December 5, 2023
Shin Kim
Shin Kim is a Master student at the Royal Academy of Music, London, with Professor Dr. Rubens Askenar. Prior to that, he was studying at the Korea University of Arts in Seoul with Byungmoo Lee, and for a year was student of Karlheinz Essl at the University of Arts in Vienna. In his work, he distinguishes three major themes: religion, narrative and psychological phenomena, paying great attention to making his music understandable to all audiences.
He is the winner of the George Enescu International Competition 2022 in the symphony music category.
Also, he won the 1 st prize at the concours de Genéve with his work "The song of Oneiroi". In "The song of Oneiroi", he tells the story of the dream world - and tells it to himself as the dreamer - using not words but pronunciation systems from various languages and using microphones to amplify, diversify and spatialise his music and to make more dreamlike.
December 10, 2023
Jessica Krash
Jessica Krash is a native of Washington, DC and continues to find it an interesting and challenging place to think about worldview in music and art. She was awarded the 2010 “Wammie” for Classical Composer (Washington Area Music Association’s version of a Grammy). Her work has appeared in traditional and experimental concerts and radio in the US, Europe, and Asia, including a work for dancers and saxophones on Washington’s canal in a thunderstorm. Jessica’s 2018 chamber and vocal music CD (Albany Records) was praised by the Wall Street Journal, Gramophone, and Fanfare, was “Recording of the Month” in Voix des Arts, and was named in “10 of the Best New Releases in 2018” by The Daffodil Perspective. Her solo piano CD (Ravello/Capstone Records) was listed by Tim Page in The Washington Post and Detroit News as one of the most interesting recordings of 2006.
January 10, 2024
Curtis stewart
Praised for “combining omnivory and brilliance” (The New York Times), four-time GRAMMY Award-nominated violinist and composer Curtis Stewart translates stories of American self determination to the concert stage. Tearing down the facade of “classical violinist,” Stewart is in constant pursuit of his musical authenticity, treating art as a battery for realizing citizenship. As a solo violinist, composer, Artistic Director of the American Composers Orchestra, professor at The Juilliard School, and member of award-winning ensembles PUBLIQuartet and The Mighty Third Rail, he realizes a vision to find personal and powerful connections between styles, cultures and musics. Stewart’s 2023 album of Love., a tribute to his late mother Elektra Kurtis-Stewart, has been nominated under Best Instrumental Solo in the 2024 GRAMMY Awards.
January 14, 2024
Miranda cuckson
Miranda Cuckson is known for her playing of a wide range of music and styles, her organic expressivity, dexterous virtuosity, insight and programming, and love for music. Acclaimed internationally as a soloist and collaborator, violinist and violist, she performs at venues large and small, concert halls, and informal spaces.
Miranda’s albums include Világ, featuring the Bartók Sonata along with new works; the Ligeti, Korngold, Ponce, and Piston concertos; music by American composers Finney, Shapey, Martino, Sessions, Carter, Eckardt, Glass, Hersch; her ECM Records album of Bartók, Schnittke and Lutoslawski; Melting the Darkness, an album of microtonal and electronics pieces; and Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, which was named a Best Recording of the Year by the New York Times.
January 14, 2024
dongryul lee
Seoul-born Chicago based composer Dongryul Lee (이동렬 [iː doŋ ɾjəɾ], pronouns: he/him) crafts music that entwines the acoustical nature of sounds with clarity, pathos, and reinvented classical expressions. Embracing the joy of rendering ludic permutations or interstellar sonic fables, he aspires to reach the human spirit through epistemic journeys. The dual identities of his backgrounds, a Korean immigrant living in the States, a born Catholic and learned Buddhist thinker, and a composer with a computer science degree, also greatly influence his musical language. He finds inspirations in spiritual, literary, and scientific elements, encompassing a diverse range of topics from Borgesian poetics and Jungian Philosophy to Number Theory, Deep Learning, and Engineering Campanology, oftentimes employing yearlong in-depth interdisciplinary research.
“Dr. Dongryul Lee’s works are alluring, sparkling, thoughtful, and carefully crafted. Each work has a unique concept, which he researches deeply and personalizes.”
– Augusta Read Thomas (Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition)
February 2, 2024
Edward barnes
The composer and/or producer of over 50 works for the stage, concert hall, radio and recordings, EDWARD BARNES is the winner of Guggenheim, NEA and NY Foundation for the Arts fellowships, and the Stephen Sondheim Award for the “creation of innovative musical theater.” He has served as Executive Director of Gotham Chamber Opera, Producing Director of MasterVoices, and Managing Director of American Lyric Theater, and is currently a lecturer at The Juilliard School.
