Fidan Aghayeva-Edler is a pianist based in Berlin, Germany, currently focused on performance of contemporary music and improvisation.

She is active in Berlin's contemporary music scene and works closely with composers. Her innovative work is supported by various grants and scholarships from Musikfonds Berlin, Deutsche Orchester-Stiftung, Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa, Fonds Darstellende Künste, GVL-Stipendium, the Norwegian Quota Scholarship, the Dwight and Ursula Mamlok Foundation, and Cesko-Nemecky fond budoucnosti. During the pandemic, she carried out various projects and developed new concert formats, such as livestream concerts with numerous world premieres, shop window concerts and virtual duo improvisations.

Her CD "Verbotene Klänge: Sechs Suiten" was broadcasted in the Bayerischen Rundfunk, RBB Kultur, Klassikcast of the Goethe Institute, MDR Figaro, KAN Israel, Radio France etc. Her further collaborative projects include CDs and albums "Klavierwerke" (2016), "Twenty for piano" (2020), "The Black Garden" (2020). Her solo CD “Fenster” with the works of seven contemporary female composers is released by GENUIN Recording Group in autumn 2022.

As a soloist and with an ensemble, she has performed in various venues across Europe, such as Philharmonie Berlin, Grieghallen Bergen, Moscow Conservatory Rachmaninov's Hall, and became part of the “musica reanimata” concert series at Konzerthaus Berlin, Impuls Festival, Festival “Verfemte Music” Schwerin, Borealis Festival, Bergen Festspillene, akademie kontemporär at HfMT Hamburg, Junge Akademie Exhibition AdK Berlin among others. She works closely with the Ensemble Berlin PianoPercussion, with whom she performs regularly.

Born in Aguascalientes, México, Luis Fernando Amaya is a composer and percussionist. Topics such as collective memory and the relationship between humans and non-humans (such as plants, animals, or environments) are commonly present in his work. He studied composition and music theory at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Musicales (CIEM) and holds a Ph.D. in composition and music technology from Northwestern University.

Amaya's music has been performed throughout the Americas and Europe by performers such as the CEPROMUSIC (México), Arditti Quartet (UK), Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (Switzerland), Ensemble Dal Niente, Fonema Consort (USA), Quartetto Indaco (Italy) amongst others. He is the recipient of awards and fellowships such as the Fonca-Conacyt (National Fund for Culture and the Arts/National Commission for Science and Technology) Scholarship, Presidential Fellowship (NU), and representing México in the 61st International Rostrum of Composers of the UNESCO in Helsinki, Finland. As a performer, Amaya is a member of the collective composition and free improvisation trio Fat Pigeon.

His scores are published by BabelScores.

Ben Bolter is associate director of the Institute for New Music and co-director of the Contemporary Music Ensemble at the Bienen School of Music. He made his orchestral conducting debut with the National Symphony Orchestra at age 25, with the Washington Post praising his performance: “Bolter spotlighted the showiest aspects...and made it look easy.” As part of Chicago's acclaimed Ear Taxi Festival, his world premiere of Drew Baker's NOX was named Chicago's Best Classical Music Performance of 2016 by the Third Coast Review. John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune remarked: "[Drew Baker's] NOX made an altogether striking close to an absorbing, eclectic program, quite the best of the Ear Taxi events..." Bolter has also served as an assistant conductor with the Indianapolis Symphony and has been a frequent guest at the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. 

Bolter is a regular conductor and collaborator with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). He has also worked with contemporary groups and soloists including Fulcrum Point New Music Project, Third Coast Percussion, Spektral Quartet, Indiana University New Music Ensemble, Square Peg Round Hole, Claire Chase, and Tony Arnold. In fall 2018, he led the Grossman Ensemble in their inaugural performance as part of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at University of Chicago and gave world premieres by composers Shulamit Ran, Sam Pluta, Tonia Ko, and David Rakowski. He has also given premieres by acclaimed composers Marcos Balter, Anthony Cheung, Drew Baker, Matthew Peterson, and Clint Needham among others and has worked closely with composers such as Steve Reich, John Luther Adams, David Lang, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Ashley Fure, Hans Thomalla, and Andrew Norman.

Bolter has also been recognized for his work with youth orchestras. For six years, he served as Music Director of the Conservatory Orchestras at the Merit School of Music, where his Philharmonic Orchestra was regularly featured live on WFMT and in Chicago Symphony Center. He is also the former Artistic Director of The People’s Music School Youth Orchestras and former Music Director of the New England Conservatory Youth Festival Orchestra. Additionally, he has worked with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's annual Chicago Youth in Music Festival, Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras, Oakland Youth Orchestras, and the 2014 MMEA Senior District Orchestra Festival in Boston. 

Bolter holds a Bachelor of Music in oboe performance from the New England Conservatory. He received a Master of Music in orchestral conducting from Indiana University, where he also served as adjunct faculty for four years. In addition to his work as a conductor, he is also an active keyboardist and songwriter and has performed in original and cover bands throughout the Midwest.

A native of Taiwan, Yu-Fang Chen is assistant professor of violin at Ball State University. Chen received her Doctoral of Musical Arts degrees on both violin and viola performance from the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2013. As a sought-after performer and pedagogy, she has been invited to teach and perform at various music institutions and festivals in United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia.   

Chen has won many awards and competitions and her career as a performing artist is extensive. As an enthusiastic performer of contemporary music, she has commissioned, premiered, and recorded many compositions by living composers. Her recordings can be found in ABLAZE and PARMA Records.  

She has served as assistant professor of violin and viola at Washburn University. In addition, she was a member of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra and the Academy of Taiwan.  

Kyong Mee Choi, composer, visual artist, painter, organist and poet, received several prestigious awards and grants including John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Robert Helps Prize, Aaron Copland Award, John Donald Robb Musical Trust Fund Commission, Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, First prize of ASCAP/SEAMUS Award, Second prize at VI Concurso Internacional de Música Eletroacústica de São Paulo, Honorary Mentions from Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges, Musica Nova, Society of Electroacoustic Music of Czech Republic, Luigi Russolo International Competition, and Destellos Competition.

Choi was a Finalist of the Contest for the International Contemporary Music Contest "Citta' di Udine and Concurso Internacional de Composicai eletroacoustica in Brazil among others. Her music was published at CIMESP (São Paulo, Brazil), SCI, EMS, ERM media, SEAMUS, and Détonants Voyages (Studio Forum, France). Ravello records published her multimedia opera, THE ETERNAL TAO, which was supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and Roosevelt University. Aucourant Records published her CD, SORI, featuring her eight compositions for solo instrument and electronics. The project was supported by the IAS Artist Project Grant from the Illinois Arts Council. She is a Professor of Music Composition and the Head of Music Composition at Roosevelt University in Chicago where she teaches composition and electro-acoustic music.

Choi received a DMA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MM in Music Composition at Georgia State University and BS in chemistry and science education at Ewha Womans University and studied Korean literature in a master’s program at Seoul National University in South Korea.

