Barrick Stees is the Assistant Principal Bassoonist of the Cleveland Orchestra and Instructor of Bassoon at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Kent/Blossom Music. Stees received a bachelor's degree and performer’s certificate from the Eastman School of Music where he studied with K. David Van Hoesen.

He has concertized extensively in Europe, South America and Asia, including a solo tour of Hong Kong and China. He has appeared at international music festivals in Italy, Germany, Argentina, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. He has given recitals throughout the United States. Solo appearances include performances with the Hartford Symphony, the South Bend Symphony, the Brevard Music Center Orchestra and the Cass City Bach Festival.

Awarded the Presidential Scholar Teacher Recognition Award from the United States Secretary of Education, he has taught at Michigan State University, the Interlochen Arts Camp, the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Brevard Music Center and the University of Akron. His former students occupy prominent positions in orchestras and universities throughout the United States.

He was previously Principal Bassoonist with the Hartford Symphony and has played with the Pittsburgh and Detroit Symphony Orchestras as well as the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has recorded three solo CDs, The Romantic Bassoon, Opera Transcriptions and Paraphrases, and Nostalgica. His website and blog, BarryBlogs, contain a wealth of information for bassoonists.

John Steinmetz (b. 1951, Oakland, Calif.) is an American composer, educator and bassoonist.

Mr. Steinmetz grew up in Fresno, moving to Southern California to attend California Institute of the Arts.

As a bassoonist, John Steinmetz plays chamber music with XTET and Camerata Pacifica, he appears with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Los Angeles Bach Festival, and sometimes he contributes bassoon sounds to movie or television soundtracks. He has been a regular participant in the Oregon Bach Festival and a frequent guest faculty member at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music. He made three tours of Spain with the Bill Douglas Trio (one of those bassoon-oriented jazz-funk-Latin-Renaissance-Afro-Irish ensembles), he premiered Donald Crockett's Extant for bassoon and chamber ensemble with the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and recorded the piece with XTET, and he premiered his own concerto for bassoon and orchestra with the Santa Rosa Symphony.

Mr. Steinmentz teaches bassoon, chamber music, and a graduate seminar for performers, about transforming notation into performance at UCLA.

As a composer, Steinmetz's work centers primarily around wind chamber music, but has also written comic pieces that poke fun at the concert ritual and other human foibles.

John's work in education follows two general directions: helping listeners understand and enjoy music, and exploring ways to foster learning in any field-particularly learning that encourages both independent thinking and awareness of interdependence. During the 1980s and '90s, John worked with computer scientists at Atari, Apple, and Disney Imagineering, consulting on projects for Alan Kay, one of the inventors of personal computing. While computer scientists developed new software for enduser programming and tested it with children and their teachers, John explored the effects of new and old technologies on learning and expression. He composed pieces involving computers, he programmed software for classroom use, and he researched creative thinking in classrooms with education researcher Doreen Nelson. He wrote about learning environments and about the possibilities and pitfalls of computer use in classrooms

As Artist in Residence for two years at the Pasadena Conservatory of Music, John facilitated design teams of community members, parents, staff, and faculty to create new kinds of concert events and innovative enhancements for administration and teaching.

Since its first publication in 1993 in the NARAS Journal, John's essay about music and society, Resuscitating Art Music, has circulated widely among musicians, teachers, administrators, and other music-lovers. John's booklet How to Enjoy a Live Concert is published by Naxos Records. John also created and edited Music for Kids for Naxos, a book and recordings for children, with folk songs, dances, music from around the world, musical projects, and narrated introductions to aspects of music. His article Music for All appeared in the Journal of the Music Teachers National Association.

Associate principal bassoonist of the San Francisco Symphony, grew up in Detroit and studied at Indiana University with Leonard Sharrow. He earned a master’s degree from Juilliard, where he studied with Stephen Maxym, and went on to play with the New Jersey Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, before joining the San Francisco Symphony in 1983. In 1985, Mr. Dibner formed PARLANTE, a chamber orchestra that he conducted and that featured many of his San Francisco Symphony colleagues. He is a frequent chamber music performer and appears regularly at music festivals in Aspen, Marlboro, and San Diego. Mr. Dibner has performed many times in the SF Symphony Chamber Music Series and is also a coach for the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.