Extraordinarily talented in the realm of dramatic musical ideas. Barnes is obviously sensitive to the poetry and music to be found in commonplace circumstances and knows how to transmute them into a work of art.
- The New York Times
February 8, 2024
Texu kim
Texu Kim (b.1980) is “one of the most active and visible composers of his generation” (San Francisco Classical Voice), writing music that’s fun, sophisticated, and culturally connected. Drawing on his personal affinity for humor, his background in science, and his fascination with everyday experiences, Kim’s work radiates positivity, offering “major-league cuteness” (Broadway World) while demonstrating “surprising scope.” (San Diego Story) As a Korean-American, Kim explores the localization of imported traditions, incorporating cross-cultural elements into his work in “impressive and special” ways so that “many orchestras and conductors around the world are taking an interest in [his] music.” (KPBS) By highlighting the interaction between folk culture and external influences, Kim creates meaningful depth while maintaining a signature playfulness and exuberance that is listener-friendly and engaging. Characterized by “exuberant, colorful washes of sound… punchy bass lines, snappy brass fanfares, and suave... solos” (San Diego Story), Kim’s music is at times “explosively virtuosic” (Wall Street Journal) but always uplifting and rewarding for both listeners and performers.
February 14, 2024
Jeffrey
Mumford
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1955, composer Jeffrey Mumford has received numerous fellowships, grants, awards and commissions. Awards include the "Academy Award in Music" from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and an ASCAP Aaron Copland Scholarship. He was also the winner of the inaugural National Black Arts Festival/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition. Other grants have been awarded by the Ohio Arts Council, Meet the Composer, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music Inc., the ASCAP Foundation, and the University of California.
Mumford's most notable commissions include those from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association and the Library of Congress (co-commission), the BBC Philharmonic, the San Antonio, Chicago & National Symphonies, Washington Performing Arts, the Network for New Music among others.
January 28, 2024
Michael
Pisaro-liu
Michael Pisaro-Liu (born, Michael Pisaro, 1961 in Buffalo, New York) is a guitarist and composer and a long-time member of the Wandelweiser collective. While, like other members of Wandelweiser, Pisaro-Liu is known for pieces of long duration with periods of silence, in the past fifteen years his work has branched out in many directions, including work with field recording, electronics, improvisation and ensembles of very different kinds of instrumental constitution.
Pisaro-Liu has a long-standing collaboration with percussionist Greg Stuart, with over thirty collaborations (pieces and recordings) to date, including their 3-disc set, Continuum Unbound from 2014 and Umbra & Penumbra for amplified percussion and orchestra premiered by the La Jolla Symphony in February, 2020. Pisaro-Liu also has recurring (intermittent) duos with Christian Wolff, Keith Rowe, Taku Sugimoto, Antoine Beuger, Graham Lambkin, Toshiya Tsunoda and Reinier van Houdt.
February 23, 2024
Pablo
Santiago chin
Chin’s recent music often draws inspiration from the narratives of film and literature, phonetic structures in text, and the use of idiosyncratic transcription methods that enable imaginative exploration of pre-existent musical sources.
His music has been performed in South, Central and North America, in Israel, Asia and in Europe. He has been commissioned to compose works for Ensemble Recherche, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), members of the Anubis Quartet, the MAVerick Ensemble, the Latino Music Festival of Chicago and Ensemble Dal Niente, among others. His music has also been performed by artists including Fonema Consort, Nina Dante and Dalia Chin, Ostravská Banda, Chicago Composers Orchestra, Donatienne Michel-Dansaq, Pierre-Stéphane Meugé, Marino Formenti, Claire Chase, Eric Lamb, Gan Lev and Marcuss Weiss.
February 14, 2024
Richard baits
Rick Baitz composes for the moving image, the concert hall, dance and theater. Credits include the award-winning documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael(2018), HBO’s The Vagina Monologues (featuring vocalist Cathy Richardson), and HBO’s Life Afterlife, plus the scores for several immersive museum installations, including 24 Hours That Changed History (2016) for the FDR Presidential Library and Museum, and three soundtracks for the recently-unveiled Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, with voice-overs by Oprah Winfrey. Other media credits include, the Sundance-honored The Education of Shelby Knox, National Geographic’s acclaimed specials The New Chimpanzees, Heart of Africa and Looters; and Geoffrey Nauffts’ ground-breaking film Baby Steps, starring Kathy Bates. Rick’s concert works have been performed across the US, Europe and Latin America, with his string quartet Chthonic Dances, premiered by the eminent ensemble ETHEL in 2011, described as “a bright-hued, vigorously melodic score” by the New York Times.
