Gwyneth Bravo is active in the fields of musicology, music education, and cello pedagogy and is a doctoral candidate in Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles where she received a President’s Fellowship.  Earlier as a Fulbright scholar at the Musicological Institute of the University of Hamburg in Germany, Gwyneth worked with the research group Exilmusik contributing an article to their book Lebenswege von Musikerinnen im Dritten Reich und im Exil (2000).  Under the auspices of the Fulbright, Gwyneth also researched the music of Viktor Ullmann at archives in Europe, which served as a departure point for her ongoing work on the composer.  Most recently, Gwyneth served as the Visual Research Assistant for the Los Angeles Opera’s Recovered Voices Project—a series of performances presented by Music Director James Conlon with the opera in March 2007.  While Gwyneth focuses primarily on issues relating to nationalism, technology, and war in twentieth-century European music, her research also includes an exploration of diverse lineages of esotericism in the western musical tradition from the seventeenth century to the present.  Her dissertation, “Composing at the Nullpunkt: Histories and Philosophies of Death in Operas of Pavel Haas, Erwin Schulhoff, and Viktor Ullmann,” examines changing cultural conceptions of death during the first half of the twentieth century with reference to operatic works by these composers who were active in Prague during the 1920s and 1930s.  Drawing on history and philosophy, the dissertation explores how the dramatic confrontation with death is portrayed as a powerful catalyst in shaping the exigencies of human freedom. As part of her continued engagement with Ullmann’s work, Gwyneth is preparing a multi-media presentation of the composer’s 1944 melodrama for speaker and piano Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke.  Gwyneth is the winner of the 2007 Ingolf Dahl Competition for a paper presented on Ullmann’s opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis at the Joint Meeting of the Pacific Southwest and Northern Chapters of the American Musicological Society.

Gwyneth, who holds a state of California teaching credential in education, has been active as a music educator and cello teacher in both public and private schools since 1998.  As a recipient of several Artists in Schools Grants from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission for teaching music in Sacramento public schools, Gwyneth established the Martin Luther King Jr. Cello Program with a Neighborhoods Art Grant from the commission in 1998.  Founded as a non-profit organization, this after-school music program provided group and private cello lessons to students at the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School for three years. 

Gwyneth studied cello with Yehuda Hanani at Peabody Conservatory and later with Janet Horvath and Tanya Remenikova in Minneapolis where she earned her B.A. in Music from the University of Minnesota.  Later, while working in Japan for two years, Gwyneth studied Japanese taiko and shinobue music and performed with the drum group Nippatsu Taiko.  Gwyneth holds an M.M. in Cello from California State University, Sacramento and is presently active as a cello teacher in the Los Angeles area where she teaches at a community music school and serves as the President of the Board of the Suzuki Music Association of California/Los Angeles.  Gwyneth is featured on the compact disc of guitar and cello music, An Evening in Spain and Latin America.