Starling Chamber Orchestra’s Josh Halpern Takes Top Honors at MTNA Senior String Competition

Congratulations to Josh Halpern, who won top honors at the Music Teachers National Association (MTNA) Senior String Competition.

Halpern, 17, is a junior at Oakwood High School. He is principal cellist of the Starling Chamber Orchestra, part of CCM’s pre-college program for advanced strings students. At Starling, Halpern is also a member of The Polaris String Quartet, which performed in Salzburg, Austria last month and will compete in the prestigious Fischoff Chamber Music Competition in South Bend, Indiana this month.

Halpern has also performed as principal cellist with the Dayton Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, the Oakwood High School Symphony Orchestra and Muse Machine. He is a founding member of the Blackbird String Quartet, which has played at public and private events throughout the Miami Valley since 2006, and of Duo Dolce, which has performed similarly since 2008. He currently studies with Alan Rafferty, cellist with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

This summer, he will again attend the Meadowmount School of Music in Westmont, New York, an intensive seven-week summer program for accomplished young strings players training for professional careers in music. At Meadowmount, Halpern studies with Hans Jørgen Jensen, professor of cello at Northwestern University’s School of Music. During previous summers, he attended the Boston University Tanglewood Institute String Quartet Workshop and the Credo Chamber Chamber Music Program at Oberlin Conservatory.

The MTNA Senior Performance Competition took place Sunday, March 27, 2011, during the 2011 MTNA National Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a national competition winner, Halpern received $2,000, provided by the MTNA Foundation Fund.

The three-tiered MTNA competitions begin at the state level. First-place winners of each state’s competition advance to a division competition. Division winners compete in the national finals.

Music Teachers National Association is a nonprofit organization of independent and collegiate music teachers committed to furthering the art of music through teaching, performance, composition and scholarly research. Founded in 1876, Music Teachers National Association is the oldest music teachers association in the United States.

For more information about MTNA, contact the MTNA national headquarters at (513) 421-1420, mtnanet@mtna.org or visit the website at www.mtna.org.