Constellation Men’s Ensemble is a Chicago-based vocal group dedicated to creating distinct performances in unique spaces, empowering the next generation of singers through educational engagement, and expanding the repertoire for men’s vocal music by commissioning new works from both emerging and established composers.

Since 2019, Constellation has begun partnering with other local nonprofits to raise awareness and funding for impactful organizations to the Chicagoland community through their Community Uplift program. Organizations to date include Center On Halsted, Boys & Girls Club of Metropolitan Chicago, Fostering Dignity, and the Alzheimer's Association of Illinois.

In 2016, CME founded their new music series NOVA—“New. Original. Vocal. Art.” NOVA seeks to capitalize on their mission of commissioning new works and expanding the repertoire for tenor/bass voices. Last year, NOVA V premiered works dealing with the theme of humanhood including our largest commission to date, Robert Maggio’s Man Up/Man Down, exploring how masculine identity takes shape in our evolving world; how our personal histories of family, race, religion, education, status, exposure, geography, etc. affect the formation of our identities. Man Up/Man Down will be released on Constellation’s debut album later this spring with Sono Luminous Records.

CME has partnered with Music of the Baroque’s Strong Voices program to bring their music and passion to students within Chicago Public Schools. Workshop performances focused on careers in music, the joy of community through singing, and the multitude of ways that music can remain a part of your life post high school. Pre-COVID, they toured to New England and Maine, working with over 2,000 middle and high school students through their passion of connecting with the next generation of singers.

CME is the 2019 winner of the American Prize in Choral Performance, professional division.

Sandra Coursey is a third year DMA pianist in Bowling Green State University’s doctorate of musical arts in contemporary music program. She is a founding member of the chamber quintet, Newphonia, comprised of BGSU doctoral students, who recently completed a residency at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Other recent performances include a recital with Newphonia at Western Illinois University as well as solo performances and a lecture recital at Mississippi University for Women’s 2022 International Music by Women Festival, BGSU’s 2022 New Music Festival, and the Eighth International Conference on Music and Minimalism.
 

Luis is a Colombian composer, improviser, and Ph.D. student in Composition and Music Theory at the University of Pittsburgh. His work as a composer is based on the development of musical discourse from structures with musical potential such as literature, physical phenomena, and public space intervention. He has received significant recognitions such as commissions by Siemens Stiftung, Scholarships by the Government of Colombia, Ticino Musica Festival, and New Music on the Point Festival. He has been Artist in residence with Cepromusic ensemble (México), National Center of Contemporary Arts (Russian Federation),among others. His music is published by Babel Scores.
 

Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of Graduate Music Studies at the Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University.

I am a scholar of U.S. and European modernism and experimentalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. My research documents the relationships produced by musical performance and artistic collaboration within interdisciplinary artistic communities. I draw upon insights from ethnomusicology, microhistory, affect theory, religious studies, and phenomenology and combine these interdisciplinary methods with rigorous archival research.

My work has explored matters of music, collectivity, and friendship through the artistic world of Morton Feldman (1926–1987), a central figure of postwar musical modernism. My first monograph, Saving Abstraction: Morton Feldman, the de Menils, and the Rothko Chapel (Oxford, 2019), takes on the conflicted history of Morton Feldman’s most important collaboration—his work with Dominique and John de Menil on music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. The book is a microhistorical analysis of the premiere of Morton Feldman’s music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston on April 9, 1972. In it, I reconstruct the network of artists, musicians, and patrons who collaborated on the event: composer Feldman, painter Mark Rothko, violist Karen Philips, and the patrons Dominique and John de Menil. These collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling. At the center of this study is the question of ecumenism—that is, in what terms can religious encounters be staged for fruitful dialog to take place? This was a dilemma for Feldman, whose music sought to produce sublime “abstract experience,” as well as the de Menils, who envisioned the Rothko Chapel as a space for ritual intervention into late modernity. I develop two central concepts in the book: abstract ecumenism and agonistic universalism. Abstract ecumenism characterizes a broad spiritual orientation within postwar musical modernism and experimentalism that aspired to altered states of ego-loss This offered a renewed religious sensibility achieved through artistic practice. Agonistic universalism describes the particular religious form that Feldman’s music achieves both within Rothko Chapel. It is an ascetic mode of existence that endures with hope the aporia of postwar modernization’s destructiveness and modernism’s failure to effectively counter it.

The research and writing on this book were supported by a number of awards from the Paul Sacher Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and a Faculty Research Grant from the Graduate School at Northwestern.

My second monograph, Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde, is expected in 2021 from Bloomsbury and will consist of expanded versions of four previously published essays on Feldman’s relationships with John Cage, Merle Marsicano, Frank O’Hara, Earle Brown and Charlotte Moorman. It will feature a new chapter on Feldman’s troubled friendship with painter Philip Guston. I also contribute a wide-ranging methodological introduction on modernism and the historiography of friendship and mourning. Intimate bonds produced more than an “underlying network of awareness” that painter Robert Motherwell intuited as the glue holding together the New York avant-garde; friendship itself is the answer to his question of “what exactly constitutes the basis of our community?” To show this, I position Feldman as a relational center of a social word and advocate for scholarly attention to the affective and epistemological conditions of friendship. I show how poems, films, compositions, and recordings register the tensions and attachments of this community.

Beyond my writing on Feldman and his world, I have written on the life and music of Julius Eastman as well as essays in music and philosophy. I am currently involved in long-term ethnographic work on the experimental music community Wandelweiser.

Stephen Eckert is a pianist, teacher, and collaborator from Newfoundland, pursuing a DMA in Contemporary Music Performance, at Bowling Green State University. Dedicated to experimental music and sound, Stephen has premiered works in the Newfound Music Festival, Orford Contemporary Workshop, soundSCAPE Festival, New England Conservatory’s SICPP, and through Ensemble Allure, a contemporary music ensemble they co-founded with composer H.P. McGowan in 2020. Recently, Stephen was named on CBC’s 2022 Top 30-under-30 list of promising Canadian classical musicians. As a winner of BGSU’s 2022 Concerto Competition, Mx. Eckert will make their concerto debut performing Lutosławski’s Piano Concerto with the BGSU Philharmonia, led by Dr. Emily Brown.

Keaton Garrett is a collaborative composer and saxophonist based in Michigan. His work is informed by his experiences performing in chamber ensembles as a classical saxophonist, while also being influenced by whatever he is listening to at the moment. His musical grammar is dynamic from work to work but at its core synthesizes concepts of collaboration, timbre, texture, line, and audible/tangible processes.
 

Married musical duo David and Momoko Gresham have performed together since their days as graduate students at the Manhattan School of Music. Recital appearances include the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center in New York City, in Japan at the Tokyo National Museum, and Fujisawa Lyra Hall, at the International ClarinetFest in Ostend, Belgium, and at venues around the USA and Japan. David is clarinet professor at Illinois State University. He has recorded the Mozart and David Maslanka concertos, and recently performed Roger Zare’s Bennu’s Fire concerto at the Illinois Music Educator’s Convention and Sydney Hodkinson’s Embers at the RedNote New Music Festival. Momoko is a staff accompanist at Illinois Wesleyan University. Her recording of Karl Husa’s Concertino for piano and band is available on Naxos.
 

