Ensemble Evolution | House Program

Claire Chase, described by The New Yorker as "the young star of the modern flute," is a soloist, collaborative artist, curator, educator and advocate for the music of our time. Over the past decade she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works for the flute in performances throughout the Americas, Europe, Australia and Asia, and she has championed new music by building organizations, forming alliances, pioneering commissioning initiatives and supporting educational programs that reach new audiences. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was the first flutist to be awarded The Avery Fisher Prize.

In 2013 Chase launched Density 2036, a 23-year commissioning project to create an entirely new body of repertory for solo flute leading up to 2036, the centenary of Edgard Varèse’s groundbreaking 1936 flute solo, Density 21.5. She was the 2009 Grand Prize Winner of the Concert Artists Guild International Competition, and made her critically-acclaimed Carnegie Hall recital debut in 2010. In 2015, Chase was honored with the American Composers Forum Champion of New Music Award. She is the founder and flutist of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and Professor of Practice at Harvard University's Department of Music.

Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family.  For forty years he has championed contemporary music by commissioning or premiering more than one hundred-fifty new works. Schick is music director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus and artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.  He was music director of the 2015 Ojai Festival. He maintains a lively schedule of guest conducting including recent appearances with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Modern and the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble. Among his acclaimed publications include a book, “The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams,” and numerous recordings of contemporary percussion music including a 3 CD set of the complete percussion music of Iannis Xenakis (Mode) and a companion recording of the early percussion music of Karlheinz Stockhausen in 2014 (Mode). Steven Schick is Distinguished Professor of Music and holds the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego. 

Fiona Digney is an Australian-born multi-faceted percussionist and producer who holds both education and performance degrees from Australia, The Netherlands, and USA, and is currently based in California while she completes doctoral studies under the guidance of Prof. Steven Schick. She has enjoyed a wide-ranging freelance career performing in solo, ensemble, and theatrical settings in Australia, China, Canada, The Netherlands, Sweden, England, Mexico, and the United States. As an avid proponent of new music, she has commissioned and premiered various percussion works from composers across the globe, and has been involved in many new and experimental music ensembles. Theatre credits include Caligula with Cripple Creek Theatre Company in New Orleans, The Cherry Orchard and Perestroika in San Diego, Caesar with Het Zuiderlijk Toneel in The Netherlands and Belgium, Becoming the System with Diamantfabriek in The Netherlands,  and the European premiere of Anne Washburn’s highly acclaimed post-electric play, Mr. Burns at the Almeida theatre, London. Fiona has performed with West Australian Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, La Jolla Symphony, Tetrafide percussion quartet (AUS),  Ensemble 64.8 and red fish blue fish (USA), as well as a soloist at Club Zho and the launch of the Totally Huge New Music Festival (AUS). Fiona has been involved in producing the Ojai Music Festival (2016-18), and the It’s About Time percussion festival in San Diego.

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective committed to transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. The ensemble’s 35 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Emerging composers have anchored ICE’s programming since its founding in 2001, and the group’s recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music’s present. ICE has received the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, and was also named Musical America Worldwide’s Ensemble of the Year 2014. The group currently serves as artists in residence at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’ Mostly Mozart Festival, and previously led a five-year residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Recent performance stages include the Park Avenue Armory, The Stone, ice floes at Greenland’s Diskotek Sessions, and boats on the Amazon River.  Yamaha Artist Services New York is the exclusive piano provider for ICE.

International Contemporary Ensemble faculty:

James Austin Smith, Oboe. Joshua Rubin, Clarinet. Rebekah Heller, Bassoon. Ryan Muncy, Saxophone. David Byrd-Marrow, Horn. Peter Evans, Trumpet. Daniel Lippel, Guitar. Jennifer Curtis, Violin. Miranda Cuckson, Violin. Joshua Modney, Violin. Kyle Armbrust, Viola. Katinka Kleijn, Cello. Cory Smythe, Piano. Ross Karre, Percussion. 
 

Kyle Armbrust started playing the viola at age three. Since giving his New York solo debut with Kurt Masur and the Juilliard Orchestra in Avery Fisher Hall, he has created a multi-dimensional career performing and recording a wide range of music. Kyle is a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of the Knights Chamber Orchestra, and principal violist of the Westchester Philharmonic. He also performs regularly with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra. An active proponent of new music, Kyle has worked with Elliot Carter, Mario Davidovsky, Osvaldo Golijov, Steve Reich, Kaija Saariaho, and John Zorn. He is featured on Vijay Iyer’s Mutations (ECM), and Tyshawn Sorey’s The Inner Spectrum of Variables (Pi Recordings). Kyle received three degrees from the Juilliard School, and is currently the assistant professor of viola at Ithaca College in New York. He plays a Carlo Antonio Testore viola made in Milan in 1752.

Praised for his “virtuosic,” “dazzling" and “brilliant” performances (The New York Times) and his “bold, keen sound” (The New Yorker), oboist James Austin Smith performs equal parts new and old music across the United States and around the world. Mr. Smith is an artist of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the Talea Ensemble and Cygnus as well as a former Artistic Director of Decoda, the Affiliate Ensemble of Carnegie Hall. He is a member of the faculties of Stony Brook University, the Manhattan School of Music and Purchase College and is co-Artistic Director of Tertulia, a chamber music series that takes place in restaurants in New York and San Francisco. Mr. Smith is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Leipzig, Germany, an alumnus of Carnegie Hall's Ensemble Connect program, and a graduate in oboe and political science from Northwestern and Yale Universities.

American hornist David Byrd-Marrow is the solo horn of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), a new music collective that performs internationally and serves as ensemble-in-residence at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. Working with a uniquely wide range of performers, he has premiered works by Matthias Pintscher, Arthur Kampela, George Lewis, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Du Yun, Marcos Balter, Wang Lu, Kate Soper, Miguel Zenón, and Chick Corea. He frequently performs at festivals including the Ojai Music Festival, Bay Chamber Concerts, the Mostly Mozart Festival, the Tanglewood Music Center, and as faculty at the Banff Music Centre. Formerly a member of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, he has also made guest appearances in the New York Philharmonic, The Knights, Decoda, the Atlanta and Tokyo symphony orchestras, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and the Washington National Opera. As a soloist, he has performed Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante with the Seattle Symphony. He has recorded on many labels including Tundra, More Is More, Nonesuch, EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, and Naxos. Mr. Byrd-Marrow received his Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School and Master of Music from Stony Brook University.

Rania El Mugammar is a Sudanese Artist, Liberation Educator, Anti-oppression Consultant , multidisciplinary performer, speaker and published writer. 

As a writer, Rania's work explores themes of identity, womanhood, Blackness, flight, exile, migration, belonging, gender, sexuality and beyond. Rania's primary mediums are poetry, spoken word and oral storytelling. She is a published poet, storyteller and playwright. Rania is deeply interested in poetic form and the auditory texture of words as well as the visual/aesthetic impact of language and form. 

She is co-chair of the St. Jamestown Collective Impact Steering Committee, a member of the Leaders Panel for the Economic Development and Culture Strategic Plan at the city of Toronto. Rania is the also the lead anti-oppression consultant for RECENTRE, Program director of B Inc at Bcurrent Performing Arts and co-founder of the How to be an Ally Series at the Centre for Social Innovation. 

Rania is an experienced anti-oppression, equity, inclusion and liberation educator and consultant who is unflinchingly committed to decolonization and freedom as the ultimate goals of her work. She has worked extensively with contemporary arts institutions, STEM based enterprises, media organization, educational institutions and community/grassroots spaces. Rania has worked with hundreds of organizations, collectives and institutions including VIBE Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Ministry of Canadian Heritage, Daniels Spectrum, Trinity Square Video, Ebay, Facebook Canada, Toronto Cultural Music Lab, Canadian Art Magazine, Bcurrent, Toronto Arts Council, WattPad, Women’s College Hospital, the University of Michigan, Canadian Art Magazine, TPW Gallery, Peel Dufferin Catholic District School Board, Regent Park Focus and beyond.
 

The New York Times described violinist Jennifer Curtis’s second solo concert in Carnegie Hall as “one of the gutsiest and most individual recital programs.” She was celebrated as “an artist of keen intelligence and taste, well worth watching out for.”

Curtis navigates with personality and truth in every piece she performs. Jennifer is a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and founder of the group Tres Americas Ensemble. She has appeared as a soloist with the Simon Bolivar Orchestra in Venezuela and the Knights Chamber Orchestra; performed in Romania in honor of George Enescu; given world premieres at the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York; collaborated with composer John Adams at the Library of Congress; and appeared at El Festival de las Artes Esénias in Peru and festivals worldwide.