February 14, 2024
Brad balliett
Brad Balliett enjoys being a musical omnivore, focusing equal parts of his career on composing, playing bassoon, and teaching artistry. Brad is principal bassoon of the Princeton Symphony, a member of Signal and Metropolis Ensemble, a founding member and former Artistic Director for Decoda, a member of the composer-collective band Oracle Hysterical, and on faculty at The Peabody Institute, The Juilliard School, and Musicambia.
As a teaching artist, Brad regularly leads composition and song-writing workshops in prisons, schools, hospitals, and homeless shelters. His work with Musicambia has given him the opportunity to guide aspiring composers and performers at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Allendale Correctional Facility, Brooklyn Detention Center, and San Quentin State Prison. With Project: Music Heals Us, Brad has led music history and composition workshops at Radgowski-Corrigan and Bain Correctional Center. With Decoda, Brad has participated in workshops for over six years at Lee Correctional Institute.
February 14, 2024
Shuying li
Praised as “a real talent” (The Seattle Times) with “vivid, dramatic” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “enjoyable” (Gramophone Magazine) scores, and “an incredible span of compositional tool box” (American Record Guide), Shuying Li is an award-winning composer who began her musical education in her native China. In her sophomore year at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, she won a scholarship to continue her undergraduate studies at The Hartt School in Connecticut. She holds doctoral and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan and is a research faculty member at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. A passionate educator, Shuying has taught and directed the Composition/Music Theory Program at Gonzaga University. She joined the faculty at California State University, Sacramento in Fall 2022.
February 18, 2024
Anna weesner
The music of Anna Weesner (winner of 2018 American Academy of Arts and Letters Virgil Thomson Award and 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship) has been performed by widely (including: Abramovic; ACO; Arnold; Bandwidth; Beck; Bowers; Cassatt; Chamber Music at Lincoln Center; Counter)induction; Cuckson; Curtis 20/21; Cygnus ; Cypress; Daedalus ; de Guise-Langlois ; Eighth Blackbird; Fader; Goode; Kang; Kraines; Lark; Look and Listen; Morales; Network; NY Virtuoso Singers; Open End; Pearson; Prism; Riverside Symphony; Sequitur; Shao; Stillman; Stinson; Tanglewood; Upshaw; Waggoner; Watras; WCM). Violin at age five and flute as a teenager in youth orchestra were formative experiences. Radio presets in her car are heavy on pop. Her recent output includes My Mother in Love, ten songs for which she wrote text, and The Eight Lost Songs of Orlando Underground for clarinet quintet. She studied at Yale (B.A.) and Cornell (D.M.A.) and is Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
February 20, 2024
thomAS
GUeGLiO
Tomás Gueglio is an Argentine composer currently based in Chicago. In his creative work, he devises surreal sound worlds through the blending of a variety of musical lineages and styles. Elements central to his recent work are private languages, the logic of dreams, and, as of late, melodramas and radio soap operas.
“Tomás Gueglio creates musical environments that facilitate subtle examinations of timbre, phrase, and gesture. He eschews bombastic surface activity in favor of substantial multi-layered textures. The results are beguiling and moving, music that lives in a space that is balanced between the visceral and tactile on one side and the curated and meticulous on the other. ”
— Dan Lippel. Liner notes for Duermevela
May 3, 2024
Charles Uzor
The composer Charles Uzor was born in Udo Mbaise, Nigeria in 1961 and came to Switzerland in 1968 during the Biafra War. After studying in Rome, Berne and Zurich (oboe and composition with H. Elhorst and H.U. Lehmann) he followed the oboist Gordon Hunt to the Royal Academy of Music London. In 1990 he obtained the recital diploma and a master’s degree in composition (studying with H.W. Henze, among others). In 2005, still external student at Goldsmith College, London University he completed his dissertation on “Melody and the phenomenology of internal time-awareness”.
