Benjamin Altman is an active concertizer, chamber musician, and concert soloist, having played with the Macon Symphony Orchestra, the Ocmulgee Symphony, the Colorado Guitar Quartet, and the Arvada Center Chorale.
In addition to his activities as a performer, Mr. Altman has been a dedicated teacher for nearly 10 years. Having served on faculty at Nazareth College, the Eastman Community Music School, and the Rocky Ridge Music Center, he now teaches guitar for Arlington Public Schools and teaches privately across the Washington, D.C. area. As a graduate assistant at the Eastman School of Music, he taught private lessons and chamber music and gave a course on Guitar Pedagogy.
Mr. Altman constantly engages in outreach and the musical life of his community,
Benjamin Altman, Guitar, Mandolin & Ukulele
most recently as a member of the Friday Morning Music Club. In the past, he volunteered at the University of Colorado Hospital, and arranged community and educational performances for underserved audiences with Music For All in Rochester New York and The Creative Access in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the guitarist in the Denver band Story and Clark, has played with the Denver Mandolin Orchestra, and played tambura in a Balkan folk ensemble in Rochester. In addition to guitar, Benjamin has performed music by Henze, Webern, Zappa, Babbitt, Donatoni, and Bach in orchestral and chamber settings on the mandolin.
Mr. Altman earned the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts at the Eastman School of Music, where he was an assistant to Prof. Nicholas Goluses. He studied previously at the Peabody Institute and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where his teachers were Julian Gray and David Tanenbaum. Throughout his career he has expanded the horizons of the classical guitar by performing new music, including premieres of works by Jorge Liderman, Terry Riley, and David Plylar, and through transcriptions of music ranging from Bach and Rossini to Radiohead and Regina Spektor. His most recent project is a series of arrangements of music by Enrique Granados for guitar and cello.
