caldwell, T-Model Ford, and many others. He has worked in the styles of hip-hop, blues, rock, classical, punk, country, soul, etc.

Rodney is fascinated with all types of music and culture and has never found a genre of music from which he could not learn. Rodney brings this passion and enthusiasm for music and culture into the classroom for the most selfish of reasons. He is looking for other explorers to join him in his search. He wants to use the talent and intelligence of these other explorers to help him describe, analyze, explain, create, and understand culture and music. He realizes that he cannot do this alone; that it takes many great minds to accomplish such a large goal. He knows this search is ongoing, that there are amazing places and music left to explore, and he is always looking for cohorts.

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Matt Shevitz

mshevitz@ccc.edu (312) 553-5925

In addition to being passionate about teaching, Matt Shevitz is also an active performer in the Chicago music scene. Throughout his music career he has performed alongside such internationally renowned jazz musicians as Dick Hyman, Bucky Pizzarelli, Johnny Frigo, Marvin Stamm, Bill Watrous, Frank Capp, Randy Sandke, Scott Robinson, Ken Peplowski, Byron Stripling, and Frank Wess among others. Matt has also performed at such festivals and clubs as the Jazz in the Park Festival (in Milwaukee, Wisconsin), the Waterfront Blues Festival (in Portland, Oregon), the Chicago Blues Festival, Lollapalooza, the House of Blues in Chicago, and as a featured artist for Oregon Festival of American Music (in Eugene, Oregon).

Recently, Matt began work on a doctorate in jazz performance from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. In addition to these responsibilities, and his family, Matt is leading his own quartet, performing original compositions along with selections from the classic jazz repertoire.

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Adriana Tápanes-Inojosa

atapanes@ccc.edu (312) 553-5727

Adriana Tápanes-Inojosa has a dual personality at Harold Washington College, one as the coordinator and developer of the Latin American & Latino Studies program, and the other as a trained singer and pianist. Therefore, Adriana teaches Fine Arts, Humanities, and Music courses at the college. She started her musical performance career at an early age in her native Venezuela, performing classical and popular music in various chamber music groups, choirs, popular vocal ensembles, and as a solo vocalist. She has a conservatory graduate degree in voice, academic studies in Literature, and a Licentiate in Piano Performance as an undergraduate.

Between 1982 and 1990, she actively performed as a piano accompanist for string and woodwind players of the Venezuela Youth Symphony Orchestra, and became involved in several vocal ensembles in popular and academic music at the same time. Then, in 1990 she moved to the U.S. to earn two Master of Music degrees in Piano Accompaniment and Chamber Music, and in Opera at the University of the Arts. Later, she continued her graduate education at Indiana University-Bloomington earning a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in Latin American Literature, doing her dissertation on social relationships between Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Music, being this kind of interdisciplinary approach what is considered her major focus of research until today. If you go to any of her classes, you will see her always bringing interdisciplinary connections to break stereotypes, mainly about African influences in Latin American cultures.

Adriana has also an extensive teaching experience, starting back in 1985 as a choral conductor and music theory instructor at the Venezuela Youth Orchestra Conservatory, in 1991 at the Philadelphia Latin American Music Association (AMLA). Then, as an Assistant Instructor at Indiana University, a full-time Lecturer at Washington State University, and as an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at Chicago State University.

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