An educator with a focus on music as humanitarian aid, Jennifer has also collaborated with musical shaman of the Andes, improvised for live radio from the interior of the Amazon jungle, and taught and collaborated with Kurdish refugees in Turkey.

Peter Evans is a trumpet player, and improvisor/composer based in New York City since 2003. Evans is part of a broad, hybridized scene of musical experimentation and his work cuts across a wide range of modern musical practices and traditions.  Peter is committed to the simultaneously self-determining and collaborative nature of musical improvisation as a compositional tool, and works with an ever-expanding group of musicians and composers in the creation of new music.  His primary groups as a leader are the Peter Evans Quintet and the Zebulon trio. He is a member of the cooperative groups Pulverize the Sound, and Rocket Science, and is constantly experimenting and forming new configurations with like-minded players.  As a composer, he has been commissioned by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Yarn/Wire, the Donaueschingen Musiktage Festival, the Jerome Foundation's Emerging Artist Program, and the Doris Duke Foundation for the 2015 Newport Jazz Festival. Evans has presented and/or performed his works at major festivals worldwide and tours his own groups extensively. He has been releasing recordings on his own label, More is More, since 2011. 

Juno nominated Cris Derksen is an internationally respected Indigenous Cellist and Composer. In a world where almost everything — people, music, cultures — gets labelled and slotted into simple categories, Cris Derksen represents a challenge. Originally from Northern Alberta she comes from a line of chiefs from North Tallcree Reserve on her father’s side and a line of strong Mennonite homesteaders on her mother’s. Derksen braids the traditional and contemporary, weaving her classical background and her Indigenous ancestry together with new school electronics to create genre-defying music. As a performer Derksen performs nationally and internationally as a soloist and in collaboration with some of Canada’s finest, including Tanya Tagaq, Buffy Sainte Marie, Naomi Klein, and Leanne Simpson, to name a few. Recent concert destinations include Hong Kong, Australia, Mongolia, Sweden, and a whole lot of Canada: the place Derksen refers to as home.

2021 commissions include pieces for the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Ottawa's Chamberfest, the City of Toronto, Edmonton New Music, the Edmonton Symphony with support from the National Arts Centre, Vancouver's Blueridge Chamber Festival, Vancouver Transform Cabaret, and a 4-part docuseries for the Knowledge Network. 

Lisa E. Harris, Li, is an independent and interdisciplinary artist, creative soprano, performer, composer, improviser, writer, singer-songwriter, and educator from Houston, Texas. 

Li's work focuses on the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit, and place. Using voice, theremin, movement, meditation, and new media to explore spatial awareness, relationality, panoptical surveillance, and sonic profiling, she maintains a focused concentration on healing in performance and living. She is the founder and creative director of Studio Enertia, an art collective with Pittsburgh creator Alisha B. Wormsley. Studio Enertia is currently producing Harris’s 10-year durational work, Cry of the Third Eye, a new opera film in 3 acts that archives the effects of gentrification on her Houston neighborhood. Li recently created and curated Houston’s inaugural Free Time Flow Festival at MacGregor Park, celebrating the intersections of basketball, electro-acoustic music, and improvisational performance. She has currently curated Pauline Oliveros Day at Discovery Green Houston. Li can be heard as the lead singer with Jason Moran's Fats Waller Dance Party. Recent engagements include The Force of Things, an Opera for Objects by Ashley Fure, The Nubian Word for Flowers- a phantom Opera by Pauline Oliveros and IONE, and Earthseed, a co-composition commission with Nicole M. Mitchell for Chicago's Art Institute. She is currently on a solo tour that includes acclaimed solo performances at Moogfest 2019 and Marfa Myths 2019. She will join the Ensemble Evolution faculty at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity in the summer of 2019.
 

Praised for her “flair” and “deftly illuminated” performances by The New York Times, bassoonist Rebekah Heller is a uniquely dynamic chamber, orchestral and solo musician. Equally comfortable playing established classical works and the newest of new music, Rebekah is a fiercely passionate advocate for the bassoon. Called an "impressive solo bassoonist" by The New Yorker, she is tirelessly committed to collaborating with composers to expand the modern repertoire for the instrument.

Her debut solo album of world premiere recordings, 100 names, has been called "pensive and potent" by the New York Times and was featured in the ArtsBeat Classical Playlist of the same publication. As a core member of the renowned International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Rebekah plays solo and chamber music all over the world. She has been a featured soloist with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and the Nagoya Philharmonic and has performed in cities both near and far –  including São Paolo, Rio, Manaus, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Köln, Salzburg, Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and many, many more.

A graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory, Rebekah lives in New York City.

IONE is an author, a playwright, a director, and an improvising text-sound artist. She has taught and performed throughout the world with her partner and spouse of 30 years, Pauline Oliveros. Pauline and IONE have created four large music theatre works together uncluding Njinga the Queen King; The Return of a Warrior (BAM’s Next Wave Festival); IO and Her and the Trouble With Him, a dance-opera in primeval time; U of Wisconsin’s Union Theater and The Lunar Opera: Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Oracle Bones; Mirror Dreams; and the film Dreams of the Jungfrau. 

Oliveros and Ione's The Nubian Word for Flower, a Phantom Opera, opened to critical acclaim at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, November, 2017. The opera is an international collaboration including the United States, European and Egyptian artists. Also forthcoming: The Nubian Word for Flowers, a Phantom Opera, in collaboration with The International Contemporary Ensemble. IONE's memoir, Pride of Family; Four Generations of American Women of Color, was a New York Times notable book on its publication.  A journalist for many years IONE, published in major magazines and newspapers throughout the 80s including The Village Voice, The Gannett Chain, and Vogue. Other works include Listening in Dreams, Piramida Negra, Nile Night, and Spell Breaking 1 and 2 Anthologies. She was Artistic Director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. for 15 years and currently is a Deep Listening Certification Instructor at the Center for Deep Listening in Troy, New York. As Founding Director of M.o.M., Inc. (The Ministry of Maåt), in Kingston, New York since 1997, IONE teaches workshops and seminars throughout the world, encouraging and supporting women’s well-being and sustaining a vibrant international community of writers, visual artists, and musicians.  

Photo: Michael Kirby Smith

Aiyun Huang enjoys a musical life as soloist, chamber musician, researcher, teacher and producer. Globally recognized since winning the 2002 First Prize and Audience Prize of the Geneva International Music Competition. She is a champion of existing repertoire and a prominent voice in the collaborative creation of new works. Huang has commissioned and premiered over two hundred works in her two decades as a soloist and chamber musician. The Globe and Mail critic Robert Everett-Green describes Huang’s playing as “engrossing to hear and to watch” and her choice of repertoire as capable of “renovating our habits of listening.” Her past highlights include performances at the Victoria Hall in Geneva, Weill Recital Hall in New York, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra’s Green Umbrella Series, LACMA Concert Series, Holland Festival, Agora Festival in Paris, Banff Arts Festival, 7éme Biennale d’Art Contemporaine de Lyon, Vancouver New Music Festival, CBC Radio, La Jolla Summerfest, Scotia Festival, Cool Drummings, Montreal New Music Festival, Centro Nacional Di Las Artes in Mexico City, Cervantino Festival, and National Concert Hall and Theater in Taipei. Her recent highlights include performances with St. Lawrence String Quartet, L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Taipei Symphony Orchestra and San Diego Symphony Orchestra. Her recent premieres include works by Philippe Leroux, David Bithell, Nicole Lizée, George Lewis, and Eliot Britton.

Yvette Janine Jackson (b. 1973) is a composer and sound installation artist focused on bringing attention to historical events and social issues through music. Her works have recently been featured at the Fridman Gallery in New York; Cube at Virginia Tech; Tonband Fixed Media Festival in Stockholm; Spreckels Organ in Balboa Park; the San Diego Art Institute; San Francisco International Arts Festival; Stockholm’s Kulturnatten festival; the Borealis Festival in Bergen; and in residency at Elektronmusikstudion (Stockholm EMS). Her composition Atlantic Crossing was read by the Naples Philharmonic in 2016 with support of the American Composers Orchestra and Cannot Be (Unrung) for  carillon and electronics was co-commissioned in 2018 by the University of Chicago and University of Michigan for Tiffany Ng. Yvette will become Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University in July 2019.