Uzor’s oeuvre includes stage and choral works and pieces with small ensembles. The 90s are characterized by the collaboration with Daniel Beriger and the ensembles La Notte, Quasi Fantasia, Percussion Art Ensemble Berne and the Carmina Quartet with Wolfgang Meyer. Early works include Canto, Notre Vie, Ricercare, Zimzum and Akhenaten’s Hymnos to Aton, a 30-minute aria for high tenor from the fragment Solar Eclipse (premiered at the Cairo Opera House).
In 2001 Uzor wins the International Composition Prize of the Onassis Foundation with his ballet Go. Black Tell in collaboration with four Swiss composers is performed at the Expo 02, the violin concerto (with Rahel Cunz and the NEC) in 2010.
March 29, 2024
chen yi
As a prolific composer who blends Chinese and Western traditions, transcending cultural and musical boundaries, Dr. Chen Yi is a recipient of the Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. She has been Lorena Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor at the Conservatory of Music and Dance in the University of Missouri-Kansas City since 1998. She was elected to American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2005, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 2019.
Fellowships and commissioning awards were received from Guggenheim Foundation (1996), American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996), Fromm Foundation at Harvard University (1994), Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress (1997), and National Endowment for the Arts (1994). Honors include the first prizes from the Chinese National Composition Competition (1985, 2012), the Lili Boulanger Award (1993), the NYU Sorel Medal Award (1996), the CalArts/Alpert Award (1997), the UT Eddie Medora King Composition Prize (1999), the ASCAP Concert Music Award (2001), the Elise Stoeger Award (2002) from Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
April, 2024
Nicolás Lell Benavides
Nicolás Lell Benavides’ (Ben-ah-VEE-des) music has been praised for finding “…a way to sketch complete characters in swift sure lines…” (Anne Midgette, Washington Post) and cooking up a “jaunty score [with] touches of cabaret, musical theater and Latin dance.” (Tim Smith, OPERA NEWS). He has received commissions from groups like The New York Philharmonic/The Juilliard School, Eighth Blackbird, New Century Chamber Orchestra with Daniel Hope, SFCM Orchestra with Edwin Outwater, West Edge Opera, Washington National Opera, The Glimmerglass Festival, Music of Remembrance, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Fry Street Quartet, Friction Quartet, and Khemia Ensemble. His music has received support from organizations such as the American Composers Forum, The Barlow Endowment, New Music USA, the Alice M. Ditson Fund, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
April, 2024
James ra
James Ra’s music has been described as “coursing with adrenaline-pumping energy.” Of the New Jersey Symphony performance of Awakened Spirit, The Star Ledger wrote, “Once it caught sight of the end...it was a fast sprint to the tape.” In Japan, when the Curtis Chamber Orchestra took his Concerto Grosso No. 1 on tour, they wrote: “the Concerto Grosso No. 1 had a tremendous impact on the audience. Its themes of love, life, and death were dramatically expressed.” This work subsequently aired on National Public Radio. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “This is a composer to watch.”
His music has been performed by various members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, NY Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Baltimore Symphony and Seoul Philharmonic in such venues as Carnegie Hall, Verizon Hall, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Philadelphia Convention Center, Jordan Hall, Weill Hall, the Kaufmann Center, Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, Seoul Arts Hall, IBK Hall in Seoul, Arts Hall in Busan, Daejeon Arts Hall, Tong Yeong International Music Festival, as well as in France, India and Turkey.
April, 2024
Andrés Soto
Andrés Soto is a Costa Rican composer based in Los Angeles with an active career in both film and concert music. He has written music for several feature films, documentaries, shorts, trailers and video games, as well as numerous concert works that have been performed by orchestras around the world, (including the Nashville Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic, Utah Symphony, Florida Orchestra), and in 2024 the New York Philharmonic and the Juilliard Pre-College Symphony will jointly premiere an upcoming work as part of a grant from the Sphinx Foundation.
Recent albums include “Doce Musas”, recorded by 12 emerging pianists from his native Costa Rica, and three albums for Universal, including “Champion Beats”, co-written with Grammy-winning producer Alex Hitchens and recorded at Capitol Studios, with tracks that have appeared on ABC, ESPN, Univision, Golf Channel, NBA, Tennis Channel, Fox, and other channels. In 2022 he collaborated with producer/ composer Daniel Rojas by writing incidental music for the celebrated 90th Pageant of the Masters at the Festival of the Arts in Laguna Beach.
May, 2024
Christopher Cerrone
Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984, New York) is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Balancing lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact, and interiority, Cerrone’s multi-GRAMMY-nominated music is utterly compelling and uniquely his own.
