Chen Yi

Chen Yi

Chen Yi

Alexandra Gardner

Praised as “highly lyrical and provocative of thought” (San Francisco Classical Voice), “mesmerizing” (The New York Times), and “pungently attractive” (The Washington Post), the music of composer Alexandra Gardner is thrilling audiences and performers alike with a clear, expressive sound and a flair for the imaginative and unexpected. She composes for varied instrumentations and often mixes acoustic instruments with electronics, drawing inspiration from mythology, the natural sciences, and her training as a percussionist. Alexandra’s compositions are regularly featured at festivals and venues around the world, including the Aspen Music Festival, Beijing Modern Festival, Centro de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Festival Cervantino, Grand Teton Music Festival, The Kennedy Center, The Library of Congress, Merkin Hall, Strathmore Music Center, Symphony Space, and the Warsaw Autumn Festival. As the Seattle Symphony 2017-18 Season Composer-in-Residence, Alexandra’s new symphonic work, Significant Others, was commissioned by SSO and premiered on the orchestra’s subscription series under the baton of Music Director Ludovic Morlot. She also led workshops with LGBTQ+ youth affected by homelessness to create a collaborative composition entitled Stay Elevated, which was performed by musicians of the symphony at the Seattle Art Museum, and directed the Merriman Family Young Composers Workshop, leading 10 pre-college students in a 12-week program culminating in a performance of world premieres. Recent projects include Fade for flute and soundtrack, commissioned by the National Flute Association, Hummingbird Dreams commissioned by Astral Artists for pianist Natalia Kazaryan, and an adaptation of her orchestra work Just Say Yes for a consortium of wind ensembles. Current commissions include a piece for oboe and electronics for Seattle Symphony principal oboist Mary Lynch, a trio for flute, harp and percussion for the American Harp Society, a string quartet for Quartet ES of the Hartt School of Music, and a duo for two marimbas and electronics for the Threshold Music Project. Among Alexandra’s honors and awards are recognitions from the American Composers Forum, American Music Center, ASCAP, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Maryland State Arts Council, The Netherland-America Foundation, the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution. She has conducted residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Harvestworks, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, The MacDowell Colony, and Willapa Bay AiR, and she spent two years as a visiting composer at the Institut Universitari de l’Audiovisual in Barcelona, Spain. Her music is recorded on the Innova, Ars Harmonica, and Naxos labels. Alexandra is also active as an arts advocate, educator, and consultant. She enjoys helping people of all ages and abilities explore and create music through masterclasses and workshops, coaching and mentoring musicians, and facilitating dialog and discussion related to artistic career development and the nature of creativity. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Gardner holds degrees from The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University (M.M.) and Vassar College (B.A.). She currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland.