Ross Karre (b. 1983 in Battle Creek, MI) is a percussionist and temporal artist based in New York City. His primary focus is the combination of media selected from classical percussion, electronics, theater, moving image, visual art, and lighting design. After completing his Doctorate in Music at UCSD with Steven Schick, Ross formalized his intermedia studies with a Master of Fine Arts from UCSD. He is a percussionist and co-artistic director the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and performs regularly with red fish blue fish, Third Coast Percussion (Chicago), the National Gallery of Art New Music Ensemble. His projection design work has been presented all over the world in prestigious venues such as the BBC Scotland, the Park Avenue Armory, the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, and the BIMhuis (Amsterdam). Ross is the founder of the crowd-sourced, contemporary music web archive metafields.org and the media collective rKAD (Ross Karre Arts Documentation). www.rosskarre.com

Cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying career in solo, chamber music, improvisation and orchestral performance. As soloist she appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Hague Philharmonic, and at the Tokyo Metropolitan Theater. She premiered Dai Fujikura’s Cello Concerto at Lincoln Center, with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), which was released live on Minabel/SONY Japan Records. Known for her innovative individual projects, she appeared in recital at the Library of Congress, Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Collaboration with the performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in “Intelligence in the Human-Machine”, a duo for cellist and brainwaves. This year, the City of Chicago presented her “Water on the Bridge”, for 30 cellos, 2 cellists and swimming pool at the 2000 square foot Eckhart Park Natatorium, in collaboration with Lia Kohl.
Additional projects include a VR/3D video of Bryan Jacobs’ “ly ful hood” for cello and robot instruments, commissioning Marcos Balter for a Bach Suite companion piece, performing in duo with Du Yun, and with Tortoise at Pitchfork Midwinter. A member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the International Contemporary Ensemble, she has a working duo with guitarist Bill MacKay
 

George Lewis, Professor of American Music at Columbia University, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. His other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself:  The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and he is the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). His creative work is documented on more than 150 recordings, as presented by the London Philharmonia Orchestra, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Spektral Quartet, Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, and others. His opera Afterword (2015) was most recently performed at the Ojai Festival, with additional performances in USA, Europe, and UK.  Lewis holds honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Edinburgh and New College of Florida.  See https://music.columbia.edu/bios/george-e-lewis.

Israeli born and raised trombonist Reut Regev has been out in the New York scene creating and exploring music for over 20 years. Reut enjoys playing with some of the most influential experimental composers, New York style bands blending styles and cultures, and traditional sounds as well. Reut’s typical year includes some free improvisation, contemporary compositions, blues, klezmer, latin music, straight ahead jazz, and everything in between. She has recorded and toured with Anthony Braxton, Butch Morris, Elliott Sharp, Burton Greene, Hazmat Modine, Metropolitan Klezmer, Joe Battan, and many more.
 
Reut’s main project as a band leader and composer, for the last decade, is the band that she co-leads with her husband, drummer Igal Foni: Reut Regev’s R*time. R*time features mostly original compositions by Reut and Igal, and encourages soulful musical explorations by the band members. The personnel includes legendary free funk guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly, as well as master bassist Mark Peterson. Also some wonderful R*timers including renowned Tubist Jon Sass, and internationally acclaimed bass players Robert Jukic and Andrea Castelli. Since R*time’s first release in 2009, This is R*time, the group has been touring Europe extensively. Following R*time’s 2012 Enja release, exploRing the vibe, the most recent release, Keep Winning, was release on Enja records earlier this year.
 
At the same time as holding a successful and exciting musical career, Reut has been building her music education studio – Notes And Beyond LLC. Through Notes And Beyond, Igal and Reut offer music workshops for various ages and levels, as well as private lessons in New Jersey and beyond.
 
Photo by Carsten Fleck

Filipino-American, Levy I. Lorenzo works at the intersection of music, art, and technology.  On an international scale, his body of work spans custom electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, free improvisation, and classical percussion.  With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music.  A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), he fulfills multiple roles an engineer, electronicist, and percussionist.  He also recently joined the Peter Evans Septet.  Levy earned degrees as Master of Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts from Stony Brook University.  He teaches Emerging Media at CUNY College of Technology and Music Technology at Hunter College. 

Joshua Rubin is a founding clarinetist and the co-Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), where he oversees the creative direction of more than 140 events per season in the United States and abroad. As a clarinetist, the New York Times has praised him as, "incapable of playing an inexpressive note." 

He holds degrees in biology as well as music, and his interest in electronic music throughout his career has led him work on making these technologies easier to use for both composers and performers. Joshua can be heard on recordings from the Nonesuch, Kairos, New Focus, Mode, Cedille, Naxos, Bridge, Sony, New Amsterdam, and Tzadik labels. His album There Never is No Light, is available on ICE's Tundra label.

He has been featured as a soloist with the Seattle Symphony (under Ludovic Morlot) and at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, in engagements with the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and this season will give performances of new music in across the US and in Canada, France, Peru, UAE, Mexico, and the UK.

Ryan Muncy, praised for his “amazing virtuosity” (The Chicago Tribune) as well as his ability to "show off the instrument's malleability and freakish extended range as well as its delicacy and refinement" (The Chicago Reader), is a New York City-based saxophonist who performs, commissions, and presents new music. His work emphasizes collaborative relationships with composers and artists of his generation and aims to reimagine the way listeners experience the saxophone through new music. He is a recipient of the Kranichstein Music Prize (Darmstadt Summer Courses), the Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, and a Fulbright Fellowship (France) and has participated in the creation of more than 200 new works for the instrument. His debut solo album Hot was released by New Focus Recordings in 2013, described as "absorbing" (Alex Ross) and "one of the year's best albums" (Time Out New York), and his second solo album, ism, was released in September 2016 by TUNDRA/New Focus Recordings, noted by The Chicago Tribune for it. Ryan is the saxophonist of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), where he also serves as co-director of the ensemble’s OpenICE program. www.ryanmuncy.comhttp://www.ryanmuncy.com/

Eduardo Kohn is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. He studies the intimate relationships that the indigenous peoples of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon have with one of Earth’s most complex ecosystems. Focusing on how they understand and communicate with rainforest beings through hunting and gathering, as well as through dreams and psychedelic plant use has led him to the audacious conclusion that complex living systems manifest “mind” at a variety of scales and in a variety of ways. From this, he develops an empirically robust framework to understand our broader relationship to such mind-like phenomena with the goal of rethinking how to live in the face of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change. His prize-winning book How Forests Think has been translated into seven languages and has inspired the planetary ecological imaginary in a surprisingly diverse number of ways ranging from an eponymous symphony (composed by Liza Lim) to international museum exhibits.

Matana Roberts has been called “a major talent” (The Wire) and “the spokeswoman for a new, politically conscious music scene” (Jazzthetik).  A dynamic saxophonist, composer, improviser, and mixed media sound artist, Roberts’s acclaimed artistic practice aims to expose and celebrate the mystical roots and intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression. Her innovative work has forged new conceptual approaches to considering narrativity, history, and political expression within music, improvisation and beyond.
 

Grammy-nominated tenor Peter Tantsits, named one of his generation’s most consistently satisfying contemporary vocalists by Opera magazine, has appeared as a soloist multiple times with the Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Orchestre de Radio France, Britten Sinfonia and many others under conductors including Sir Simon Rattle, Kirill Petrentko, Emmanuelle Haïm, and Thomas Adès. His repertoire spans the classic through the avant-garde, including works by Stravinsky, Berg, Janáček, and Mahler as well as Milton Babbitt, Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pascal Dusapin, Gerald Barry and Pauline Oliveros.  On the opera stage he has sung at La Scala, the Bayerische Staatsoper, Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, and LA Opera with notable leading performances at the European opera theaters of Basel, Mainz, Bonn, Köln, Bern, St. Gallen, Karlsruhe and others.  He is particularly known for his critically acclaimed portrayals in Stockhausen’s Donnerstag aus Licht, Dusapin’s Perelà, Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten, Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten, and Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre.

Tyshawn Sorey is a composer and musician whose music assimilates and transforms ideas from a broad spectrum of musical idioms and defies distinctions between genres, composition, and improvisation in a singular expression of contemporary music. Sorey was recently named a 2017 MacArthur Fellow and a 2018 United States Artists Fellow. The Spektral Quartet, Ojai Music Festival, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Miller Theater, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Opera Philadelphia, Carnegie Hall, and Jack Quartet, among many other ensembles and venues, have commissioned his works. He has also released six critically acclaimed recordings that feature his work as a composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist and conceptualist. As a collaborator he has performed and recorded with many leading creative music figures and contemporary/new music ensembles such as Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Vijay Iyer, Anthony Braxton, Ensemble Intercontemporain, John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith, Butch Morris, Myra Melford, George Lewis, the Lucerne Festival Players, Ikue Mori, WildUp Ensemble, Steve Lehman, Claire Chase, and Marilyn Crispell, among many others. Sorey is an Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, specializing in creative improvised and avant-garde musical performance practices.

