Alicia Mastromonaco

Office

About

A native of San Francisco, Alicia began her music studies on piano and voice before moving her focus to the French Horn. She holds positions in the Monterey and Marin Symphonies as well as the Carmel Bach Festival, where she plays both modern and period horns. Alicia is an active freelancer in the Bay Area, and has played with the San Francisco Symphony, New Century Chamber Orchestra, Santa Rosa Symphony, Oakland Symphony, Berkeley Symphony, California Symphony, Symphony San José, Modesto Symphony and others, and has recorded on the soundstage at Skywalker Sound.

Alicia earned her bachelor degrees in horn performance and musicology from Boston University, where her principal teachers were Daniel Katzen and Eric Ruske. She did graduate study at the Universität der Künste Berlin under Christian-Friedrich Dallmann. Alicia earned a masters degree in horn performance at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying with Christopher Cooper.

In addition to her work as an in-demand horn player, Alicia is also a musicologist whose scholarly interests involve studying 20th- and 21st-century orchestral communities through the lenses of labor politics, shifting systems of patronage and economic structures, and socio-cultural mores. She earned a masters of arts and PhD in musicology from University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, “Breakdown on the Freeway Philharmonic: Understanding the Causes and Effects of Regional Orchestra Bankruptcies in the San Francisco Bay Area,” traces the history of the Oakland and San José Symphonies from their inception through their bankruptcies in 1988 and 2002, respectively. In addition to her work with labor activists, Alicia writes program notes, gives pre-concert lectures, and introduces schoolchildren to the orchestral world through her work as education coordinator with the Monterey Symphony.

When she is not playing music or writing about it, Alicia enjoys gardening, hiking, baking sourdough bread and other baked goods, and spending time with her family and two cats in the El Cerrito hills.