Ruth Zechlin

Federico García-Castells

Federico García-Castells

Sarah Kirkland Snider

Recently deemed “one of the decade’s more gifted, up-and-coming modern classical composers” (Pitchfork), “a potentially significant voice on the American music landscape” (David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer), and “an important representative of 21st century trends in composition” (New York Classical Review), composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative that has been hailed as “rapturous” (The New York Times), “groundbreaking” (The Boston Globe), and “poignant, deeply personal” (The New Yorker). With an ear for the poetic and the architectural, Snider’s music draws upon a diversity of influences to render a nuanced command of immersive storytelling. Of her orchestral song cycle, Penelope, Pitchfork‘s Jayson Greene proclaimed: “Snider’s music lives in…an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all.” Snider’s works have been commissioned and performed by the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Kansas City Symphony, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra; the Residentie Orkest Den Haag, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Aarhus Symfoniorkester, Britten Sinfonia, and National Arts Centre Orchestra; percussionist Colin Currie, tenor Nicholas Phan, and vocalist Shara Nova (formerly Worden); eighth blackbird, A Far Cry, Ensemble Signal, The Knights, and yMusic; Roomful of Teeth, Cantus, and Trinity Wall Street Choir; and many others. Conductors who have championed her work include Andreas Delfs, David Danzmayr, Andre dé Ridder, James Gaffigan, Giancarlo Guerrero, Ryan McAdams, Rossen Milanov, Edwin Outwater, and Leonard Slatkin. Her music has been heard in concert halls around the world including Carnegie Hall, the Elbphilharmonie, the Sydney Opera House, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and Wigmore Hall; and at festivals such as Big Ears, BAM Next Wave, Aspen, Ecstatic, Colorado, Cross-linx,Sundance, BAM’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Bang On a Can Summer, Liquid Music, 21C Liederabend, New York Festival of Song, Podium (Germany), Oranjewoud (Holland), and Apples & Olives (Switzerland.) Penelope, her acclaimed song cycle inspired by The Odyssey on text by Ellen McLaughlin, has been performed over fifty times in North America and Europe. Current projects include Forward Into Light, an orchestral commission inspired by the American women’s suffrage movement for the New York Philharmonic to premiere on their season finale concert in June 2020, and an opera on 12th century visionary/abbess/composer Hildegard von Bingen–commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, with a grant from Opera America–to premiere at Prototype Festival in January 2023. Highlights of Snider’s 2019-2020 season include performances of her 27-minute tone poem Hiraeth by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra under Xian Zhang, the Louisville Orchestra under Teddy Abrams, and the Cabrillo Festival under Cristian Macelaru. Louisville Orchestra also performs The Blue Hour, an hourlong work for soprano and string orchestra co-composed by Snider, Caroline Shaw, Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, and Shara Nova, who will also be the featured vocalist at this performance. Snider is Distinguished Guest Composer at the 2020 Winnipeg New Music Festival, which features performances of Hiraeth and Penelope (also featuring Shara Nova) under the baton of Daniel Raiskin. She is also a featured composer at Soundstreams’s RBC Bridges program, which will present a survey of her choral works in Toronto. Something for the Dark, Snider’s popular 12-minute portrait of resilience, is to be performed by the Phoenix Symphony under Tito Muñoz and the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra under Vinay Parameswaran, among others. Snider’s season culminates in the world premiere of Forward Into Light at David Geffen Hall, with Jaap van Zweden leading the New York Philharmonic. Snider will also curate a concert of chamber music for the finale of the New York Philharmonic hotspots festival to coincide with her premiere. Forward Into Light will also be heard at Aspen Music Festival, under the baton of Hugh Wolff, alongside the premiere of a new set of songs for Soprano, Tenor, and Two Pianos commissioned by the festival entitled Solitude of Self.

Martha Callison Horst

Ms. Horst is a composer who has devoted herself to the performance, creation, and instruction of classical music. Her music has also been played by performers and groups such as the Fromm Players, CUBE, Earplay, Alea III, Empyrean Ensemble, Susan Narucki, Left Coast Ensemble, Dal Niente, The Women's Philharmonic, Composers, Inc., members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Eric Mandat, and Amy Briggs. Ms. Horst has won the Copland Award, the 2005 Alea III International Composition Competition for her work Threads, and the Rebecca Clarke International Composition Competition for her work Cloister Songs, based on 18th century utopian poetry. She has held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Wellesley Conference, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and Dartington International School in the UK. Her work Piano Sonata No. 1, recorded by acclaimed pianist Lara Downes, was released nationally by Crossover Media. Dr. Horst currently teaches composition and theory at Illinois State University and has also taught at the University of California, Davis, East Carolina University, and San Francisco State University. She currently serves as the composer-in-residence for the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra in Chicago, IL.

Adolphus Hailstork

Zhou Long

Zhou Long

Melissa Hui

Canadian composer Melissa Hui was born in Hong Kong and raised in North Vancouver, BC. Initially inspired by the haunting music of the Mbuti of Central Africa, Javanese gamelan and Japanese gagaku court orchestra, she strives to create a personal music of ethereal beauty, intimate lyricism and raucous violence. Her work has been commissioned and performed throughout North America, Europe and Asia, including performances by the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, St. Lawrence String Quartet, Esprit Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, National Arts Centre Orchestra, Focus Festival in New York City, Oregon Symphony, International Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam, ISCM Festivals in Croatia and Switzerland, and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. The recipient of awards from the Guggenheim and Fromm Foundations, and a doctorate from Yale University, she was on the composition faculty at Stanford University for ten years before moving to Montreal. Melissa joined the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in 2010. She is a founding member of the Common Sense Composers' Collective.

