Biography

John Romey is a musician who's broad range of experiences and interests have fused to create an enthusiastic and individualistic approach to music that is passionate yet intellectual. Romey strives to balance a rigorous career as a performing artist, music educator, and scholar. He is also an active composer.

As a performing artist, Romey has performed in North America and Europe. He can be heard playing a variety of bowed bass instruments throughout North America. He performs regularly on period and modern instruments in a variety of contexts, including orchestral, chamber, and solo. His broad-based appoach to music enables him to blur the lines between many musical worlds from classical to jazz, baroque to contemporary. Romey has studied bass with noted teachers and performing artists such as Rob Nairin, Cahty Meints, Nicholas Walker, and François Rabbath. As a composer, he is interested in furthering the growth of repertoire for the double bass, as well as composing for various contemporary classical and jazz ensembles. He is particularly interested in integrating contemporary aesthetics with improvised music.

Romey maintains a private studio at his home in Cleveland, Ohio. He has lead an ensemble, given workshops, as well as been a guest lecturer at the Jazz Institute at the Community School of Music and Artsin Ithaca, NY as well as taught courses at Ithaca College School of Music.

John Romey is currently pursuing a Doctoral in Musical Arts in historical performance practice at Case Western Reserve University where he performs regularily on Viennese violone, G-violone, and viola da gamba. He received a M.M. in modern double bass performance from Ithaca College School of Music in May 2011. There he received an assistantship and taught Class Double Bass and Class Strings, and was a T.A. for Dr. Nicholas Walker. Romey received his B.A. in Music with honors from The City College of New York (CUNY) where he worked closely with his mentor, musicologist Barbara Russano Hanning, author of Norton's Concise History of Western Music. His primary interests as a scholar include performance practice, the history of bass instruments, 18th-century German and French Music, musical iconography, Ornamentation, Iconography, as well as instrumental virtuosity.

He has been awarded numerous scholarships, including the Geico Family Scholarship (2002-2003), the Kaye Scholarship (2004-current), and Georgie and William B. Snyder Scholarship (2005-current). With the aid of fellowships, including the City College Fellowship (2005-current) and the Naumberg Fellowship (2006), he has been able to finance several trips to Paris, France, where he has conducted research with French double bass virtuoso, François Rabbath, on his tri-partite method Nouvelle technique de la contrabasse. Through video-documented interviews and hands-on lessons with Rabbath, as well as interviews with Rabbath's students around the world, Romey is currently writing a book based on Rabbath's pedagogy. His forthcoming book, It's Not in the Book: Meditation on the Methodology and Pedagogy of François Rabbath and the Nouvelle technique de la contrabass, aims to make notes on revisions and updates in Rabbath's three method books, as well as providing more detailed and supplementary instruction that Rabbath teaches in the lessons, but that is not specifically notated in the method books.