Wilfrido Terrazas (Camargo, 1974) is a Mexican flutist, improviser, composer and educator, whose work finds points of convergence between notated and improvised music, and approaches collaboration and collective creation in innovative ways. He is a member of Generación Espontánea and Liminar, and he has performed over 350 world premieres, written over 40 compositions, and recorded over 30 albums. Wilfrido has presented his work all over Mexico, and in other 14 countries in Europe and the Americas. Since 2014, he is co-curator of La Semana de Improvisación La Covacha, a festival completely dedicated to improvised music in Ensenada. Other current projects include Filera, Escudo(Torre), and the Wilfrido Terrazas Sea Quintet. In the summer of 2017, Wilfrido was appointed Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego.

Pianist Cory Smythe works actively in new, classical, and improvised music. He has performed widely, making appearances as soloist and chamber musician at the Darmstadt International Festival for New Music, the Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City, the Green Mill jazz club in Chicago, and the Mostly Mozart festival at Lincoln Center. In recent seasons, Smythe has played alongside violinist Hilary Hahn. Their Grammy-winning album, In 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores, documents Hahn’s diverse collection of newly commissioned encores for violin and piano. An innovative improviser, Smythe performs as a soloist and in collaboration with a wide array of jazz and creative artists, among them, most recently, Peter Evans, Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, and Anthony Braxton. As a core member of the new music group the International Contemporary Ensemble, Smythe has given numerous premieres, collaborated in the development of new pieces, and worked closely with composers John Zorn, Philippe Hurel, Dai Fujikura, George Lewis, and Alvin Lucier among many others. Smythe holds degrees in classical piano performance from the music schools at Indiana University and the University of Southern California.

Violin/Vox/Freestyle Composition artist Mazz Swift is critically acclaimed as one of America's most talented and versatile performers today and engages audiences worldwide with her signature weaving of composition and improvisation called MazzMuse. Aside from full-time work as a performer, Swift is a composer and educator. Her works include commissions by The University of Delaware, Neues Kabarett (through a Meet-the-Composer grant), The New Harmony Music School & Festival, and the Blaffer Foundation. Several of her pieces for atypical chamber ensemble have been performed live and also replayed on National Public Radio. Mazz has performed and taught workshops on free improvisation on six continents, most notably having traveled to Suriname, Mozambique, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, Senegal, Albania and Siberia as cultural ambassador at the invitation of the United States Department of State. She is also a teaching artist with Carnegie Hall's “Future Music” and “Lullaby” programs, where she coaches an ensemble of talented teens from every corner of NYC, writes lullabies with incarcerated mothers and mothers-to-be, and leads professional development sessions for professional symphony orchestra members and their students.

Mazz sits on the artistic board for the Jersey City-based chamber music collective, Con Vivo, and is also a proud performing member of that organization. Two of her compositions are featured on Con Vivo's full length CD, Modern Dances, one of which is a piece dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin and his family entitled "Invisible".

Sheng virtuoso Wu Wei has developed the ancient instrument into an innovative force in contemporary music. As a soloist, he has performed with such leading orchestras and ensembles as the Berlin and Los Angeles Philharmonics, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal StockholmPhilharmonic Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and EnsembleModern, The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) , with such conductors as Jaap van Zweden,Kent Nagano, Gustavo Dudamel, Marin Alsop, Myung-Whun Chung, Ilan Volkov, Susanna Mälkki, Matthias Pintscher, Markus Stenz,Baldur Brönnimann and Jakub Hrůša. He has given world premieres of more than 400 works, including more than 20 concertos for sheng and orchestra, by composers such as Unsuk Chin, Jukka Tiensuu, John Cage, Toshio Hosokawa,Guus Janssen, Enjott Schneider,Liza Lim,Shuya Xu and Ruo Huang.Mr. Wu is also a prolific composer for the sheng, having received several commissions, including those from Fondation Royaumont and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. 
Mr. Wu has appeared at a number of prestigious festivals and venues worldwide, including the BBC Proms, Paris Autumn Festival, Edinburgh International Festival, Berliner Festspiele, Warsaw Autumn, and Musica nova Helsinki; the Berlin Philharmonie, Royal Albert Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Gewandhaus in Leipzig, and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris.
Mr. Wu studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and at the Hanns Eisler Academy Berlin. He is a winner of the German music competition Musica Vitale, and was also the recipient of the German Global Root prize, German Record Critics’ Award, and the Edinburgh International Festival’s Herald Angels prize (2011). He was also named best Sheng soloist at the Chinese Music Awards (2017). 
Mr. Wu has recorded CDs and DVDs for Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, Harmonia Mundi, and Wergo. His recording Unsuk Chin:3 Concertos(Deutsche Grammophon) garnered the International ClassicalMusic Award and BBC Music Magazine Award in 2015.  

The highlight of Wu’s projects in 2019 include: debut Unsuk Chin’s Sheng concerto with the New York philharmonic Orchestra under Susanna Mälkki; portrait concert and world premiere Ondrej Adámek’s Sheng concerto with London Philharmonie Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik and Ensemble 2é2m Paris etc; world premiere of sheng concerto from Berndt Richard Deutsch with Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra under Baldur Brönnimann, with Basel Sinfonietta, China NCPA Orchestra under Christoph Eschenbach; premiere Huang Ruo’s sheng concerto with São Paulo Symphony Orchestra under maestro Marin Alsop; concert with NDR Big Band in Elbe Philharmonie; sheng concerto with  Jenaer Philharmonic Orchestra, Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra, Hamburger Camerata, Hongkong Chinese orchestra, Singapore Chinese orchestra, Avanti Chamber orchestra.
 

Liza Lim is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, the mosaic of time, ecological connection and a morphing of the senses are ongoing concerns in her ritualistic compositions. Her four operas: The Oresteia (1993), Moon Spirit Feasting (2000), The Navigator (2007) and Tree of Codes (2016), and the major cycle Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) explore themes of desire, memory, spiritual transformation and the uncanny. Her percussion ritual/opera Atlas of the Sky (2018), is a work involving community participants that investigates the emotional power and energy dynamics of crowds.
Liza Lim has received commissions and performances from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras (Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Orchestra, BBC, WDR, SWR) and was Resident Composer with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005 & 2006. Her work has been featured at Spoleto (USA), Miller Theatre New York, Festival d’Automne à Paris, the Salzburg, Lucerne, Holland and Venice Biennale Festivals. She has had a 30-year collaboration with the ELISION Ensemble and has regularly worked with Ensemble Musikfabrik, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, International Contemporary Ensemble, Arditti String Quartet and JACK Quartet amongst others. She is Professor of Composition at both the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and University of Huddersfield. 
 

Carlos Aguilar is a soloist, interdisciplinary artist and actively premieres, and performs new music. He believes that like people, music, and art are ever evolving and the development should be reflected in how we present, what we present and why we present it. He is especially interested in integrating musical performance tradition and conceptual visual arts, creating a flexible and free medium to showcase music with a theatrical element. As a teen, he swept San Diego's classical music scene by winning first prize in all open competitions. He was the first flutist to ever win the Grand Prize at the Musical Merit of San Diego Competition and the La Jolla Symphony Young Artist Competition. Carlos has been featured as a soloist with the La Jolla Symphony, Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, and Colburn Chamber Orchestra. Over the last few summers, he has attended the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Marrowstone Festival and SoundSCAPE Festival. He was the principal flute of the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra with whom he toured South America and Europe. Carlos has worked with Claire Chase, the International Contemporary Ensemble and rising young composers in the New England area. His teachers have included Paula Robison and Dr Elena Yarritu and he is currently based in New York City.

Lisa Atkinson is a composer avid in the pursuit and promotion of new music, whose work strives to encapsulate the visceral, tactile nature of live-performance and the emotional context of gesture. Atkinson's works have been performed by Wet Ink, the Amaranth String Quartet, and soprano Amber Evans, and has worked with luminaries Suzanne Ferrin, Georg Friedrich Haas, as well as members of the JACK Quartet and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Currently, Atkinson is pursuing a PhD in Composition at Northwestern University under the guidance of Alex Mincek, Jay Alan Yim, and Hans Thomalla.