Casey Grev is Associate Professor of Saxophone at the Crane School of Music. A dedicated performer of contemporary music, Dr. Grev was an invited performer at the Hot Air Music Festival, San Francisco Center for New Music, Resonant Bodies Festival, Society of Composers Inc. National Conference, The Ohio State University Contemporary Music Festival, and was selected to study at the 2016 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music. Dr. Grev received both his Masters and Doctoral degrees from Michigan State University, where he was a recipient of the University Distinguished Fellowship and studied with Joseph Lulloff.
 

Composer Aaron Helgeson (b. 1982, Eugene OR) uses transcription, adaptation, and collage to mix contemporary sounds with historical sources like wax cylinders, medieval psalms, and unfinished manuscripts.
 
Described by Cleveland Classical as "eerily beautiful" and the New York Times as a "virtuoso display of engaging drama”, Helgeson's music has received numerous awards and grants from institutions like the Aaron Copland Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, ASCAP, and American Composers Forum.
 
In 2016 he received an Ohio Arts Council Award for his Snow Requiem, an "anti-cantata" based on author David Laskin’s book The Children’s Blizzard about the Homestead-era snowstorm of the same name combining original transcriptions of Norwegian-American immigrant folk music with sonifications of weather data using orchestral tone clusters, wordless vocal chorales, and percussive noise.
His recent choral cycle The Book of Never for Grammy Award winning chorus The Crossing, collages ancient hymns from the Novgorod Codex (a medieval book of Russian psalm chant overwritten hundreds of times with heretical sermons by an excommunicated Pagan missionary) with contemporary texts by writers in various states of exile.
 
Other recent projects include Poems of Sheer Nothingness commissioned by soprano Susan Narucki using fragmented realizations of ancient Occitan troubadour poems, Calls of Close and Away for Imani Winds on 19th-century French hunting calls and 20th-century American military signals, and Echoes of Always for Ensemble Dal Niente assembled from scraps of Baroque opera overtures and bits of Helgeson's own previous music. Recordings of his music are available on Carrier Records, Oberlin Music, and Innova Recordings.
 
Also a scholar of creativity and mental health in the arts, Helgeson is frequently invited to teach workshops in creative wellness at educational programs around the country, working with young artists to find holistic ways of living and working. His 2021 article for American Composers Forum “The Doppelgänger Within: How Depression Hides in the Creative Process” discusses the way creative work can lead to mental health problems, documenting his own depression and the creative methods that have helped him manage it. He is currently developing a study with psychologist and creative studies expert Pablo Tinio that tracks the workflow of artists to better understand mental and emotional obstacles to creativity and how to navigate them.
 
Helgeson serves as Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at Montclair State University's Cali School of Music, with previous teaching positions at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, he also taught as Assistant Professor of Composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, with other visiting appointments at the Hartt School of Performing Arts, University of Chicago, New York University, and the University of California Washington Center. In addition, he has given lectures and masterclasses at institutions like Northwestern University, Mannes School of Music, Stanford University, and the Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt. He holds degrees in music and theater from the University of California San Diego (PhD, MA) and Oberlin College (BMus, BA).
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He currently resides in New York where he serves on the advisory board of Creatives Care, a non-profit facilitating low-cost psychological treatment for performing artists.

Miki Kaneda is assistant professor of music, musicology, and ethnomusicology at Boston University. She researches transcultural movements and the entanglements of race, gender, and empire in experimental, avant-garde and popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries. With a focus on Japan and the United States, the work on Japan studies experimental music as a transnational practice. Her current projects based in the United States use ethnographic methods to study connections between musical performance, labor, and collective care in experimental music. Kaneda’s recent work foregrounds Asian and Asian American feminist perspectives to analyze how notions of race and gender shape individual and collective narratives about experimental music. Her book project titled “The Unexpected Collectives, Transnational Experiments: Music and Intermedia in 1960s Japan” is under contract with the University of Michigan Press.

Kaneda’s publications on topics including the transnational flows of experimental sonic arts, art and the everyday, musical Orientalism, decolonial listening, graphic scores, and video game sound have appeared in ASAP/Journal, Twentieth Century Music, Journal for the Society of American Music, Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Nihonkenkyū, Monumenta Nipponica, post.moma.org, Flash Art, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She regularly presents at national and international conferences and lecture series. Previously, she held fellowship positions at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was a founding co-editor of the web platform post.moma.org.

Kaneda’s musical interests, including experimental music and contemporary Western classical music and gagaku (historical Japanese court music), have tended to be associated with spaces and institutions aligned with the centers of national cultural power. Yet, Kaneda engages with these practices as a woman of color, Asian American immigrant, and working parent. Her work aims to show that there is more to these musical practices than hegemonic narratives. In her research and teaching, she asks questions such as: _what was experimental music in 1960s Japan for the women whose works were excluded from the Exhibition of World Graphic Scores that John Cage saw when he visited Tokyo? How did an artist, as a homemaker and mother, shape her own version of the international avant-garde from her kitchen in an Osaka suburb? How does a Japanese American artist negotiate the histories of the violence of medical “experiments” on racialized and gendered bodies in her contemporary practice? In 2022, what does it take to be a professional musician working in new music as the daughter of South Asian immigrants?

Mari Kimura is at the forefront of violinists who are extending the technical and expressive capabilities of the instrument. As a performer, composer, researcher, and entrepreneur, she has opened up new sonic worlds and new musical possibilities for the violin. Notably, she has mastered the production of pitches that sound up to an octave below the violin’s lowest string without re-tuning. This technique, which she calls Subharmonics, has earned Mari considerable renown in the concert music world and beyond. She is also a pioneer in the field of interactive computer music. At the same time, she has earned international acclaim as a soloist and recitalist in both standard and contemporary repertoire. Her most recent efforts involves entrepreneurship, bringing her prototype motion sensor MUGIC™, (pronounced "mu" as in music +"gic" as in magic) to the market.

As a composer, Mari is a recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Fromm Award from Harvard, residencies at the Rockefeller Brother's Fund and IRCAM in Paris. Mari’s commissions include the International Computer Music Association, Harvestworks, Music from Japan and others, supported by grants including New York Foundation for the Arts, Arts International, New Music USA/Meet The Composer, Japan Foundation, Argosy Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts. She was named one of 45 "Great Immigrants” by the Carnegie Corporation, and has been featured in major publications including the New York Times written by Matthew Gurewitsch, and in Scientific American written by Larry Greenemeier.

As a violinist, Mari has premiered many important works, including John Adams’s Violin Concerto (Japanese premiere), Luciano Berio’s Sequenza VIII (US premiere), Tania Léon’s Axon for violin and computer (world premiere), and Salvatore Sciarrino’s 6 Capricci (US premiere), among others. In 2007, Mari introduced Jean-Claude Risset’s violin concerto, Schemes, at Suntory Hall with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. The cadenza she wrote for the concerto, incorporating advanced Subharmonics, was subsequently published in STRINGS magazine. In 2019, she gave the world premiere of Dai Fujikura's "Motion Notions" for violin and a motion sensor at her solo recital at the International Chigiana Festival in Siena, Italy.

