Featured Members
Patrick Valentino
Composer, Conductor, Playwright
Graduate of Montclair State University
Currently attending the New England Conservatory
2005 Graduate Fellowship Recipient
In addition to his composition studies at Montclair State University and the Moscow Conservatory in Russia, Patrick Valentino spent his undergraduate years participating in various campus and community activities. He acted as a liaison between the Global Education Department and potential study abroad students, formed and managed a swing band that played free concerts for the public and hospital television, acted as a church and music minister to local nursing homes and hospitals, and served as the music director for a campus-wide AIDS benefit gala.
Patrick considers Phi Kappa Phi a rare forum of intellect and action. Of receiving a Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Fellowship, Patrick said, "I was facing a life for the next few years which would have been academically and artistically edifying but almost prohibitively expensive, and the fellowship not only aided a little in this vein but served as a reminder not only that I'm a part of something great but also to accept the challenges life provides."
In addition to his graduate studies at the New England Conservatory, Patrick is looking forward to studies outside of the classroom setting. "The educational situation for an artist is not sitting in a classroom; it is absorbing as much of life as possible and learning how to assimilate it and give it to others through art," said Patrick. "I am a composer; we provide a vision of the world in our own language, and I am still studying because of an inexplicable and irrepressible drive to fully understand both."