Cerrone’s opera, In a Grove (libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann), jointly produced by LA Opera and Pittsburgh Opera, was called “stunning” (Opera News) and “outstanding” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) in its sold-out premiere run directed by Mary Birnbaum in March 2022. Other recent projects include The Year of Silence, based on the story of the same name by Kevin Brockmeier, for the Louisville Symphony and baritone Dashon Burton; A Body, Moving, a brass concerto for the Cincinnati Symphony; Breaks and Breaks, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony; The Insects Became Magnetic, an orchestral work with electronics for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; The Air Suspended, a piano concerto for Shai Wosner; and Meander, Spiral, Explode, a percussion quartet concerto co-commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, the Chicago Civic Orchestra of the Chicago Symphony and the Britt Festival.
May, 2024
Javier Farias
Chilean American composer Javier Farias has been awarded First Prize in the Andrés Segovia Composition Competition, International Composing Competition «2 Agosto,» and Michele Pittaluga Composition Competition. In 2014 he was honored with the Fromm Music Foundation Prize at Harvard University for a concerto for two guitars composed for Sérgio and Odair Assad and the YOA Orchestra of the Americas. His catalog consists of works ranging from solo guitar to full guitar ensemble to others featuring or incorporating the guitar into compositions for chamber ensembles, choral music, and orchestral settings, including five guitar concertos, having outstanding musicians such as the guitarist of the band The Police, Andy Summers; bandoneonist of Astor Piazzolla’s sextet, Daniel Binelli; jazz guitarist Mike Stern or classical guitarist Eliot Fisk premiering and recording his music.
His compositions have premiered in lauded venues such as Carnegie Hall, Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Instituto Cervantes in New York City, the Kennedy Center, Tsuda Hall in Japan, Meistersaal in Berlin, Troy Music Hall, and by the Organization of American States among others. His music written for guitar has also been included in guitar program repertoire for conservatories including the Conservatoire de Paris, Yale University, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen.
May, 2024
Osnat Netzer
Osnat Netzer /osˈnat ˈnɛtsɛʁ/ is a composer, performer and educator. Osnat creates her compositions collaboratively, tailoring her work to the performer’s sensibilities, physicality and improvisational inclinations. She takes inspiration from cognitive linguistics, and in dialogue with the embodied experience of physical forces, such as potential and kinetic energy, resulting in compositions that are rich in musical languages and connected to the fulsome pursuit for tension and relaxation.
Born in Haifa, Israel, Netzer studied composition and piano at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, where her primary composition teacher was Menachem Zur. She came to the United States in 2003 for graduate studies in composition with Robert Cuckson at Mannes school of Music and continued her studies with Lee Hyla at New England Conservatory, where she earned her doctorate in 2011. In 2019, she joined the faculty of DePaul University, where she is now Associate Professor of Composition and Musicianship.
Netzer’s works have been commissioned and performed by Ensemble Dal Niente, ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Patchwork, mezzo-soprano Lucy Dhegrae, bass David Salsbery Fry, saxophonists Kenneth Radnofsky, Doug O’Connor and Geoffrey Landman, Spektral Quartet, and Winsor Music, among many others, published by Edition Peters and earthsongs, and recorded on Bridge Records and New Focus Recordings.
May, 2024
Aleksandra Vrebalov
The 2024 Grawemeyer Music Prize recipient ALEKSANDRA VREBALOV defines her work as an opportunity for healing, service, connection and a celebration of humanness. Her over a hundred works, diverse in aesthetics, genre, and medium, are often inspired by urgent personal concerns and explore themes of identity, place, and belonging.
Living through the wars in former Yugoslavia, Vrebalov has been inspired by the friction between the public and the private side of heroism - like in Beyond Zero: 1914-1918, or her opera The Knock.
ALEKSANDRA VREBALOV’s works – ranging from concert music and opera to music for modern dance and film – have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Cincinnati and Glimmerglass Opera, Serbian National Theater, English National Ballet, Rambert Dance, Sybarite5, Gottinger Symphonie, ETHEL, Dusan Tynek Dance Company, Ijsbreker, Moravian Philharmonic, Belgrade Philharmonic, and Providence Festival Ballet, among others. Her works have been recorded for Nonesuch, Cantaloupe, Innova, Centaur Records, Vienna Modern Masters, and Ikarus Films.