As an educator, Mari is the Founding Chair of the Future Music Lab at the Atlantic Music Festival in collaboration with IRCAM since 2013. The program focuses on high-level instrumental performers, who explore composition, improvisation and performance using the latest technology. Since 1998, Mari has been teaching a graduate course in Interactive Computer Music Performance at Juilliard. In 2017, Mari Kimura was named Professor of Music at UC Irvine's "Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology" (ICIT) program, Music Department at the Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
 

Peter Kramer was born in Portland, Oregon where he studied composition, piano and violin with Dr. Marshall Tuttle at Mount Hood Community College. He graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory with a double major in Composition and Harpsichord Performance, and recently graduated from the CUNY Graduate Center with a PhD in Music Composition. His principal teachers include Lewis Nielson, Jason Eckardt, Suzanne Farrin and Webb William Wiggins. Additionally, Peter has been mentored by composers Eric Wubbels, Josh Levine, and Daniel Tacke.
 

Pianist Mabel Kwan is a founding member of Ensemble Dal Niente. She tours with improvised music group Restroy, synthesizer duo Mega Laverne and Shirley, and electronic/instrumental trio Uluuul. Mabel is a 2018 High Concept Labs Artist and 2017 3Arts Awardee. She is recognized for her work in classical, improvised, and experimental music. Her self-produced work is a meditation on sound, contradictions, and our perceptions of what is familiar or strange.

Since 2006 Mabel has lived in Chicago, where she sings vocals with the Lucky Bikes, plays piano with Fifth Season, and plays chamber music with Bridging Memory Through Music, a therapeutic intervention for patients with dementia. Mabel volunteers for TECHNE, an organization that works with young girls to build electronic instruments and improvise using music technology.

A native of Austin, Texas, Mabel studied piano with Eun Young Lee, Danielle Martin, and Timothy Woolsey. She received piano performance degrees from Rice University studying with Brian Connelly, and Northern Illinois University with William Goldenberg.

Mabel has performed solo and collaboratively at the Palacio de Belles Artes, Museo Nacional del Arte, MusicArte Festival (Panama City), Guangzhou Symphony New Music Project, Sonic Fusion Festival (Edinburgh), No Hay Banda (Montreal), SALT Festival (Victoria), Omaha Under the Radar, Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, EMPAC, Ravinia, Millennium Park, Library of Congress, Walt Disney Hall, Metropolitan Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago.

Mabel's 2016 debut solo album, one poetic switch (Milk Factory Productions) features works written for her on piano and clavichord. In the same year she released a solo clavichord album, Inventions (Parlour Tapes+) in collaboration with composer Danny Clay and artist Andrew Barco. In 2018 Mabel released the premiere recording of the complete Trois Hommages (New Focus) by Georg Friedrich Haas. Mabel plays on Ensemble Dal Niente's albums Balter/Saunier (New Amsterdam) with rock band Deerhoof, and on the George Lewis portrait album Assemblage (New World).

Jack Langdon (b.1994, Keyeser, WI) is a musician, video artist, and writer. His work disintegrates commonplace sounds, images, and narratives—reassembling them in strange constructions. His music is gentle and expansive, drawing inspiration from the landscape and folk modernisms of the American Midwest.
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Jack is an organist, whose experimental performances foreground the unique qualities of individual organs. He has written for Yarn/Wire, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Trio SÆITENWIND, Minnesota Sinfonia and has recorded with Taylor Ho Bynum, Weston Olencki, Anthony Vine, and Kelley Sheehan. He currently lives in Chicago and is a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
 

The Lawrence Graduate Bayreuth Tuben Quintet is a tuben horn quintet that, fluid by design and inclination, is comprised of slightly less or more than five musicians who identify as, know, or would like to know, someone who is LGBTQ+. Informed by our decidedly un-Wagnerian values of inclusivity, diversity, and visibility, the LGBTuben Quintet aims to build and expand the cannon for our flexible ensemble and advance a non-hierarchical agenda that includes affecting positive social change and creating broader representation for the historically underrepresented.

Elliott Lupp is a composer, improvisor, visual artist, educator, and sound designer whose work often invokes images of the distorted, chaotic, visceral, and absurd. This aesthetic approach as it relates to both acoustic and electroacoustic composition has led to a body of work that, at the root of its construction, focuses on the manipulation of noise, extreme gesture, shifting timbre, and performer/computer improvisation/interaction as core elements. 

Elliott has received a number of awards and honors for his work, including a 2019 SEAMUS/ASCAP Commission, the 2019 Franklin G. Fisk Composition Award for Chamber Music, and Departmental and All-University awards in Graduate Research and Creative Scholarship. His music has been performed at a variety of electroacoustic festivals including N_SEME, CHIMEfest, Electronic Music Midwest, MOXsonic, Fulcrumpoint New Music Project, SEAMUS, and Electroacoustic Barn Dance, and by such ensembles as the Dutch/American trio Sonic Hedgehog (flute, clarinet, and electric guitar), the Atar Piano Trio, Found Sound New Music Ensemble, various members of MOCREP, The Chicago Composer's Orchestra, Fonema Consort, and Ensemble Dal Niente.

Elliott currently teaches courses in music composition and music technology at Northwestern University, where he is pursuing his PhD. He holds a master’s degree from Western Michigan University, where he studied with Christopher Biggs and Lisa R. Coons; and a bachelor’s degree from Columbia College Chicago as a student of Eliza Brown and Kenn Kumpf.

Camilo Mendez is a composer of acoustic concert music. He conceives his works as compositional cycles; series of pieces orbiting around the same musical ideas, but written for different instrumental combinations. He completed a Doctorate and a Master’s in advanced composition at the Royal College of Music in London. He has also studied privately with Rebecca Saunders and Pierluigi Billone. In 2017, Mendez was the Rieman and Baketel Fellow for Music at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

His music has been performed by ensembles and soloists who specialize in contemporary concert music and has been featured in such international festivals as Festival Internacional Cervantino, the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, June in Buffalo, Klasik Keyifler, the Mallorca Saxophone Festival, and Next Generation Donaueschingen. In 2009, he was awarded the Colombian national prize in composition for his work Tropical Textures VI. He has held residencies at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Willapa Bay AiR. Dr. Camilo Mendez joined the Academy of Music at HKBU as Assistant Professor in 2018.
 

Alex Mincek is a composer, performer, co-director of the New York-based Wet Ink Ensemble, and assistant professor at the Bienen School of Music. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Alpert Award, and multiple awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music has also been recognized through commissions and awards from arts institutions such as the French Ministry of Culture, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, ASCAP, the National Endowment for the Arts, MATA, Radio France, the Barlow Endowment, and the Fromm Music Foundation.
Mincek’s music has been programmed at venues and international festivals including Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre, Wigmore Hall, Strasbourg Musica, Darmstadt (IMD), Ultraschall Berlin, Festival Archipel Geneve, the Contempuls Festival in Prague, and the Ostrava New Music Days. He has collaborated with ensembles including the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Janacek Philharmonic, Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble Linea, Talea, Dal Niente, Yarn/Wire, Mivos and the JACK Quartet.