Colleen Bernstein is a percussionist, educator, and creative collaborator recognized for her adventurous musical spirit and impactful community engagement initiatives. She has been featured in performances with Grammy-winners including Béla Fleck and the Silkroad Ensemble. Colleen received 2nd place in the Black Swamp Showcase and 3rd place in the MalletLab International Competition in 2018, and won the Ludwig Albert Talent Award at the 2015 Universal Marimba Competition. An active performer with the American Wild Ensemble and Creative Leaps International, Colleen is also Director of Community Engagement for the Silkroad Global Musician Workshop and faculty for the Crescendo Detroit Pathways Program.

Daniel Iván Bruno is a trombonist and composer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has studied at the Conservatorio Superior de Música Manuel de Falla. Bruno’s artistic explorations throughout his career have revolved around his instrument, the trombone, using the tradition of jazz as a basis for technique and expression of a style, to later blend it with concepts and approaches such as contemporary music and free improvisation. As a bandleader, he has released two albums: Garrafa Natal (by Los Tenistas) and Maple verdeo (by Maples). He currently plays in various groups on the Buenos Aires jazz and improvised music scene. 
 

Ms. Carther is a professional French horn player, and has been highly involved with her craft for 28 years. She attended Banff Centre's Summer Music program in 2018, and is a returning participant. She attended Indiana State University where she received her Bachelor’s degree in Music in 2004, and continued her studies at Baylor University where she received her Master’s degree in Music Performance in 2006. Originally from Gary, Indiana, she resides in San Antonio, Texas, where she continues performing as a freelancer for weddings, church services, and music festivals. Ms. Carther is a private instructor, a substitute teacher, and is the hornist for Adelante Winds; a professional, non-profit, multicultural woodwind quintet based in San Antonio that performs works by Latin, African American, and female composers.

Born into an art-loving family and raised on the verge of several musical streams since her childhood, violinist and composer Layale Chaker debuted her musical training at the National Higher Conservatory of Beirut in her native Lebanon. She later pursued her musical studies at Conservatoire de Paris and the Royal Academy of Music in London. She has studied under professors such as Mohamed Hashem, Carmen Scripcariu, Jeanne-Marie Conquer, and Nicholas
Miller. Layale has appeared as a soloist, performer, improvise,r and composer in concerts, recitals, and projects around Europe, the Middle-East, North and South America and Asia, performing in Germany, France, Greece, Italy, the UK, the US, Canada, Switzerland, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Indonesia, and Argentina, as well as in several festivals, namely Alderburgh Festival Junger Kunstler Festival Bayreuth, the Lucerne Festival for Contemporary Music, Impuls’Festival, Beethoven Festival Bonn, and Avignon Festival among others. Past season highlights include a premiere work for solo violin and orchestra with the Oxford Orchestra, the premiere of her string trio by members of New World Symphony in Miami, as well as the debut tour with her own ensemble, Sarafand, across Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United Stats. Her debut album with Sarafand, 'Inner Rhyme', was released in January 2019 on In A Circle Records. She has debuted her first violin concerto with the Bayreuther Philharmoniker as the orchestra’s first-ever commissioned composer in January 2018. A recent commission from Newlands Festival has also invited her for a collaboration with Holland Baroque. Layale Chaker was also recently granted the Diaphonique 2018 Franco-British Commission Fund, along with with Londonbased Notes Inegales ensemble and musicians of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, for a creation in May 2019. As a member of Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan, she performs around the year inconcert halls such as the Royal Albert Hall, Teatro Colon, Mozarteum Salzburg, Philharmonie de Paris, Salzburg Festspiele, and der Philharmonie Berlin among others. Layale Chaker is a Ruth Anderson Anderson 2017 Competition Prize winner, the recipient of the Royal Academy of Music's 2018 Guinness Award, a finalist of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé 2018 Prize, and the recipient of the Prix Nadia et Lili Boulanger 2019.

After studying in theatre, dance, and music, and working in an experimental theatre collective, he decided to deepen his music composition skills by completing a Bachelor’s degree in Instrumental Composition. He continued an interdisciplinary practice, incorporating multiple art forms into my musical compositions. In navigating the new music world, he participated in music workshops with a Gagaku ensemble in Japan, the Bozzini Quartett in Montréal and collaborated with many emerging musicians throughout the country. In his compositions, he investigates the social role of music by creating intimate spaces in which the audience can connect with philosophical concepts. His piece À moi, à toi, à nous for solo guitar is currently being performed in various Canadian cities as part of the Class Axe program organized by the CMC. As of September 2019, he will begin a Master’s degree at the Ghent Royal Conservatory in Belgium. 

Taiwanese-American soprano Felicia Chen is a vocalist, improviser, and community organizer with an affinity for contemporary sound art. Through her fearless approach toward the creation and interpretation of new works, Felicia eschews boundaries that limit the definition of music. Praised by The Boston Musical Intelligencer for creating "siren-like sounds that explored extremes of the vocal range," Felicia employs an arsenal of techniques that color her vocalisms with the beauty of human imperfection. A firm believer that classical music can be a catalyst for social change, Felicia frequently collaborates with artists and communities whose voices are historically underrepresented. Through Mazumal, a voice and cello partnership that programs new works championing diversity, Felicia has led seminars and workshops, educating young artists on equity and inclusive dialogue through music. Felicia’s 2018-19 season includes performances at National Sawdust, Society for Electro-Acoustic Music, Emruz Festival, and co-conducting Marcos Balter’s PAN with Claire Chase and Project&.

Nicole Cherry, from Silver Spring, Maryland, is the second violinist of the Marian Anderson String Quartet, having garnered honors including the Congress of Racial Equality’s Award for Outstanding Arts Achievement and Chamber Music America’s Guarneri String Quartet Award. The Juilliard School’s 100th anniversary profiled her in the Journal’s “A Quiet Revolution: Juilliard Alumni; the Transformation of Arts Education.” Nicole’s diverse performance list includes members of the Cleveland Quartet, pianist, Stanley Cowell, Brother Ah’s World Music Ensemble, Ann Hampton Callaway, and Whitney Houston. Research on 19th century Afro-European violinist George Bridgetower led to commissions from Grammy-winning, DJ Sparr, Berklee College’s, David Wallace, and Ysaye Barnwell (Sweet Honey and the Rock). Performances abroad include a South African tour of townships during Apartheid. Completing her doctorate at Texas Tech with Annie Chalex Boyle, she is the recipient of the Paul Whitfield Horn Fellowship and the President’s Excellence in Diversity and Equity Award. 

American cellist Alexa Ciciretti has established herself as a performer who is equally at home playing Baroque viola da gamba music, Romantic symphonies, cutting-edge contemporary music and everything in between. She has performed as a member of the New World Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, and Aspen Chamber Symphony. She served as continuo cellist for the United States premiere of Vivaldi’s Farnace at Spoleto Festival U.S.A. and will perform at the Ojai Festival in June 2019.  She has also performed with the Miami-based group Flamenco Sephardit and recently starred in the short film A Waning Heart, which was screened at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Ms. Ciciretti studied at Eastman School of Music and Oberlin Conservatory. When not playing cello, she enjoys to cook, to eat chocolate and the weather in her native New England.

Melissa Coppola, a Korean-Italian hailing from Ann Arbor, MI (USA), is a DMA candidate in Piano Performance & Pedagogy at University of Michigan. She leads a versatile career, performing as a soloist and collaborative pianist, as well as a drummer and singer in the rock duo, Junglefowl. Coppola is a recipient of the 2018 Presser Graduate Music Award for her experimental concert series, [perspective], which re-envisions the traditional piano recital as an immersive, multi-sensory experience. She is a co-founder and former Executive Director of Girls Rock Detroit, a nonprofit organization that presents educational programming to foster creative expression for girls, trans, and nonbinary youth.

New York-based oboist Jasmine Daquin is currently pursuing her Master’s degree in Oboe Performance at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Jasmine earned her Bachelor’s degree from SUNY Purchase College and subsequently, a performance certificate from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. Her principal teachers include Richard Killmer, James Austin Smith, and Stephen Taylor. Jasmine performs repertoire ranging from Baroque to modern, and contemporary. Jasmine has been invited to perform at several summer festivals such as the Bay Chamber Concert series, in Rockport, Maine, the Colour of Music Festival, and Gateways Festival Orchestra. In 2016, Jasmine was invited to perform with the Colour of Music Virtuosi for the Grand Opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C. While at home in New York City, Jasmine performs with various ensembles such as The Chelsea Symphony, Greenwich Village Orchestra, and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn. After attending the Decoda|Skidmore Chamber Music Institute where she performed works by Elliott Carter and August Klughardt and after performing with Decoda, the first Carnegie Hall-affiliate ensemble, Jasmine developed a passion for sharing contemporary and lesser-known works of music with communities. In her free time, Jasmine enjoys cooking and watching documentaries about cooking.

