Banff Musicians in Residence Winter 2025

Megumi Masaki is a pianist, multimedia performing artist, educator and curator. She is recognized as an innovator that reimagines the piano, pianist and performance space. Her work pushes boundaries of interactivity between sound, image, text and movement in multimedia works through new technologies, including hand-gesture-motion tracking to generate and control live-electronics and live-video, AI, 3D visuals, keyboard-controlled computer game, e-textile sensors and active infra-red tracking. As a Japanese-Canadian artist, her work also explores how human rights and environmental issues can intersect and be communicated through music. Over 70 compositions have been created with/for Megumi and she has premiered 150 works worldwide. Megumi was appointed to the Order of Manitoba and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
www.megumimasaki.com

David Harrington is the artistic director, founder and violinist of the Kronos Quartet. For 50 years, San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet has combined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually reimagine the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the most celebrated and influential groups of our era, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 70 recordings of extraordinary breadth and creativity, and collaborating with many of the world’s most accomplished composers and performers. Through its nonprofit organization, Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA), Kronos has commissioned more than 1,100 works and arrangements for string quartet—including the recently completed 50 for the Future library of free, educational repertoire. Kronos has received more than 40 awards, including three Grammy Awards and the Polar Music, Avery Fisher, and Edison Klassiek Oeuvre Prizes—among the most prestigious awards given to musicians.

Photo by Mark Allan

Paul Wiancko has led an exceptionally multifaceted musical life as a composer and cellist. An avid chamber musician, Paul has performed alongside Midori, Yo-Yo Ma, Richard Goode, Chick Corea, Mitsuko Uchida, Nico Muhly, Max Richter, and members of the Guarneri, Takács, JACK, Parker, Kronos, Orion, and Juilliard quartets. His performances with Musicians From Marlboro have been described as "utterly transparent" and "so full of earthy vitality and sheer sensual pleasure that it made you happy to be alive" (Washington Post).

Chosen as one of Kronos Quartet's "50 for the Future," Paul's own music has been described as "dazzling", "compelling" (Star Tribune) and "vital pieces that avoid the predictable" (Allan Kozinn, journalist). National Public Radio recently wrote, "If Haydn were alive to write a string quartet today, it may sound something like Paul Wiancko's LIFT​," a 26-minute work featured on the Aizuri Quartet's Grammy-nominated album Blueprinting, one of National Public Radio's top 10 classical albums of 2018. Paul is a recipient of the S&R Foundation's Washington Award for Composition and has been invited to be composer-in-residence at the Caramoor, Twickenham, Newburyport, Portland, and Methow Valley Festivals. This year, Paul's music will be premiered by Alexi Kenney at Wigmore Hall, the Eybler Quartet at Banff Centre, Tessa Lark, Marina Piccinnini, and Michael Thurber at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet and James Austin Smith at Spoleto Festival USA, where he is the 2019 Bank of America Composer-in-Residence.

Hailed for her "magnetic, wide-ranging tone" and her "rock solid technique" (Philadelphia Inquirer), violist Ayane Kozasa is a sought-after chamber musician, collaborator, and educator. Since winning the 2011 Primrose International Viola Competition—where she also captured awards for best chamber music and commissioned work performances—Ayane has appeared on stages across the world, from Carnegie, Wigmore, and Suntory Hall to Ravinia, Aspen, and the Marlboro Music Festival. She is a passionate advocate for the expansion of viola repertoire, and has commissioned multiple new works featuring the viola, including “American Haiku” by Paul Wiancko and “K’Zohar Harakia” by Judd Greenstein.

Ayane has developed a career that revolves around the art of chamber music. She is currently a member of the duo Ayane & Paul with composer and cellist Paul Wiancko, with whom she collaborated on Norah Jones’ album “Pick Me Up Off the Floor.” The duo has appeared at several festivals, including Spoleto Festival USA, Brooklyn Chamber Music Society, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet Seminar. Ayane’s most recent passion project Owls is a quartet collective with violinist Alexi Kenney and cellists Gabriel Cabezas and Paul Wiancko. Owls share an uncommonly fierce creative spirit, weaving together new compositions with original arrangements of music ranging from the 1600s to the present, and have played at series such as the Baryshnikov Arts Center in NYC and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. This season, Ayane is the guest violist of the Cavani String Quartet. The quartet boasts several original educational presentations with the string quartet as the catalyst, and they have presented their work at institutions such as the Cleveland State University and the University of Michigan. Beginning fall of 2024, Ayane joins the Kronos Quartet as their new violist.