Mincek’s compositional thinking is primarily concerned with creating musical contexts in which diverse sound worlds seamlessly coexist – from raw to highly refined timbres, from rhythmic vitality to abrupt stasis, and from mechanical-like repetition to sinuous continuity. By connecting, combining and alternating seemingly disparate states, he attempts to create a sense of interconnectivity that reveals underlying qualities of coherence and unity. His music frequently explores novel approaches to microtonal harmony by integrating methods often regarded as incompatible. Mincek’s musical thinking is also concerned with how the cognition of physical shape, movement and color can be used as a model for organizing musical sound and structure in relation to psychoacoustics and musical perception more generally.

Mincek received his MA from the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Nils Vigeland, and his DMA from Columbia University, where he studied with Tristan Murail and Fred Lerdahl.
 

Donald Nally collaborates with creative artists, leading orchestras, and art museums to make new works for choir that address social and environmental issues. He has commissioned over 120 works and, with his ensemble The Crossing, has produced over twenty recordings. Donald and The Crossing have been nominated for eight Grammy awards, winning Best Choral Performance in 2018, 2019, and 2023. He is also the John W. Beattie Chair in Music and director of choral organizations at Northwestern University. He has held distinguished tenures as chorus master for Lyric Opera of Chicago, Welsh National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, the Chicago Bach Project, and for many seasons at the Spoleto Festival in Italy.

Donald’s collaborations include the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Park Avenue Armory, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Beth Morrison Projects, Lincoln Center, Mostly Mozart, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, the Barnes Foundation, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNow series, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the National Gallery, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the American Composers Orchestra, Klockriketeatern at the Finnish National Opera, the Institute for Advanced Study, Big Ears Festival, and the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana, where The Crossing holds an annual residency.

In addition to his work with The Crossing, Donald has been visiting resident artist at the Park Avenue Armory, music director of David Lang's 1000-voice Crowd Out at Millennium Park in Chicago, Lang’s 1000-voice Mile Long Opera on the High Line in Manhattan, and chorus master for the New York Philharmonic for world premieres of Julia Wolfe and David Lang. His 60-chapter series Rising w/ The Crossing, a response to the 2020 pandemic, gained national attention and was featured in The Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR's Performance Today; it has been archived by The Library of Congress as a cultural artifact as an "important part of this collection and the historical record."
 

Maya Nguyen (b. 1996) is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist working at the boundaries of sound, image, and the body. She holds a BA in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago, and is an MFA candidate in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Her work has been presented in a solo exhibition at SITE Sharp gallery, and group exhibitions and performances at Vincom Center for Contemporary Art, UCLA New Wight Gallery, Terrain Biennial, Gene Siskel Film Center, Elastic Arts, The University of Chicago, Indiana University, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and elsewhere.

Praised for her "great control" (Chicago Classical Review), cellist Isidora Nojkovic is an active soloist, chamber, and orchestral musician. She has a passion for contemporary music and commissioning, having premiered over 50 works, and is one half of the contemporary violin/cello duo Orbit (“the new cross-continental duo to pay attention to.” – Classical Post). She performs regularly with the Vancouver Opera, Vancouver Symphony, Illinois Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble, and the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. She has also completed two tours with Lincoln Center Stage, performing in twenty-two countries as part of a piano quintet.

Karola Obermüller composes in search of the unknown, with layers upon layers of obscured material buried deep beneath a surface that is sometimes sumptuous, sometimes bristling with rhythmic energy. This unique voice began forming in collages of sound made with tape recorders as a child and evolved later with composition degrees from the Meistersinger-Konservatorium Nürnberg, the Hochschule für Musik Saar, and the University Mozarteum Salzburg. Her sense of rhythm and form was forever changed by studying Carnatic and Hindustani classical music in Chennai and Delhi, India.

A Ph.D. at Harvard University brought her to the US where she now teaches at the University of New Mexico, co-directing the composition area and the annual John Donald Robb Composers’ Symposium music festival.  She also lives and works part of the year in Europe and has been a visiting artist at ZKM, Deutsche Akademie Rom, Centro Tedesco di studi Veneziani, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and IRCAM as well as serving as a resident composer for new music festivals at Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg, Conservatorio Piccinni di Bari (Italy), University Mozarteum Salzburg, Festival Virtuosi Century XXI, Recife (Brazil), Samobor Music Festival Croatia, and others.

Her music, often political, always dramatic, includes operas for Staatstheater Nürnberg, Theater Bielefeld, Theater Bonn, and Stuttgart’s Musik der Jahrhunderte.  The emotional juxtapositions of story suspended in a tableau architecture that one finds in her operas can be heard in her concert works as well. These include commissions from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Music Foundation, New Music USA, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Saarländischer Rundfunk, Theater und Orchester Heidelberg, and numerous soloists and ensembles.

Obermüller works with lauded contemporary music ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), the Arditti String Quartet, Neue Vocalsolisten, MusikFabrik, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, E-MEX Ensemble, the Iridium Quartet, the New Thread Quartet, Pegnitzschäfer Klangkonzepte, Ensemble Adapter, New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble, and ensemble phorminx. She has received numerous awards including the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis, the Darmstädter Musikpreis, the New York Musicians Club Prize, the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer’s Award, the Bavarian Youth Prize for Composition (awarded by Zubin Mehta), the John Green Prize for Excellence in Music Composition, and the 1st Prize of the “New Note” International Composers Competition Croatia. Having been selected for the Contemporary Music Edition by the German Music Council, the Wergo label has produced a portrait CD of her music (November 2018). Another portrait CD for New Focus Recordings is in production.
 

Peter Opie is associate professor of cello at Ball State University. He has performed in Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States. He has given cello and chamber music master classes at many universities and conservatoires around the world, including Oberlin Conservatory, University of Michigan, University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, St Petersburg State Conservatory, and the National University of Colombia. Also active as an orchestra player, he has worked regularly with the Indianapolis and Detroit Symphony Orchestras and has served as acting principal for the Fort Wayne Philharmonic. He holds degrees from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and the University of Michigan. 
 

Mauricio Pauly is a composer, improviser and producer of hybrid music. He has collaborated with writers, designers, programmers and theatre-makers. His music has been featured at festivals such as Ultima, Warsaw Autumn, Darmstadt, Le Bruit de la Musique, Images Sonores and Open Ears Festival. Recent releases include The Threshing Floor (w/ scapegoat), Charred Edifice Shining (w/ Distractfold), and The Difference is the Buildings Between Us (w/ No Hay Banda). Upcoming releases include an album of improvised music with pianist Eve Egoyan. He was a Fellow at Civitella Ranieri and Harvard's Radcliffe Institute and Composer-in-Residence at Villa Romana in Florence. Since 2020 he has been an Assistant Professor at SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver.