June, 2024
Sam Nichols
Sam Nichols is a composer who lives and works in Northern California. He has received commissions from a number of ensembles and organizations, including the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Earplay, and the Composers Conference at Wellesley College. He recently won the 2011 Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award for his string quartet, Refuge. He’s also received awards and fellowships from the League of Composers, the University of Illinois (3rd prize, 2010 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Prize), the Composers Conference, and Montalvo Center for the Arts, among others. He’s been involved in a number of electronic music projects, producing several multi-media installations in collaboration with sculptor Robin Hill, and also performing with percussionist Chris Froh.
June, 2024
Larry Bitensky
Known for music described as “extraordinarily sensitive and beautiful” and “speaking directly to the heart,” composer and pianist Larry Bitensky has been hailed for works that are satisfying for performers and communicative to audiences. With their emotional intensity, directness, lyrical and sinuous melodies, and funky, polyrhythmic grooves, his works range from wistfully nostalgic, deeply sad, and evocative, to exuberant, playful, and ecstatic.
Educated at Skidmore College, the New England Conservatory of Music, Ithaca College, and Cornell University, Bitensky’s musical personality is rooted in a range of influences. He often seeks to merge the complex structures and expressive range of the classical masters and the innovations of the 20th-century greats with the melodic and rhythmic invention and improvisatory flow of musical traditions from India, Indonesia, the Islamic and Jewish worlds, jazz, and the Grateful Dead. His travels as part of the College’s study abroad program have also allowed him to explore the musical cultures of Morocco, Spain, Turkey, and Bali.
June, 2024
Daniel Asia
He received a B.A. degree from Hampshire College and a M.M. from the Yale School of Music. His major teachers include Jacob Druckman, Stephen Albert, Gunther Schuller, and Isang Yun in composition, and Arthur Weisberg in conducting. Asia's works ranges from solo pieces to large-scale multi-movement works for orchestra, including five symphonies.
He served on the faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music as Assistant Professor of Contemporary Music and Wind Ensemble from 1981 to 1986. In 1986–88, a UK Fulbright Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship enabled him to work in London as a visiting lecturer at City University. Since 1988, he has been Professor of Composition and head of the composition department at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He conducts the New York-based contemporary chamber ensemble The Musical Elements, which he co-founded in 1977. Asia founded and directs the American Culture and Ideas Initiative.
As a blogger, Asia contributes articles on music and culture to The Huffington Post. In 2013, he gained notoriety after receiving international responses for an April 25 article entitled "Carter is Dead."
June, 2024
David Fulmer
Winner of the 2019 Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, David Fulmer has garnered numerous international accolades for his bold compositional aesthetic combined with his thrilling performances. A Guggenheim Fellow, and a leader in his generation of composer-performers, the success of his Violin Concerto at Lincoln Center in 2010 earned international attention and resulted in immediate engagement to perform the work with major orchestras and at festivals in the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, and Australia. Fulmer made his European debut performing and recording his concerto with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Matthias Pintscher in 2011. That same year, Fulmer made his debut at Tanglewood appearing with the work. A surge of recent and upcoming commissions include new works for the New York Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, ProMusica Chamber Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Salzburg Foundation, BMI Foundation, Concert Artists Guild, Washington Performing Arts, Kennedy Center, Fromm Music Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, and Tanglewood.
June, 2024
Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson, Professor of Music Emeritus, Vassar College, is the composer of three symphonies, six string quartets, and over one hundred other works. His opera, Aethelred the Unready, was given a staged production at New York’s Symphony Space. A recipient of the Roger Sessions Memorial Bogliasco Fellowship as well as an Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Richard has previously received the Hinrichsen Award, the Stoeger Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize, the Burge/Eastman Prize, a Frank Huntington Beebe Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Commissions have come from the Naumburg, Koussevitzky, and Fromm Foundations as well as the San Francisco Symphony, the Chicago Chamber Musicians, and the Library of Congress. His orchestral works have been performed by the San Francisco Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the American Symphony, the Jerusalem Symphony, the Pro-Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, the Orquesta Sinfonica de Colombia, the Residentie Orkest of The Hague, and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard College, where he studied with Randall Thompson and Robert Moevs, Mr. Wilson has been Composer-in-Residence with the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992. Post his retirement in 2017, after teaching just over fifty years at Vassar, he has remained active as pianist and has added some two dozen new works to his catalog.
June, 2024
Chris Arrell
The music of Chris Arrell celebrates the blurring of lines between human and machine, the natural and the digital, and the popular versus the avant-garde. Praised for its nuance and unconventional beauty (New Music Box, Boston Music Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution), his compositions have led to commissions from the Alte Schmiede (Vienna), Boston Musica Viva, Music at the Anthology (New York), Spivey Hall, Cornell University, and the Fromm Foundation of Harvard University.