As a founding member of the Aizuri Quartet for 11 years, she developed her skills of launching a brand new ensemble. The quartet was the 2018 quartet-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum and the grand prize winners of both the Osaka International String Quartet Competition and MPrize Chamber Arts Competition. The Aizuri Quartet’s debut album, Blueprinting—which features the music of 5 American composers, all commissioned by the quartet—was nominated for a Grammy Award and named one of NPR’s top 10 classical albums of 2018. With collaboration being a deep part of their identity, they performed with artists such as Wilco, Marcy Rosen, Jonathan Biss, and Maeve Gilchrist. Their devotion to education brought them to young musicians around the world, and they crafted a unique student composer workshop format that they implemented at institutions such as the University of Southern California, Princeton University, and New York Youth Symphony. In 2020, the quartet launched AizuriKids, an interactive web series for children that explores relationships between music and themes ranging from astrophysics to cooking. Their dedication to the art of the string quartet for 11 years was recognized by Chamber Music America, and in 2022 the quartet received the Cleveland Quartet Award.

Other collaboration highlights include performances with world-renowned artists such as Tessa Lark, Steven Banks, Nobuko Imai, and the Kronos Quartet. As a seasoned orchestral performer, Ayane has performed with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, A Far Cry, Philadelphia Orchestra, East Coast Chamber Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, as well as the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, where she served as principal violist from 2012 to 2016.

Much of Ayane’s current work involves mentoring aspiring young musicians through programs like the Meadowmount School of Music, Green Lake Chamber Music Camp, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet Chamber Music Seminar. She is currently on the viola faculty at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and has been guest faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Northwestern University. Taking inspiration from her mentors the Cavani Quartet, Ayane has developed several education-based music shows curated especially for the youth in a festival’s community including Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts and Spoleto Festival USA. Ayane is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, the Kronberg Academy in Germany, and the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied viola with Misha Amory, Roberto Díaz, Nobuko Imai, and Kirsten Docter. Aside from music, she enjoys hiking, doodling, and creating animation.

Photo by Shervin Lainez

Benedicte Maurseth is a well-established and esteemed performer and composer on Norway’s music scene. She has studied with Hardanger fiddle master Knut Hamre for close to thirty years and is an alumna of the Ole Bull Academy. Maurseth has toured extensively as a soloist and in collaboration with others, both in Norway and internationally. She works closely with many of the leading artists across genres and artistic expressions such as Jon Fosse, Anne Marit Jacobsen, Rolf Lislevand, Mats Eilertsen, Berit Opheim, Merilyn Crispell, and more. Maurseth has written music for theater and film and other commissioned works for festivals and albums. The work Tidekverv, which was premiered in 2017, was awarded NOPA's music prize, and her song «Very Full», which was specially written for the TV series Loki (Marvel Studio), ranked high on the Billboard list.

Maurseth also received many prestigious artist grants from the Norwegian state for cultivating her tradition and creative work. She has recorded albums for Grappa Musikkforlag (Hubro & Heilo) and ECM Records, and has also published books, articles and essays. Her book To be nothing. Conversations with Knut Hamre, Hardanger Fiddle Master, was published at Terra Nova Press / MIT Press fall 2019.  Her latest album Hárr was awarded «Best Nordic album of the year» and received the prestigious Nordic Music Prize for 2022. In 2022 she also released the book Systerspel (Fiddlesisters) about the history of female fiddle players in Norway from 1700 until today. For this work she was awarded the prize «Folk musician of the year» in 2023 and also received the Sff-award for her outstanding contribution to the history and traditional music of Norway. 
 

Kristine Tjøgersen (*1982 in Oslo, Norway)’s compositional practice is characterized by curiosity, imagination, humor and precision. Through her work, she creates unexpected auditory situations through playing with tradition. She has a special interest in the interplay between the visual and the auditory and how they affect each other.

Nature in motion and process is often reflected in her works, and collaboration with researchers and biologists is for her a source of new sound and scenic ideas that allows her to incorporate organic forms into the music.