David Sanford

David Sanford credits a variety of influences with igniting his musicianship. "I started on trombone when I was about ten and liked big band music early. I wanted to be a jazz musician. Charles Mingus inspired me to be a composer later on." Sanford was also influenced by rhythm and blues/funk groups like Parliament, the Isley Brothers, and Sly and the Family Stone and, later, by orchestral and more mainstream popular music. After completing undergraduate music studies at the University of Northern Colorado, he earned a master's degree in theory and composition from the New England Conservatory of Music and an M.F.A. and Ph.D. at Princeton University. Sanford has won many awards and honors, including a BMI Student Composer Award, a Koussevitzky Commission and a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to take a year off to focus exclusively on composing during graduate school. Recently, Sanford won the Samuel Barber Rome Prize Fellowship, allowing him to stay at the American Academy in Rome for 11 months with a group of 25 to 30 scholars in other areas of the humanities. One of the referees for his work wrote: "David Sanford is the real thing, a composer in the American tradition of brash, open-eared exploration: no material is too exalted or too debased for him to transform into his living art." Sanford's works have been performed by the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Chicago Symphony Chamber Players, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Harlem Festival Orchestra, cellist Matt Haimovitz, the Corvini e Iodice Roma Jazz Ensemble, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, the Empyrean Ensemble at UC Davis, Mount Holyoke faculty members Linda Laderach, Adrianne Greenbaum, and Larry Schipull, and dozens of other groups and performers. In addition, he has conducted performances of his own works at Monadnock Music, New England Conservatory, the Knitting Factory, and the Five Colleges New Music Festival, and leads his own big band, the Pittsburgh Collective. At Mount Holyoke, Sanford teaches theory (ear training, class harmony, and advanced seminar), composition, twentieth-century music history, jazz history, music in film, and music of the 1970s.

Eve Beglarian

According to the Los Angeles Times, composer and performer Eve Beglarian is a “humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” A 2017 winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts for her “prolific, engaging and surprising body of work,” she has also been awarded the 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Prize from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for her “innovation, risk-taking, and experimentation.” Beglarian’s current projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel and writer/director Mallory Catlett about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present, a piece about the controversial Balthus painting Thérèse Dreaming for vocalist Lucy Dhegrae, and a duo for uilleann pipes and organ that was premiered by Renée Louprette and Ivan Goff at Disney Hall as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 100th anniversary celebrations. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times) In 2009, “Ms. Beglarian kayaked and bicycled the length of the Mississippi River [and] has translated her findings into music of sophisticated rusticity. [Her] new Americana song cycle captures those swift currents as vividly as Mark Twain did. The works waft gracefully on her handsome folk croon and varied folk instrumentation as mysterious as their inspiration.” (New York Times) Beglarian’s chamber, choral, and orchestral music has been commissioned and widely performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the American Composers Orchestra, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the California EAR Unit, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, loadbang, Newspeak, the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble and individual performers including Maya Beiser, Lara Downes, Lucy Dhegrae, and Thomas Feng. Highlights of Beglarian’s work in music theater includes music for Mabou Mines’ Obie-winning Dollhouse, Animal Magnetism, Ecco Porco, Choephorai, and Shalom Shanghai, all directed by Lee Breuer; Forgiveness, a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng and Noh master Akira Matsui; and the China National Beijing Opera Theater’s production of The Bacchae, also directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. She has collaborated with choreographers including Ann Carlson, Robert LaFosse, Victoria Marks, Susan Marshall, David Neumann, Take Ueyama, and Megan Williams, and with visual and video artists including Cory Arcangel, Anne Bray, Vittoria Chierici, Barbara Hammer, Kevork Mourad, Shirin Neshat, Matt Petty, Bradley Wester, and Judson Wright. Performance projects include Brim, Songs from a Book of Days, The Story of B, Open Secrets, Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum, twisted tutu, and typOpera.

Tania León

Kenji Bunch