Board of Directors
Sophie Benn
President
Dr. Sophie Benn is a cellist, baroque cellist, and assistant professor of musicology at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. She brings to Trobár over a decade of experience in nonprofit and arts communities, having worked with other Cleveland-area organizations as an administrator, archivist, volunteer, and performer. For five years, Sophie was a director of Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project, an organization dedicated to new and experimental music. She earned her PhD in musicology from Case Western Reserve University in August 2021 and holds degrees in music history, cello performance, and pedagogy from Rice University and the Cleveland Institute of Music.
devin burke
Secretary
Devin Burke is an assistant professor in Music History at the University of Louisville. He received his Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University, and his research centers on music of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries with areas of interest that include French spectacle and the relationship between science, natural philosophy, and music. Dr. Burke’s work has been supported by the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, the Richard A. Zdanis Research Fellowship, the Arts & Sciences Dissertation Fellowship, and the Heinrich Award from Case Western Reserve University. In 2019, he brought Trobár to the University of Louisville for a residency.
Don Mullins
Treasurer
Doniphan Mullins recently retired from a three-decade career in Electronic Trading Client Services at Goldman Sachs in Chicago, resettling with his wife in Bainbridge, OH. He has many years of experience in non-profit finances as head of the Finance Committee at First Baptist Church of Oak Park where he was responsible for the church budget. A lifelong music lover, Mr. Mullins is an amateur violin and viola player as well as a choral singer in both church and community choirs. He has provided helpful guidance in setting up systems to manage Trobár’s finances.
John Romey
Member-at-large
Dr. John Romey, assistant professor of music at Purdue University at Fort Wayne, is a specialist of early modern French music, culture, politics, and spectacle; of South American colonial and indigenous musics; and of historical bowed bass instruments, instrumental technology, and historical performance practices. Trained in historically informed performance at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Romey is an expert on the history of the Viennese Violone and performs professionally on violones and viols of all sizes. He has published the entry on the “Double Bass” for Oxford Bibliographies in Music and is under contract to contribute new articles about the double bass and the violone for Grove Music Online. In collaboration with John Pringle, renowned luthier of historical instruments, he has created a performance-based research project that will reconstruct a consort of French Renaissance viols (https://thefrenchconsortproject.com). While grounded in scholarship, this project will culminate in the creation of experiential learning components for students in the music history classroom. The French Consort Project has received financial support from the Viola da Gamba Society of America.