A recent recipient of the Hildegard Behrens Foundation Global Humanitarian Entrepreneur Prize, flutist Hannah Darroch is currently completing her DMA at McGill University. She holds a Master of Music from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she was a TA to Christina Jennings and a member of their award-winning wind quintet in-residence. She has worked professionally with a number of ensembles including her home country’s New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and has performed alongside international artists ranging from Renée Fleming to Diana Krall. Hannah can be heard on a number of recordings including the 2014 soundtrack to The Hobbit, and the premiere of Frank Ticheli's Pulitzer-nominated work Songs of Life and Love.

22-year-old Daniel Egwurube is originally from Nigeria. He is an alumni of the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA), which is run by the LA Phil. Through YOLA, Daniel was trained twelve hours a week in jazz and classical music for ten years. Daniel is an alumni of the competitive Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. Daniel was among nine students chosen through audition, essay, and interview to tour with the LA Philharmonic in Japan. He is currently a flute performance major at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
 

Zekkereya El-megharbel is a Los Angeles-based composer, trombonist, animator, and illustrator. With a background rooted in the theories and practices of Black-American Art Music, Zekkereya’s music often fuses spontaneously composed elements, with elements that are premeditated. His work is motivated by entropic forces and daily life, and how they move objects to be in constant disagreement with each other or coalesce into points of resolution and peace.

Antonin Fajt is a Czech-American composer, pianist, and electronic producer. Born in Brno, he moved to the United States at age 15, just before the market crash of 2008. Drawing on his Moravian and Roma heritage, his work explores for rhythmic and melodic nuances in folk song interpretation and translates them into an improvisational language informed by the American contemporary musical landscape. From before college, Antonin studied composition with professor Joan Tower for about 7 years, his work culminating into a string of solo, chamber, and orchestral works. The following three years he spent working closely with a creative music ensemble while landscaping in the Hudson Valley, before beginning his PhD study at the University of California, Irvine in the area of Integrative Composition, Improvisation, and Technology. Besides music, Antonin enjoys cooking and taking long drives through the states.

Laura Farré Rozada is an award-winning pianist and mathematician. She has been selected for the NEXT scheme with the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group for the 2018-19 season. She recently completed her Master’s degree at the Royal College of Music in London as an RCM Patrons’ Award Holder. Laura recently published her debut album The French Reverie. She has appeared on Channel France 3 and Bulgarian National Radio. Laura made her debut with Robert Gerhard’s Piano Concerto conducted by Edmon Colomer. She has worked with George Crumb and Brian Ferneyhough, and premiered works by Philippe Manoury and David Lang.

Émilie Fortin is an adventurous musician and teacher who explores every possible facet of the trumpet. A versatile performer, she is a freelancer for several ensembles and orchestras. She has contributed to the creation of over fifteen works internationally with various composers in an effort to enrich the repertoire of her instrument. She is also the artistic director of Bakarlari, a collective of soloists. Active on the Montréal scene, she performs frequently in recital with pianist Olivier Hébert-Bouchard and in free improvisation with clarinetist Charlotte Layec, while perfecting her craft on the baroque trumpet with Alexis Basque.

As an advocate for contemporary music, Mary has been performing new music since her undergraduate studies at the Eastman School of Music where she was a member of Ossia as well as Musica Nova, under the direction of Brad Lubman. Recently, Mary completed her master’s degree at the University of Michigan and was a member of the Contemporary Directions Ensemble, under the direction of Oriol Sans. Mary is currently located in Michigan and a member of Girlnoise (an all-women chamber group specializing in new classical music). She and Girlnoise have commissioned several works, including Annika Socolofsky’s Shy one, sweet one. In addition to Girlnoise, Mary has had the privilege of performing at Strange Beautiful Music in Detroit and collaborating with Ensemble Signal members, the JACK Quartet, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. 

Bianca Gannon is a Canadian-born, Ireland-raised, Melbourne-based improvising musician-composer and Artistic Director with a Bachelor in Music from Cardiff University. A keen multi-disciplinary collaborator, she creates immersive multi-sensory experiences and synaesthesias, such as in her series The Sound of Shadows. In the act of breaking down barriers, in presenting art which is complex yet accessible, Bianca is motivated by that which connects us. As a performer of simultaneous piano with gamelan, Bianca brings together her training in classical composition, improvised music and Indonesian gamelan to create a chiaroscuro of otherworldly resonances and trance-like rhythms. Bianca has lived in and studied intensively across Indonesia including on the Indonesian Arts and Culture Scholarship. Bianca's work has been presented across Australia, Europe, and USA. She has been commissioned by Nimbus Trio and Elliott Hughes, and undertaken residencies with the Australian Art Orchestra, Kenny Werner and Gamelan Cudamani, and regularly performs with her improv trio Impermanence.

Taja is 18-year-old, she has recently graduated from Mannes Precollege and she is graduating from high school at Special Music School. She performed in many famous New York City venues like Roulette, the Jazz Gallery, Rubin Museum, Merkin Hall and Le poisson rouge. During her 4 years of high school, she played classical, jazz, and contemporary music which enhanced her musical training. She got accepted into Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain and SUNY Purchase College, and she decided to attend Purchase College in the fall. 
 

Bassoonist Clifton Joseph Guidry III is an American bassoonist currently Studying at the Mannes School of Music under Marc Goldberg. As an avid player and supporter of new music, Clifton has spent the last two years commissioning and premiere a number of new works for bassoon and electronics. He has gotten to work with composers George Lewis, Felipe Lara, Edgar Guzman, and Georg Friedrich Haas. Mr. Guidry has participated in the Eastern Music Festival, the Puerto Rico Summer Music festival, and Banff Centre's Ensemble Evolution program. This summer, Mr. Guidry will be performing in the Spoleto festival, and returning to Banff Centre for Ensemble Evolution. Mr. Guidry completed his undergraduate studies at the Peabody Conservatory under Phillip Kolker.
 

Composer, vocalist, and improviser Esin Gunduz writes music that investigates the energies at play among and between all beings. She explores these energies as visceral sensory experience and sound, building landscapes of her own recorded-voice samples and surrounding these with instrumental textures—to create breathtaking vistas. Ms. Gunduz has performed her works at the (R)évolution: Resonant Bodies program at Banff Centre, June in Buffalo and So Percussion’s Brooklyn-Bound Series. The performers who have championed her work include Ensemble Linea, mandolinist Avi Avital, and members of the Talea Ensemble and Mivos Quartet. Current projects include an electroacoustic ensemble piece based on Sumerian tablets, an open piece on embodying sound sensations, and an electro-acoustic piece-in-progress for voice about healing from trauma. A researcher of vocal performance, Esin Gunduz is an adjunct professor of voice at Villa Maria College and holds a PhD in music composition from SUNY University at Buffalo. 

Website

Cellist, improviser, and activist, Olivia J. P. Harris is dedicated to contemporary music and experimental sound art and committed to using music as a vehicle for social commentary and progress. In addition to being an active soloist, Olivia is a founding member of Mazumal, a voice and cello duo committed to innovative performance promoting inclusivity through socially conscious programming and educational outreach. Olivia is enthusiastic about interdisciplinary collaboration and has played alongside dancers, visual artists, and songwriters, including collaborations with her brother, writer Bernard E. P. Harris. Olivia’s principal instructors include Rhonda Rider, Astrid Schween, Jeffrey Zeigler, and Mihai Tetel.

Liam Hockley is a versatile clarinetist and passionate advocate for new music. In addition to the classical canon, Hockley’s repertoire encompasses major works from the twentieth and twenty- first centuries, and he regularly collaborates with Canadian and international composers on innovative new works. Hockley has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including an interpretation prize at the 2015 Stockhausen-Konzert und -Kurse Kürten. Hockley is currently a candidate for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in clarinet performance at the University of British Columbia and maintains an active freelance schedule in Vancouver.