Arrell’s invitations include a portrait concert at the Alte Schmiede, selection as the Featured Guest Composer for the Ball State Univ. Festival of New Music, selection as a Composer-in-Residence by the University of Nevada (Las Vegas), selection as the featured guest composer for the Aura New Music Ensemble (Univ. of Texas-Houston), and Walking in Altamira, an extensive collaboration with Collide-O-Scope Music (New York) supported by the Ditson Foundation of Columbia University. Additional recognition for his music includes the Bent Frequency Underscore Prize, the Ettelson Composer Award, the Ossia Music Prize, and honors from the League of Composers/ISCM, the Salvatore Martirano Competition, the MacDowell and ACA colonies, and the Fulbright Hays Foundation.
July, 2024
Pamela z
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. She uses MAX MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in theaters and concert halls. In addition to her performances, she has a growing body of installation works using multi-channel sound and video.
Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan – performing in international festivals and venues including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center (NY); La Biennale di Venezia; San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox, the Japan Interlink Festival; Other Minds (San Francisco); and Pina Bausch Tanztheater’s Festival (Wuppertal, Germany). She has received commissions to compose live and fixed-media scores for choreographers and film/video artists. Her large-scale, performance works, including Memory Trace, Baggage Allowance, Voci, and Gaijin, have been presented at venues like the Kitchen in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Theater Artaud (Z Space) in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, as well as at theaters in Washington D.C. and Budapest.
August, 2024
Amelia kaplan
Amelia Kaplan is a composer whose primarily gesture-driven music reflects the riotous mix of sounds and cultures cohabiting in our increasingly fragmented world. She seeks to create meaning by crafting, juxtaposing, and recontextualizing refined gestures, drawing on the myriad musical and non-musical sounds available from almost any time and place. In recent years her music has mostly responded to the ecological and political crises besetting our warming planet which we, as humans, seem to have no will to prevent.
Ms. Kaplan is a recent winner of a Copland House residency, and has had past residencies at MacDowell, Ucross, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has received commissions from the International Mise-En Festival, the Bent Frequency Duo Project, DoublePlay Percussion Duo, Violet, The University of Chicago, and bassoonist Benjamin Coelho, among others. Her works have been performed at festivals around the world, including the Mise-En Festival, the Thailand International New Music Festival, numerous national and regional SCI conferences, SICPP, International Alliance for Women in Music, Wellesley Composers Conference, Gaudeamus, Darmstadt, June in Buffalo, and others. Recordings are available on Albany, Ablaze, Centaur, and Navona Records, and her double reed compositions are published by TrevCo Music.
August, 2024
Amy williams
Amy Williams was born in Buffalo, New York in 1969, the daughter of Diane, now retired violist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and Jan, percussionist and Professor Emeritus at the University at Buffalo. She started playing the piano at the age of four and took up the flute a few years later (her first teacher was the legendary Robert Dick, so she could soon play “Chopsticks” in multiphonics…). She grew up in the heyday of the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, hearing all the latest contemporary music and meeting composers who would later become influential to her: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Elliott Carter, Julius Eastman and so many others. She went to Bennington College and, while there, decided to devote her life to performing and composing contemporary music. After a fellowship year in Denmark, she returned to Buffalo to complete her Master’s degree in piano performance at the University at Buffalo with pianist/composer Yvar Mikhashoff and her Ph.D. in composition, working with David Felder, Charles Wuorinen and Nils Vigeland. She returned to Bennington in 1998 as a member of the music faculty and she then moved on to a faculty position at Northwestern University in 2000. Since 2005, she has been teaching composition at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is a Full Professor. She was a 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholar at the University College Cork, Ireland and a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 2019.
August, 2024
william Cooper
Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle for his “richly soaring vocal lines,” William David Cooper is the composer of three operas, and music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, Baroque instruments, non-Western instruments, film, dance and electronics. His music has been performed by Augustin Hadelich, Liza Stepanova, gamin, The New York Virtuoso Singers, C4, AnticoModerno, the Saint Peter’s Bach Collegium Orchestra, Splinter Reeds, the Lysander Trio, ECCE Ensemble, the Lydian String Quartet, the Calder Quartet, the Empyrean Ensemble, Ensemble Signal, the Slee Sinfonietta, the Juilliard Orchestra, and the Alma Symphony, among others.