Alan Pierson is co-director of the Contemporary Music Ensemble at the Bienen School of Music. He has been praised as "a dynamic conductor and musical visionary" by the New York Times, "a young conductor of monstrous skill" by Newsday, "gifted and electrifying" by the Boston Globe, and "one of the most exciting figures in new music today" by Fanfare. He is the artistic director and conductor of acclaimed ensemble Alarm Will Sound, which has been called "the future of classical music" by the New York Times and "a sensational force" with "powerful ideas about how to renovate the concert experience" by the New Yorker. Pierson served as the artistic director and conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. The New York Times called Pierson's leadership at the Philharmonic "truly inspiring," and the New Yorker's Alex Ross described it as "remarkably innovative, perhaps even revolutionary."

Pierson has also appeared as a guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, the Steve Reich Ensemble, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Carnegie Hall's Ensemble ACJW, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, the New World Symphony, and the Silk Road Project, among other ensembles. He is principal conductor of the Dublin-based Crash Ensemble and has been a visiting faculty conductor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and the Eastman School of Music. He regularly collaborates with major composers and performers, including Yo-Yo Ma, Steve Reich, Dawn Upshaw, Osvaldo Golijov, John Adams, Augusta Read Thomas, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Donnacha Dennehy, La Monte Young, and choreographers Christopher Wheeldon, Akram Khan, and Elliot Feld.

Pierson has recorded for Nonesuch Records, Cantaloupe Music, Sony Classical, and Sweetspot DVD.

Pinson Chamber Band is a platform for Mexican composer Craig Davis Pinson's hybrid collaborative works, cultivating aspects of composition and improvisation. Its current iteration as a nine-piece features collaborators Molly Jones (sax), Evan Kopca (clarinet), Noah Jenkins (viola), Erica Miller (cello), Mabel Kwan (accordion), Bill Harris and Sam Scranton (drums), and Chet Zenor & Craig Davis Pinson (guitar). The group draws from post-rock, chamber music, and experimental instrumental techniques to explore both visceral and dream-like sounds, while feeding off of the tension between unified group playing and the individual expressivity of each member. Pinson is a graduate of Northwestern University's doctoral program in composition.

The radically traditional flutist Shanna Pranaitis fearlessly explores the growth edges of sonic possibility and creates profoundly moving immersive concert experiences by integrating new and historically reimagined works with theater, movement, lighting and storytelling. Close collaborations with colleagues around the world have led to recitals and performances on five of the seven continents and include performances at such festivals as the Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL) and Darmstädter Ferienkurse (DE), and in such hallowed halls as Carnegie Hall and the Tonhalle Zürich. Shanna is Co-Founder and Artistic Director of FluteXpansions, the first comprehensive e-learning platform of its kind with resources for the frontier of contemporary flute performance and composition. As an arts entrepreneurship coach, she specializes in strategic transformation for artists to live creatively fulfilled and financially empowered while powerfully anchored in their own authenticity. She performs on a Burkart flute and piccolo and Kingma bass and alto flutes. www.shannapranaitis.com

Cole Reyes (b. 1998) is a Brooklyn-based composer, educator, conductor, and performer originally from the Chicagoland Area. His music explores the intersection between personal experience and the greater world beyond through the exploration of timbre and pulse. He has collaborated with artists such as the JACK Quartet, Del Sol Quartet, Transient Canvas, the Rhythm Method Quartet, Juventas New Music Ensemble, the Bergamot Quartet, BlackBox Ensemble, Inversion Da Capo, Dashon Burton, and Unheard-of//Ensemble. He holds a master’s degree in Concert Music Composition from New York University where he studied with Robert Honstein, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe.
 

Ben Roidl-Ward is the Solo Bassoonist of Ensemble Dal Niente, Principal Bassoonist of the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Assistant Professor of Bassoon at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). He also holds positions as a Contemporary Leader for the Lucerne Festival and Second Bassoonist of the Illinois Symphony. Ben’s dedication to working with and advocating for composers of his generation has led him to commission and premiere numerous works featuring the bassoon with the goal of broadening the repertoire and expanding the possibilities of the instrument.

Ben has appeared as a soloist with the Seattle Symphony and the Northwestern and Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensembles, along with several regional orchestras throughout the US. He has performed as Guest Principal Bassoon with the Arctic Philharmonic (Bodø, Norway) and the Milwaukee Symphony, and has also appeared as a guest with the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, among others. His festival appearances include the Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Tanglewood, Lucerne, Donaueschingen, Spoleto, and Banff Festivals.

A 2018 Luminarts Fellow in Classical Music, Ben was one of five finalists for the International Double Reed Society’s 2020 Gillet-Fox Competition. He serves as a Mentor for the Chicago Musical Pathways Initiative and was a guest faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in 2021-22. Ben has presented masterclasses at Northwestern University, the Oberlin Conservatory, the Peabody Conservatory, SUNY Fredonia, and the State Universities of Arizona, Colorado, and Oklahoma. In the 2022-’23 season, he is an Artist-in-Residence for the Bienen Institute for New Music at Northwestern University and releases his debut solo album on Sideband Records.

Ben received his DMA from Northwestern University, where he studied with David McGill. His dissertation focused on the bassoon’s multiphonics and methods of notating them. His previous teachers include Ben Kamins at Rice University, George Sakakeeny at the Oberlin Conservatory, and Francine Peterson in the Seattle area.

Ryne Siesky (b. 1996) is a Filipino-American composer, educator, and music technologist whose music has been described as “beautifully haunting” (Robert Avalon Competition), “patiently evocative” (George Lewis), and “unsettling, [yet] interesting” (Joshua Weatherspoon, Cycling ’74). Siesky’s music has been performed by Hypercube, Peridot Duo, Deco Saxophone Quartet, Duo Sequenza, Robert Black, and Jacob Mason, among others. His music has also been featured at several festivals including the Aspen Music Festival, NYCEMF, SEAMUS, and ICMC, among others. Siesky serves as Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Johnson University where he teaches courses in computer music programming, studio recording, and digital art. He is also the EID Director for the Millennium Composers Initiative and a DMA candidate in composition at the University of Miami, Frost School of Music.

Born in Osaka, Japan, Pianist Yumi Suehiro began studying piano at age 6, and marimba a year later. In Japan, Ms. Suehiro won numerous national and international competitions, including the top prize at the Kobe International Competition as the youngest winner. She performed Copland’s Piano Variations at Weill Recital Hall (Carnegie) as an AMTL Audition Winner, at Steinway Hall, presented by the Amati Music Festival, and premiered Fifteen Minutes of Fame at Symphony Space presented by Vox Novus. She also was the featured marimba player in Latin percussionist Victor Rendon's recording of “Fiesta Percussiva”.

An undergraduate scholarship student at Lehman College, she graduated magna cum laude, studying piano with Peter Vinograde, percussion with Morris Lang, and composition with John Corigliano. She was featured there as a soloist on both piano and marimba, playing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Rosauro's Marimba Concerto. 