Eli Holmes is a 19-year-old bassoonist and writer. Eli’s life has always been animated by music, ever since he sang his first ta-rata-ta with the children’s chorus in Carmen when he was 6. After a number of boy soprano roles, his voice changed, and Eli took up the bassoon. He hasn’t looked back. After studying at the Juilliard Pre-College Division for 5 years, and playing with the National Youth Orchestra and the Verbier Festival Junior Orchestra, Eli now studies Philosophy and Music and Harvard University, while pursuing an M.M. in Bassoon at the New England Conservatory. His mentors include Claire Chase, Vijay Iyer, Barli Nugent, Marc Goldberg, Richard Svoboda, Michael Kushell, and Peter Gordon.

Sonya Holowell is a vocalist, improviser, and writer working across new and experimental genres. She is descended from the Wodi Wodi people of the Dharawal nation, on the south-east coast of NSW, Australia. The contexts for her work are diverse, and she is particularly drawn to interdisciplinary collaboration, placing the voice in unusual positions to create new hybrid forms. Sonya has performed at numerous festivals for new and experimental music including Sydney Festival, Resonant Bodies Festival, soundSCAPE, and Liveworks and has collaborated with ensembles such as the Song Company, Ensemble Offspring and Australian Art Orchestra. Her work has been shown at venues including the Sydney Opera House, Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National Gallery of Australia. In addition to performing, Sonya is also co-editor and writer for online arts publication ADSR Zine.

Nicole Johnson, student of Mark Robinson of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Claire Edwardes of Ensemble Offspring, is a contemporary percussionist and graduate of a Bachelor's degree in Percussion Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She was a recipient of the Greenberg Gurney Jensen Scholarship for her studies. Her performance history includes; the Tapsapce Publications professional recording of Robert Oetomo’s percussion quartet, recording at Trackdown Fox studios for the Lego Batman film, performing in a Percussion Ensemble in the 2018 Sydney Festival, recording with ABC and Ross Edwardes for his 2019 released album, and working with Urban Theatre Projects for a work in the Sydney Festival 2020.

Willy Kubas is an artist working in performance, video, installation, and music. Their work tends to draw on the subject of identity and it's divergent facets, and how those formations are perceived, interpreted, and appropriated. In these mannerisms, their work questions and reconsiders relationships between identity and individuality, as well as the way we consume new forms of media. Born in 1997 and raised in New Jersey, Kubas was drawn towards the arts at a young age and they first learned music through after-school choir at age nine. They later pursued classical music in high-school, after which they were accepted into the New England Conservatory (NEC) as a vocal performance major, before transferring to the department of contemporary improvisation. From here, they have worked with artists such as Joe Morris, Anthony Coleman, Ted Reichman, and Tanya Kalmanovitch. While they continue their studies at New England Conservatory, Kubas currently lives and works in Boston.
 

Leonardo Labrada is an artist that uses percussion and conducting as interface for his investigations. His experience goes from solo/ensemble/orchestral percussion playing to multidisciplinary works with drama, visual arts, and performance. Assistant Conductor at the Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra (OFG), Professor/conductor at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Goiás (IFG). In 2018, he was a soloist with OFG in Des canyons aux étoiles by Messiaen. With Grupo Impact(o) de Percussão, have built the first set of sixxens in Brasil, played Métaux from Xenakis (2016), and was a soloist of the first After Spring, Concerto for Sixxen and Orchestra (2017) by Michelle Agnes, with OFG.

Violinist Virginie Laliberté has been passionate about creating new works since her undergraduate studies in violin performance at University of Ottawa. She has premiered and recorded several works for bass and violin with composer Andrew Lawrence, has participated in contemporary music festivals in Québec and Ontario and has recently co-founded the Toronto-based contemporary music duo Songs of Now with clarinettist Celia Tang. In addition to performing, she is currently pursuing a PhD in Music Education at University of Toronto.

Equally as comfortable in a symphony orchestra section or an underground performance club, Rebecca Lawrence is a genre-bending, 21st century bassist, with creative interests that range from contemporary and traditional classical music, experimental, pop, and folk music to modern art and intersectional feminism. She plays in the Los Angeles-based conductorless Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra and has been a featured performer at the Ojai Music Festival. She holds degrees from the USC Thornton School of Music and the Institut François Rabbath Paris, and studied with acclaimed bassists David Allen Moore, Paul Ellison, and François Rabbath.  

Stephanie Liu is a violinist based in New York City and a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University. As an active chamber and orchestral musician, she performs regularly with groups such as the Highline Chamber Players, Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, String Orchestra of Brooklyn, Deep Roots Ensemble, and Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, and has recently held fellowships at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity and Bang on a Can at Mass MoCA. Stephanie has served as a mentor for Lincoln Center Education and was a recipient of the Davis Projects for Peace awards in 2015. She also makes an impact as an arts administrator, currently working with Talea Ensemble and The New York New Music Ensemble, and previously in development at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. A native of North Carolina, Stephanie received a Master of Music from Stony Brook University, studying with Jennifer Frautschi, Arnaud Sussmann, and Philip Setzer. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Princeton University, with Minors in Sustainable Energy Engineering and Violin Performance.

Clarinetist Julia Lougheed is passionate about using music to convey the the emotions of "now". She performs throughout the Phoenix area as a soloist and chamber musician. She can be seen performing with the Vientos Dulces Clarinet Quartet, Oh My Ears House Band, Arizona State University Bands and Orchestras, and the Paradise Valley Community College Composers and Improvisers Big Band. Julia actively collaborates with living composers to create new repertoire for her instruments. One commission she is proud of is Pour vous by Karlo Corona, a musical expression of the emotions felt in the wake of the Pulse Nightclub Shooting.

José’s music incorporates a wide range of influences from Colombian folk tunes to modern music, while borrowing from Latin music, heavy metal, and spectralism. He’s interested in the idiosyncratic synthesis of timbral examination, Latin American vernacular music, and technology. He has written for Alarm Will Sound, Taller Sonoro, Wild Up, Third Coast Percussion, and American piano duet Hockett among others. He curates Stack Overflow a concert series that promotes electronic music. An alumnus of the National University of Colombia as both and the University of Missouri, he is currently a DMA composition student at UT Austin.

In his work, composer Joshua Alvarez Mastel strives to create immersive musical environments with diverse sonic landscapes whose formal processes often draw from his fascination with psychoacoustic phenomena and their relationship to other modes of human perception, and from his interest in paleoanthropology, art history, and natural and cognitive sciences. Also an active improviser and an avid field recorder, Josh’s music has been performed by JACK Quartet, Alea III, the New England Conservatory Symphony, and AIR Ensemble Beijing. He completed his undergraduate studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston where he studied with Stratis Minakakis and John Mallia, and he is currently pursuing his Master's degree at Montclair State University, where he studies with Marcos Balter, Nathan Davis, and Phyllis Chen.
 

Liam McGill was born in New Jersey, United Stats in 1996. Throughout most of their childhood, Liam studied Scottish percussion and performed with bagpipe and drum bands. Early in college, they studied electroacoustic composition and have been composing music ever since. Liam graduated from Harvard College, where they studied with Chaya Czernowin, Josh Levine, and Hans Tutschku, with a Bachelor of Arts in Social Anthropology in May 2019. Starting this October, Liam will complete a fellowship in Ireland, where they will work in collaboration with Irish musicians.

Lisa Mezzacappa, a composer, double bassist, and improviser, has been an active collaborator in the San Francisco Bay Area music community for more than 15 years. Mezzacappa’s activities as a composer and bandleader include ethereal chamber music, electro-acoustic works, avant-garde jazz, music for groups from duo to large ensemble, and collaborations with film, dance, and visual art. Current projects include the 13-member improvising orchestra, the duo B. Experimental Band; a suite for electro-acoustic sextet inspired by Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics; and a new podcast opera about relationships at the dawn of the Internet, created in collaboration with writer Beth Lisick.

Trained as an architect and orchestral contrabassist, Roxanne Nesbitt is an interdisciplinary artist investigating the space between sound and design. Her research includes contemporary classical composition, electroacoustic music, improvisation, experimental instrument design, sound installation, and performance. Recently, Roxanne has focused on her project symbiotic instruments, where she designs, builds, and composes for parasite-like acoustic instruments that are played in or on existing traditional instruments. With the support of the Canada Council, Roxanne made 146 ceramic percussion instruments and composed five new pieces which were debuted, at a recent concert at the Western Front in Vancouver, BC. Roxanne collaborates with dancers and choreographers as a performer and composer. In January 2019, Roxanne composed a live electroacoustic score for the Biting School's Suddenly Slaughter presented at the PUSH festival. Roxanne also fronts her own band, graftician as vocalist/noise maker. She is a member of the improvised duo, why choir alongside Juno award-winning drummer Ben Brown.