Cooper’s operas have been featured by Fort Worth Opera, West Edge Opera, the National Opera Association, the Universal Artists Festival at New England Conservatory, Four Corners Ensemble’s Operation Opera, the UC Davis Early Music Ensemble, and the Black House Ensemble at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. In 2020, his work Two Pieces for Piri and Strings was featured on an Innova Records album by piri player gamin. In 2019, his Requiem premiered at St. Peter’s Church in NYC. His ballet for Baroque instruments Creatio Continua was also commissioned by St. Peter’s Church in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. His Yeats Songs were commissioned and premiered by the New York Virtuoso Singers. Upcoming premieres include pieces commissioned by The Brass Project, Deus ex musica, and a new work for saxophone and piano, for Philipp Stäudlin and Yoko Hagino.
August, 2024
Diana M. Rodriguez
2021 MICF resident composer DM R (Diana M. Rodriguez) was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, has lived in Miami and Boston, and currently is based in New York City, where she is a doctoral candidate at Columbia University.
She previously earned a master’s degree from the Boston Conservatory and a bachelor’s degree from the New World School of the Arts at the University of Florida.
DM R (pictured) is a composer of electroacoustic music, influenced variously by pop culture, Colombian folk, Rock en Español, and more. She also is a concert series curator for Columbia Composers and CanvaSounds, as well a member of C3 (Colombian Composers Collective), a group of six Colombian composers currently based in the US that also includes Mizzou alumni José G. Martínez.
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November, 2024
Nico Muhly
Nico Muhly, born in 1981, is an American composer who writes orchestral music, works for the stage, chamber music and sacred music. He’s received commissions from The Metropolitan Opera: Two Boys (2011), and Marnie (2018); Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Tallis Scholars, and King’s College, Cambridge, among others. He is a collaborative partner at the San Francisco Symphony and has been featured at the Barbican and the Philharmonie de Paris as composer, performer, and curator. An avid collaborator, he has worked with choreographers Benjamin Millepied at the Paris Opéra Ballet, Bobbi Jene Smith at the Juilliard School, Justin Peck and Kyle Abraham at New York City Ballet; artists Sufjan Stevens, The National, Teitur, Anohni, James Blake and Paul Simon. His work for film includes scores for for The Reader (2008) and Kill Your Darlings (2013), and the BBC adaptation of Howards End (2017). Recordings of his works have been released by Decca and Nonesuch, and he is part of the artist-run record label Bedroom Community, which released his first two albums, Speaks Volumes (2006) and Mothertongue (2008)
November, 2024
Jeeyoung Kim
As a Korean-born composer who was educated in Korea and the United States, Jeeyoung Kim's music harmonizes the unique cultural aspects from Eastern and Western traditions. Her music has been critically acclaimed: “...Heroes for orchestra was an efficient and attractive calling card. The piece moved from gentle wind melodies through flowing string passages to end with rousing brass fanfares and clattering percussion,” Steve Smith, The New York Times; “...Miserere for SATB, [was] a powerful work, from the quiet opening with Tibetan bowls to create what is considered the sound of Heaven in Korea, to the two solos sung in a traditional style called Jeong-Ga, to the bold middle and ending sections,” New York Classical Review; and, when describing Tryst, written for Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, Joshua Kosman of The San Francisco Chronicle stated, “Even to the untrained ear, there was no mistaking the elegance and poignancy of this music.”
Novemver, 2024
Ethan Chaves
Ethan Antonio Chaves (b.2003) is an award-winning violinist, violist, and composer based in Boston, MA, where he studies at Harvard University and the New England Conservatory of Music through their dual-degree program.
Chaves’ music is rooted in melodic lines, resulting in carefully crafted counterpoint and linear harmony with subtle rhythmic interplay in his work. He has written for a variety of ensembles, from voice and piano to large orchestra, and has explored non-classical composition in his work for the New York Youth Symphony Jazz Septet: Low Fidelity Replicator. His works for orchestra have been performed and recorded by the Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony, Harvard Pops Orchestra, and the Decoda Ensemble, and have won numerous awards, including Winner of the Harvard Pops Orchestra Composition Competition, Finalist in the National Young Composers Challenge and Honorable Mention in the Metropolitan Youth Orchestra of New York’s Emerging Composers Competition. His chamber and solo works have been performed by many acclaimed musicians and ensembles including Triple Helix, Jessica Meyer, Tom Kraines, Kenichiro Aiso and Philip Sheegog.