Ms. Suehiro received her Master of Music degree in piano performance from the Manhattan School of Music as a student of Zenon Fishbein and Peter Vinograde. While at Manhattan, she won second prize in the school’s 2010 concerto competition (John Harbison’s Piano Concerto), and in 2011 was chosen to perform Richard Wilson’s “Flashback” for Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s master class.

Ms. Suehiro regularly performs with ensemble Mise-En as a core member. She has performed Ligeti's Piano Concerto with Mise-En in Sarasota, Florida in January 2017 at New College of Florida. 

Ms. Suehiro has taught at Lehman College (CUNY), and is a member of the faculty at Lehman College Continuing Education.

Taimur Sullivan is professor of saxophone and coordinator of the winds and percussion program at the Bienen School of Music, and a member of the acclaimed PRISM Quartet. His performances have taken him from the stages of Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Knitting Factory, to engagements throughout Russia, China, Europe and Latin America. He has garnered critical praise as "outstanding...his melodies phrased as if this were an old and cherished classic, his virtuosity supreme" (Paul Griffiths, New York Times), a player of "dazzling proficiency" (American Record Guide), “Taimur Sullivan is a whiz…” (Gramophone), and "Mr. Sullivan delivered this...wide-ranging program with a seductive breadth of tone and considerable technical agility" (Alex Ross, The New York Times).

Mr. Sullivan has dedicated much of his career to commissioning new repertoire for the saxophone, and has given the premieres of over 300 works by composers including William Bolcom, George Lewis, Julia Wolfe, Alvin Lucier, Augusta Read Thomas, Tyshawn Sorey, Kate Soper, Gavin Bryars, Lee Hyla, Tania León, Olga Neuwirth, John Harbison, Chen Yi, Martin Bresnick, Jennifer Higdon, Donnacha Dennehy, Steve Mackey, and many others. He has also presented the American premieres by important international composers such as Gerard Grisey, Toshio Hosokawa, Philippe Hurel, Michael Finnissy, Giya Kancheli, and Jean-Claude Risset. In honor of his distinguished record of promoting and presenting new works for the saxophone, the New York-based arts-advocacy organization Meet the Composer named him one of eight "Soloist Champions" in the United States.

As a member of the PRISM Quartet for over 25 years, Mr. Sullivan has performed concertos with orchestras nationwide, including the Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, and Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and has conducted residencies at the nation’s leading conservatories including the Curtis Institute of Music, Rice University, and Princeton University. His recent work with PRISM has crossed over into collaborations with noted jazz artists Ravi Coltrane, Chris Potter, Miguel Zenón, Joe Lovano, David Liebman and Rudresh Mahanthappa, with Sō Percussion and Partch Percussion Ensemble, and with traditional Chinese instrumentalists. His recent recording of Gavin Bryars’ The Fifth Century (ECM) with PRISM and The Crossing choir under the direction of Donald Nally was awarded the Grammy award.

During recent seasons, Mr. Sullivan performed John Adams’ Nixon in China with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of the composer, two concerti at the Festival of Palaces in St. Petersburg, Russia, concerts in China, Croatia, and Colombia, became a founding member of Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble, and presented concerts and master classes around the United States including at Yale University, Eastman School of Music, University of Michigan, the Hartt School, National Sawdust, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Brandeis University, Big Ears Festival, and Le Poisson Rouge.

Prior to arriving at Northwestern University, Mr. Sullivan served on the performance faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and Columbia University. He appears on 50 commercial recordings, and performs exclusively on Selmer saxophones and Silverstein ligatures.

Singaporean composer Yuting Tan writes music which explores the interaction of different sounds to form unique harmonies and textures. Her music has been recognized with awards including first prize in the Macht Competition for Orchestral Composition (2018) and first prize in the Virginia Carty deLillo Composition Competition (2018) at the Peabody Conservatory. Past collaborations include performances by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Peabody Symphony Orchestra, Megalopolis Saxophone Orchestra, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Tacet(i) Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, ~Nois, Alarm Will Sound, Unassisted Fold and Ensemble Soundinitiative. Yuting is pursuing a PhD in Music Composition at the University of Chicago.
 

A sound can evoke a time, a place, a cultural moment, or a worldview.  As someone who loves both the Western classical tradition and the world of pop culture, Alex Temple (b. 1983) has always felt uncomfortable with stylistic hierarchies and the idea of a pure musical language.  She prefers to look for points of connection between things that aren’t supposed to belong together, distorting and combining iconic sounds to create new meanings — often in service of surreal, cryptic, or fantastical narratives.  She’s particularly interested in reclaiming socially disapproved-of (“cheesy”) sounds, playing with the boundary between funny and frightening, investigating lost memories and secret histories, and telling queer and trans stories.

Alex’s work has been performed by a variety of soloists and ensembles, including Mellissa Hughes, Julia Holter, Isabel Leonard, Mabel Kwan, Amanda Gookin, wild Up, Spektral Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, the American Composers Orchestra, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.  She has also performed her own works for voice and electronics in venues such as Roulette, Exapno, Galapagos Art Space, Gallery Cabaret, Constellation, and Experimental Sound Studio.  As the keyboardist for the chamber-rock group The Sissy-Eared Mollycoddles, she performed at the South by Southwest Festival and Chicago’s Green Mill Cocktail Lounge;  with a·pe·ri·od·ic, an ensemble dedicated to the performance of indeterminate music in the tradition of John Cage, she made sounds using her voice, synthesizers and household objects.

Alex got her BA from Yale University in 2005, where she studied with Kathryn Alexander and Matthew Suttor, and released two albums of electronic music on a microlabel that she ran out of her dorm room.  In 2007 she completed her MA at University of Michigan, where she studied with Erik Santos and visiting professors Michael Colgrass, Tania León and Betsy Jolas, as well as collaborating with a troupe of dancers and playing in an indie bossa-nova band.  After she left Ann Arbor, she spent two years working as the program manager for the New York Youth Symphony’s Making Score program for young composers.  In 2017, she completed a DMA at Northwestern University, where she studied with Hans Thomalla and Jay Alan Yim, and taught aural skills, theory, composition for non-majors, and private composition lessons. In recently years she has taught at Luna Lab and National Sawdust’s BluePrint Fellowship, and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Composition at Arizona State University.

Hans Thomalla is professor and director of Institute for New Music at the Bienen School of Music. 

Thomalla is a German-American composer based in Chicago. He has written chamber music as well as orchestral works and a particular focus of his activity lies in composing for the stage. His opera Fremd was produced by the Stuttgart Opera in 2011 and his second opera Kaspar Hauser by the Freiburg Opera in 2016. His most recent work for the stage, Dark Spring, was premiered at the Mannheim Opera in 2020.

Thomalla is Professor of Music Composition at Northwestern University, where he founded and directs the Institute for New Music. He studied at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule and received his doctoral degree in composition from Stanford University, where he was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. From 1999-2002 he held the position of Assistant Dramaturge and Musical Advisor at the Stuttgart Opera. He has taught at June in Buffalo and the Freiburg Matrix Academy, and has served on the faculty of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse for several years.