An American-Belgian double bassist, clarinetist, and folk singer, Annick Odom currently lives in The Netherlands. Her solo project, West Virginia, My Home, explores narrative and sense of place to blend past and present, mixing Appalachian folk songs collected from living musicians with newly commissioned works by American composers. She also performs with a variety of groups such as Squee!Collective, an ambient glitch chamber group; the Free Fall Improvisers Orchestra, a free improvisation ensemble; and Sweet Joe Pye, an old-time string band. In addition to performing, she greatly enjoys teaching and facilitating community arts workshops. In 2016, she co-founded a youth summer camp called No Boundaries Flint: All Arts Camp. She received Bachelor's degrees in Double Bass Performance, Clarinet Performance, and Psychology from the University of Michigan in 2014. In 2018, she finished a Master's degree in New Audience and Innovative Practice at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague.

Amanda Ross is a trumpet player committed to contemporary music and collaboration. She has performed at Strange Beautiful Music IX and XI (Detroit, Michigan), Threads All Arts Festival (Ypsilanti, Michigan) and Soundscape Exchange Festival (Maccagno, Italy). She is a founding member of Girlnoise, an Ann Arbor based mixed chamber ensemble dedicated to promoting the music and artistry of women. An active collaborator, she received an EXCEL Enterprise grant through the University of Michigan to commission ALMANAC for trumpet and electronics by Chicago based composer Corey Smith. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Musical Arts at the University of Michigan.

Theodosia enjoys an active career as an oboist, English horn player, and soprano internationally. She has played with orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Boston Philharmonic, and studio orchestras at Warner Brothers. She performs frequently at venues including Hollywood Bowl, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and The Forum. Theodosia has enjoyed playing under the baton of Placido Domingo, James Conlon, Carl St. Clair, and Johh Harbison. As a vocalist, Theodosia starred as Maria in West Side Story with USC in April 2018, and at Songfest with conductor Michael Barrett and Jamie Bernstein narrating. Theodosia’s passion for contemporary music has lead to performances at Bang on a Can Festival, soundSCAPE, and Songfest collaborations with Jake Heggie and Libby Larsen. Theodosia made her solo debut in 2015 with the Phoenix Symphony singing Greek songs, and was a featured soloist of the 2017 European Union Cultural Capital in Pafos. She performed a concert tour in 2016 and raised $26,000 for Greek non-profits during the economic crisis. Theodosia holds degrees in Oboe and Voice from Oberlin Conservatory, UCLA, and USC.

Cellist Jake Saunders is a native of Boise, Idaho. As a performer, curator, educator, artistic director, and new music advocate, Saunders engages diverse communities through inclusive programming and distinctive collaboration. Saunders is currently Artistic Director and cellist of 208 ensemble, and is a Teaching Assistant at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Kamancheh player and composer Niloufar Shiri began her musical journey at the Tehran Music Conservatory in Iran. She later immigrated to the USA and pursued her studies in composition at the University of California, San Diego, and Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT) at the University of California, Irvine. Niloufar’s musical world lies at the intersection of classical Iranian music, contemporary music, and improvisation. Her focus revolves around exploring the concept of displacement in relation to familiar and distant environments. Her music closely examines textural and timbral spaces, drawing inspiration from staggered pitch relations found in the Radif, as well as bird sounds, noise, and feedback. Her unique and radical approach to kamancheh performance significantly expands the sonic capabilities of the instrument and places her at the forefront of its practice. 

Niloufar Shiri was generously supported by the Isobel and Tom Rolston Fellowships in Music Endowment.

Gavin Stewart is a soloist, composer, collaborator, and advocate of new music. Having appeared at numerous summer schools focusing on new works including Grolloo Flute sessions, Rarescale Summer School, and Robert Dick's New York Studio, he has an emerging international reputation in the area of new music. Gavin has been educated to Masterès degree at Royal Holloway, University of London where he has most recently studied with internationally renowned Carla Rees. Gavin is currently pursuing his PhD holding a college scholarship at Royal Holloway looking at the Kingma System's ability as a 'world flute' in reference to the Shakuhachi.

Jo Anne is one of Singapore's leading bassoonists. Highly versatile and experimental, her free-spirited nature led her to playing in diverse spaces including art galleries and museums. She began her bassoon studies through a Singapore Youth Orchestra scholarship then studied at Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana (Lugano, Switzerland).  Her studies were supported by the Singapore National Arts Council and Dr. Gerber-ten Bosch foundation (Zürich). Jo Anne hosts and produces her own podcast interview series called Legends of Reed, which showcases interviews with double reed musicians. She has recorded her debut album The Night Garden, which will be released later in 2019. She has performed internationally as a guest musician at various festivals. As a result of her supporting social causes and campaigns with her music she was featured in the documentary Impossible Orchestra (Finer Films, Melbourne 2012) and on Dutch TV (NPO Holland Festival, Save the Bassoon Campaign, 2016).

Michiko Theurer is a passionate performer, visual artist, and conversation-weaver dedicated to opening spaces for shared experience. As a violinist, she has collaborated with members of Eighth Blackbird, the Takács Quartet, the Pacifica Quartet, and So Percussion, and is a founding member of the Bay-Area based interdisciplinary improv collective, fff. Her artistic and intellectual projects cross disciplinary and sensory borders, and include performances, intermedia art, installations, and frequent collaborations with composers, scholars, and other artists. She holds a DMA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is currently a PhD student in musicology at Stanford.

Martine Thomas, violist, is completing a Master's in viola performance at New England Conservatory as the final year of the Harvard-NEC Dual Degree Program. She is an artist with the Silk Road Ensemble, and close collaborator with several composers, including Camila Agosto and Brandon Snyder. Martine received her Bachelor of Arts from Harvard in English, where she studied poetry with Jorie Graham. 

Yuma Uesaka is a Japanese American clarinetist, saxophonist, and composer known his work in jazz and the avant-garde. Since his arrival to New York City in 2014, Yuma quickly built a reputation for his improvisational sensibilities and his powerful sound. An alumnus of Banff International Workshop in Jazz & Creative Music, Yuma worked and studied with cutting edge luminaries such as Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey, Nicole Mitchell, and Amir ElSaffar. Born in London and raised in Metro-Detroit, Yuma started studying the saxophone at the age of 10. He holds two bachelor’s degrees from University of Michigan, where he majored in Jazz Studies and Computer Science Engineering. There he studied with Geri Allen, Robert Hurst, Andrew Bishop, and Erik Santos. 

Aliya Ultan is a composer-performer from Brooklyn, New York. With interests in circus arts, narrative-based composition, and interdisciplinary improvisation, Ultan has created large scale works engaging research regarding climate change, herds, swarms, children's stories, and urban planning. Ultan is the winner of numerous grants and competitions including From the Top’s Jack Kent Cooke Award, YoungArts, Oberlin College’s Flint Initiative Grant, and XARTS. Most recently, Ultan has completed a series of commissions including a contemporary circus show, a large ensemble piece for the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble as well as a score for a feature length film featuring a baritone singer and 18 dancers.

Kristina Wolfe is a composer and Marie Skłodowska-Curie scholar currently working in sound archaeology exhibition and composition at the University of Huddersfield. Her work has been performed at the MATA, Bang-On-A-Can, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festivals. She will be a 2019 Composer-in-residence at the Mizzou International Composers Festival. She currently spends her leisure time hiking, fieldwalking, and field recording. In doing so, she hopes to gain a deep respect for history, to capture the resonance of objects from the past, and to develop an understanding of time. She is a Deep Listening certificate holder and active new music community member.

Korean-American composer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and sound artist Bora Yoon creates immersive electroacoustic soundscapes using digital devices, voice, found objects, and instruments from a variety of cultures and centuries – evoking memory and association - to formulate a multimedia narrative through music, sound, and song. Featured in The Wall Street Journal and WIRE Magazine for her musical innovations, Yoon’s works have been presented at Lincoln Center, TED, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Nam June Paik Art Center (Korea), Festival of World Cultures (Poland), Park Avenue Armory, Smithsonian, and universities worldwide. Interdisciplinary collaborators include R.Luke DuBois, Ben Frost, and many others. Fascinated by the intersection of sound and space, music and architecture, and the pulleys and strings that hold everything together, her work has been awarded by New York Foundation for the Arts, Asian-American Arts Alliance, Billboard, and BMI. She is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition and interdisciplinary humanities at Princeton University. 

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