Dr. Geoffery Munger, DMA

Geoffery Munger is a Southern California based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and educator.
 
As a composer, Geoffery strives to combine their experiences, both spiritually and personally, to create music that is meditative, introspective, and organic. Concerned with the idea of a singular moment and the power of deep listening as a meditative process, Geoffery draws their musical inspiration from small, everyday instances and sounds. He is inspired by his upbringing in a lower-class family in the Mexican border town of Holtville, California where the sounds of mariachi, jazz, and punk rock permeated his youth and influenced his musical palette. Munger has written for a wide range of performance forces from solo pieces to large, staged dramas and strives to meld the world of popular music with concert music.  
 
Their music has been performed throughout the United States and was featured at the 2016 Atlantic Music Festival in Waterville, ME. Other commissions and grants include the 2020 Friedman Humanities Grant, 2019 Crotty Endowed Fellowship, 2018 Kenneth Fiske Endowed Fellowship, Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity, The Newgate Orchestra, The Kettleblack Orchestra, and the Huntington Beach School District. His research on aleatoric notation in wind ensemble music was recently presented at the 2022 Research On Contemporary Composition Conference at the University of North Georgia.
 
Munger has amassed over sixteen years of experience as a music educator teaching ages five to ninety-five on a wide range of instruments and voice types. He focuses on three questions when teaching: What’s next for music and music education? How do we disrupt the paradigm in the music education repertoire? How do we listen? Geoffery strives to help a new generation of musicians to reevaluate the social structures and norms of Western European concert music that have been in place for too long and forge new, unique musical paths. Geoffery has served on the faculty at California State University, Fullerton and California State University, San Bernardino as a lecturer in music composition and theory and is now a professor of composition/theory at Saddleback College.
 
Geoffery holds a DMA from Claremont Graduate University where he studied with Dr. Peter Boyer. He received his B.M. in Music Composition from Cal State, Fullerton in 2013, studying with the late Dr. Lloyd Rodgers and received his M.M. in Music Theory and Composition in 2016 from the same institution where he studied with composers, Dr. Pamela Madsen and Dr. Ken Walicki.

Geoffery resides with his wonderful operatic soprano/librarian wife and three cats in Orange County, CA where, when he is not teaching or writing music, he enjoys playing video games (particularly J.R.P.G.s), gardening, and making gnarly hot sauces.