Thomalla has been awarded numerous awards and fellowships, including the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, the Composer Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, the Christoph-Delz Prize, a Fromm Commission, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the academic year 2014-15 he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and in 2020-21 he was a fellow at the Kaplan Humanities Institute at Northwestern University.

Hans Thomalla appears as a fictional character in Alexander Kluge’s story collection “Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verräter. 48 Geschichten für Fritz Bauer.”

Flute and saxophone contemporary music duet, Tower Duo has performed together since 2007 and focuses on the music of living composers with performances at conferences, universities, festivals, and arts venues across the country. Flutist, Erin Helgeson Torres is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Ohio Northern University, Principal Flute of the Lima Symphony Orchestra, Principal Flute of the Worthington Chamber Orchestra, Second Flute with the Evansville Philharmonic, and solo flutist with the Columbus Ohio Discovery Ensemble. Saxophonist Michael Rene Torres is Assistant Teaching Professor of Saxophone and Composition at Ohio State University, Artistic Director of the Columbus Ohio Discovery Ensemble, and Program Director of the Johnstone Fund for New Music. Tower Duo’s debut album, Crosswind, was released by Ravello Records under the PARMA Recordings label in January of 2019.

Alissa Voth (she/her) is a Chicago-based composer. She writes contemporary classical concert music exploring musical and narrative capacities, echoing woven and submerged experiences of the present. Voth's music has been performed by soloists such as Charles Lilley, Sarah Brady, Antonina Styczén, and Lucy Yao, as well as at festivals and venues such as at the UT Contemporary Music Festival, Cortona Sessions for New Music, and the Isador Bajic School.

As an educator, Voth has taught composition at the Boston Conservatory's High School Composition Intensive, private music lessons, and adaptive music classes for disabled students in Boston Public Schools. Currently, she collaborates with programmer Paige Gulley to develop music composition games based on cognition research. You can find a reflection of their preliminary work published in Special Interest Group for Computers and Society. She additionally writes songs and lyrics for theater, mainly collaborating with playwright M Sloth Levine.

Voth is pursuing a PhD at Northwestern University. Her teachers and mentors include Marti Epstein, Felipe Lara, Hans Thomalla, Danuta Mirka, Alex Mincek, and Jonathan Bailey Holland. Her hometown is Tulsa, Oklahoma.
 

Julia Wolfe’s music is distinguished by an intense physicality and a relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. She draws inspiration from folk, classical, and rock genres, bringing a modern sensibility to each while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them.

Wolfe’s Her Story, a 45-minute semi-staged work for orchestra and women’s chamber choir, receives its world premiere on September 15, 2022 with the Nashville Symphony and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero. Co-commissioned by a consortium of five American orchestras, all performances feature the vocal ensemble Lorelei, with stage direction by Anne Kauffman, lighting design by Jeff Sugg, costumes by Márion Talán de la Rosa, and sound design by Andrew Cotton. The world premiere is followed by performances in the 2022-23 season from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (January 6–7), Boston Symphony Orchestra (March 16–18), and San Francisco Symphony (May 25–27); dates with additional commissioner National Symphony Orchestra will be announced at a later date. Her Story invokes the words of historical figures and the spirit of pivotal moments to pay tribute to the centuries of ongoing struggle for equal rights and representation for women in America.

Other recent works include Fire in my mouth (2019), a large-scale work for orchestra and women’s chorus, commissioned/premiered by the New York Philharmonic with The Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City; Forbidden Love (2019), a string quartet performed by percussionists, written for Sō Percussion and co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the LA Philharmonic, and the Kennedy Center; and Flower Power (2020), a concerto for the Bang on a Can All-Stars co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Danish National Symphony.

In addition to receiving the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Wolfe was a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. She received the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in Music, and was named Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year. Julia Wolfe is co-founder/co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can, and she is Artistic Director of NYU Steinhardt Music Composition.

Her music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Publishing Group.

Yarn/Wire is a New York-based percussion and piano quartet (Sae Hashimoto and Russell Greenberg, percussion; Laura Barger and Julia Den Boer, pianos) dedicated to the promotion of creative, experimental new music. The ensemble is admired globally for the energy and care it brings to performances of today’s most adventurous music, and New York Classical Review states that “Yarn/Wire may well be the most important new music ensemble on the classical scene today.” Founded in 2005, the ensemble seeks to expand the representation of composers so that it might begin to better reflect our communities and their creative potential.

Yarn/Wire has performed internationally at festivals including the Lincoln Center, Edinburgh International, Rainy Days (Luxembourg), Ultima (Norway), Festival 20/21 (Belgium), Contemplus (Prague), and Wien Modern (Austria) Festivals, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Hall, Dublin SoundLab, Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Brooklyn Academy of Music, and New York’s Miller Theatre. Their numerous commissions include works from composers such as Annea Lockwood, Enno Poppe, Michael Gordon, George Lewis, Ann Cleare, Catherine Lamb, Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Evans, Alex Mincek, Thomas Meadowcroft, Misato Mochizuki, Sam Pluta, Tyondai Braxton, Kate Soper, and Øyvind Torvund. The ensemble enjoys collaborations with genre-bending artists such as Tristan Perich, Ben Vida, Mark Fell, Sufjan Stevens, and Pete Swanson.

Through the Yarn/Wire International Institute and Festival, plus other educational residencies and outreach programs, the quartet works to promote not only the present but also the future of new music in the United States. Their ongoing commissioning series, Yarn/Wire/Currents, serves as an incubator for new experimental music.

Yarn/Wire has recorded for the WERGO, Kairos, New Amsterdam, Northern Spy, Shelter Press, Distributed Objects, Black Truffle, Populist, and Carrier record labels in addition to maintaining their own imprint. For more information, please visit www.yarnwire.org.

Jay Alan Yim is associate professor and coordinator of the composition and music technology program at the Bienen School of Music. Listed in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Yim is an internationally recognized composer, with a Kennedy Center/Friedheim award, three BMI and two ASCAP awards, Tanglewood and Aspen fellowships, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and three Illinois Arts Council fellowships. Other honors include an appointment as a composer/fellow (1995-96) for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Yim has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon, Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus, New Music Consort, Frances-Marie Uitti, National Endowment for the Arts, and Chicago Cultural Center, and performances by the San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Korean Broadcast Orchestra, Sendai Philharmonic, Nederlands Radio Filharmonisch, Residentie Orkest Den Haag, London Sinfonietta, Isaac Stern, Yo-Yo Ma, Yefim Bronfman, Sarah Chang, Ian Pace, ICE, dal niente, Arditti Quartet, JACK Quartet, and Spektral Quartet. Festival presentations for him include concerts at Tanglewood, Almeida, ISCM World Music Days, Darmstadt, Wien Modern, Gaudeamus, Ars Musica, Sendai, Huddersfield, ICMC. Yim has been recorded by both the New York Philharmonic and Arditti Quartet and is co-founder of the "localStyle" digital media collaborative, with museum installations in Asia, the USA and Europe.