As Tjøgersen puts it, “By giving nature a voice in the concert hall, I want the audience to get to know valuable forms of life, and to raise awareness of what can be lost if humans continue to change nature.”

She holds an MA in composition from Anton Bruckner Universität in Austria, where she studied with Carola Bauckholt, and an MA in clarinet from the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she studied with Hans Christian Bræin.

Her works have been performed by Ensemble Recherche, Klangforum Wien, Arditti Quartet, Pinquins, SWR and WDR Symphonieorchester, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as at festivals such as ECLAT, Ultraschall, Wien Modern, Tectonics, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, and Ultima.

In 2019–20, Tjøgersen was a fellow at Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and in 2020 she received Norway’s Arne Nordheim Composer Prize, as well as the Pauline Hall Prize for her orchestra piece Bioluminescence. In 2021, she was awarded “Work of the Year” from the Norwegian Society of Composers for her Piano Concerto. In 2022, she won the International Rostrum of Composers in Palermo, and in 2023 she was the winner of Coup de Coeur des Jeunes Mélomanes from Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco for her orchestra work Between Trees.

Image credit: Frederic Boudin
 

Called “a brilliant musical scientist” (CBC), “breathtakingly inventive” (Sydney Times Herald), and “utterly inspiring” (I Care If You Listen), award winning composer and filmmaker Nicole Lizée explores themes of malfunction, turntablism, rave culture, urbex, film theory, psychedelia, game culture, experimental fashion, and thrash metal to create a new kind of expression.

Nicole’s works are regularly performed worldwide to international acclaim. Her commission list of over 60 works includes the Kronos Quartet, BBC Proms, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Bang On A Can, National Arts Centre Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and Sō Percussion.

Awards include the 2024 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year, the 2023 Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera, the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Opera, the Prix Opus for Composer of the Year, and the Canada Council Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music.

A Juno-award winning artist, Shad is one of Canada’s most revered rappers, a peerless wordsmith who embodies Hip-Hop’s power to entertain, educate and express the fullness of humanity through art. Born in Kenya to Rwandan parents, and raised in London, Ontario, Shad has released 7 full-length albums and 3 EPs since his debut in 2005. 5 of his albums have been shortlisted for the Polaris Music Prize, the most shortlisted nominations of any artist in the prize's history. Shad also hosted CBC's Arts and Culture radio show 'q', is the host of Netflix's Peabody and Emmy-Award winning docuseries 'Hip-Hop Evolution' and he holds a Masters Degree in Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University. Using the power of words and music to make meaning, Shad draws on his own experiences to explore the fullness of life and what it means to be human.

Image by Justin Broadbent.

Scott Fraser is a Grammy-winning recording, mixing, mastering, and concert engineer, producer, and sound designer for acoustic music recordings and live performances. He specializes in classical, jazz, folk, world and avant-garde genres. In a career spanning multiple decades he has engineered over 700 albums, as well as having mixed thousands of concerts worldwide.  

Since 1992 he has toured extensively as sound designer for the Kronos Quartet. Scott has mixed over a thousand concerts for Kronos, in venues including Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Kennedy Center, Disney Hall, La Scala, Concertgebouw, etc.  

Scott co-produced, recorded, and mixed the Laurie Anderson/Kronos Quartet collaboration Landfall, which won the 2018 Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. He co-produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered You’ve Stolen My Heart, an album of Bollywood classics, interpreted by Kronos, featuring the legendary vocalist Asha Bhosle. In 2005 it was nominated for a Grammy in the World Music category. Scott also engineered The Ten Thousand Things, music of John Cage, as well as the Harry Partch compendium Bitter Music, both of which were Grammy nominees. In 2021, Scott recorded tracks for Opium Moon’s Night + Day CD, and mixed & mastered classical guitarist Mak Grgic’s Mak|Bach CD, both of which received Grammy nominations.

Scott has also worked with artists as diverse as Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, The Residents, Harold Budd, The Klezmatics, Katia & Marielle Lebeque, Tigran Hamasyan, Sandra Tsing-Loh and Mel Tormé.

Scott has taught recording master classes at Tainan University of Technology in Taiwan, New York University in Abu Dhabi, & Scripps College in Claremont, California.