Student Centered Learning
Dayton String Trio
Moira Levant is a teacher, composer, fiddler, professional violinist, and author. She has degrees in Music History from Wright State University, Music Composition from Carnegie Mellon, and Ethnomusicology from the University of Limerick, Limerick Ireland. She is a member of ASCAP and the Dayton Music Club. Moira plays in various ensembles around Dayton, playing for churches, fairs, and weddings. She has a long association with the Liberty Dancers, George Rogers Clark Park Association, and is currently their fiddler. As a composer she has won several music composition awards through both ASCAP and the Ohio Federation of Music Clubs.
She along with Christian Berg is one of the founders of COCOA Music, Composers of Ohio Collaborative Organization for Acoustic music. COCOA is a non-profit organization which strives to provide a platform for composers of all ages to have their work performed and recorded by professionals. Cocoa music produces at least two concerts a year and at least one masterclass a year for younger composers.
Denise Carter earned her B.Mus. Ed degree from Wright State University and has been teaching privately since 1993. She has received additional training and performance experience at the conservatoire du Busobre (Morges Switzerland), Berklee College of Music and was a participant in the Starling-DeLay Symposium at the Julliard School in 2019. Ms. Carter has played in orchestras in the US and Japan and currently serves as the principal second violinist and Youth Strings Director with the Miami Valley Symphony Orchestra.
Mr. Christian Berg holds a Master of Arts in Theory and Composition from Montclair State University, NJ and a Bachelor of Music in Double Bass Performance from Manhattan School of Music in New York. He has also had private studies in piano, voice, and guitar.
He has taught guitar, bass, and composition/arranging, in the classical, pop, jazz, and Latin music idioms at the University level and at middle school and high school workshops and clinics throughout the Midwest. He is currently adjunct professor at Otterbein University in Westerville and the University of Dayton. He has also served for many years as a faculty member at the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp and the Miami Valley Jazz Camp.
He has enjoyed an active career in jazz for four decades as a performer in clubs, concerts, festivals, films, radio, and television with Susanna McKorkle, Mel Lewis, Jimmy Knepper, Joe Albany, Chuck Wayne, Bob Wilber, Marty Grosz, John Pizzarelli, and many others. Since 2005 he has been the bassist with the prestigious Columbus Jazz Orchestra and has performed with them in Denmark, Germany, and all over the US as well as in their regular concert series at the Southern Theatre in Columbus, Ohio.
Mr. Berg appears on dozens of commercial recordings and his CDs of original compositions, A Man is a Tree and Sweet Sorrow, both on Hipgnosis Records, have received much critical acclaim.
He is very active as a composer/arranger and his songs, jazz compositions, orchestral and chamber pieces and big band arrangements have been performed and recorded by many artists, locally and nationally. He has written music for film & television, musical theatre and video games. With Moira Levant, he co-founded the Dayton-based Composers Organization, COCOA.
As the former Director of Research and Music Development with Brain Actuated Technologies, Inc., Yellow Springs, OH, he developed and patented software for brain-actuated music. He is the inventor of the Berg Bass-in-a-Box, a collapsible semi-acoustic bass.