Juri Seo* (b. 1981) is a Korean-American composer and pianist based in Princeton, New Jersey. She seeks to write music that encompasses extreme contrast through compositions that are unified and fluid, yet complex. She merges many of the fascinating aspects of music from the past century—in particular its expanded timbral palette and unorthodox approach to structure—with a deep love of functional tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. With its fast-changing tempi and dynamics, her music explores the serious and the humorous, the lyrical and the violent, the tranquil and the obsessive. She hopes to create music that loves, that makes a positive change in the world—however small—through the people who are willing to listen.
Her composition honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and the Andrew Imbrie Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, Copland House Residency Award, and the Otto Eckstein Fellowship from Tanglewood. She has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, and the Tanglewood Music Center. Her portrait albums "Mostly Piano" and “Respiri” were released by Innova Recordings. She holds a D.M.A. (Dissertation: Jonathan Harvey's String Quartets, 2013) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she studied with Reynold Tharp. She has also attended the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome, corsi di perfezionamento with Ivan Fedele) and Yonsei University (Seoul, B.M.). She has been a composition fellow at the Tanglewood, Bang on a Can, and SoundSCAPE festivals, the Wellesley Composers Conference, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She is Associate Professor of Music at Princeton University.
Juri lives in Lawrenceville, just outside of Princeton, with her husband, percussionist Mark Eichenberger and a little mutt named Roman.
*Note on pronunciation: In North America, my name is pronounced [Jew-ri Suh].
Trevor Weston’s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling.” (Detroit Free Press) Weston’s honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Weston co-authored with Olly Wilson, chapter 5 in the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, “Duke Ellington as a Cultural Icon” published by Cambridge University Press. Weston’s work, Juba for Strings won the 2019 Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition.
Weston’s Flying Fish, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall for its 125 Commission Project and the American Composers Orchestra, was described as having, “…episodes of hurtling energy, the music certainly suggested wondrous aquatic feats. I was especially affected, though, by an extended slower, quizzical episode with pensive strings and plaintive chords.” (New York Times). The Boston Landmarks Orchestra commissioned Griot Legacies for choir and orchestra, a work created with four innovative arrangements of African American Spirituals. Griot Legacies demonstrates Weston’s “knack for piquant harmonies, evocative textures, and effective vocal writing.” (Boston Globe) The Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Church Wall Street, under the direction of Julian Wachner, recorded Trevor Weston’s choral works. The Bang on a Can All-Stars premiered Weston’s composition Dig It, commissioned by the group for the Ecstatic Music Festival in NYC.
A list of ensembles performing Trevor Weston’s compositions include Roomful of Teeth, The Boston Children’s Chorus, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue Choir, The Starling Chamber Orchestra, Mallarme Chamber Players, The Providence Singers, Chicago Sinfonietta, Seraphic Fire, The Tufts Chamber Chorus, Ensemble Pi, The Amernet String Quartet, The UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus, The Washington Chorus, Trilogy: An Opera Company, and The Manhattan Choral Ensemble. In addition to his creative work, Weston completed the re-orchestration of Florence Price’s Piano Concerto for the Center for Black Music Research in 2010.
Dr. Weston’s musical education began at the prestigious St. Thomas Choir school in NYC at the age of ten. He received his B.A. from Tufts University and continued his studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he earned his M. A. and Ph. D. in Music Composition. His primary composition teachers were T. J. Anderson, Olly Wilson, Andrew Imbrie and Richard Felciano. Dr. Weston is currently Professor of Music at Drew University in Madison, NJ.
A composer with a gift for incorporating many influences and styles within her work, Nkeiru Okoye is perhaps best known for her opera, Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed that Line to Freedom, the orchestral work, Voices Shouting Out, which she composed as an artistic response to 9/11, and her suite, African Sketches, which has been performed by pianists around the globe. Profiled in both the Music of Black Composers Coloring Book and Routledge’s African American Music: An Introduction textbook, Dr. Okoye is also the inaugural recipient of the Florence Price Award for Composition. A recent New York Times article mentioned, “Okoye’s work would make a fitting grand opening for an opera company’s post-pandemic relaunch.”
In March 2020, the State of Michigan issued a proclamation acknowledging Dr. Okoye’s “extraordinary contributions” to the history of Detroit, Michigan, for Black Bottom, a symphonic experience commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, in celebration of the centennial season of Orchestra Hall. Her other recent works include Tales from the Briar Patch, a sung story, commissioned by The American Opera Project, and Charlotte Mecklenburg, commissioned by the Charlotte Symphony. Some of her upcoming compositions for the 2021-2022 season include Euba’s Dance, for cellist Matt Haimowitz, When young spring comes for pianist and NPR Host, Laura Downes, and a micro-opera, 600 Square Feet, for Cleveland Opera Theatre.
Dr. Okoye is a board member of Composers Now!. She holds a BM in Composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and a PhD in Music Theory and Composition from Rutgers University.
Wallace McClain Cheatham (1945-2021) continued to grow as a musician, researcher, and teacher throughout his life. From the podium, he introduced major works of African-American composers to audiences in Wisconsin and Illinois. His compositions, which span a variety of genres, have been performed in national and international settings. Some of his scores have been published by Shawnee, Alfred, Master-Player Library, Oxford University Press, Southern Illinois University Press, and Jomar Press.
Dr. Cheatham's research dealing with opera as it relates to the African-American experience has been published in internationally circulated journals of scholarship. His book, Dialogues On Opera and The African American Experience, is housed in libraries worldwide.
Dr. Cheatham was a public school music teacher for more than three decades. He was a guest professor at Wisconsin's Cardinal Stritch University. He was called upon to be a piano accompanist for instrumentalists and singers, and a lecturer in national and international performance and professional venues. He is a subject of biographical record in Who's Who In The World, Who's Who In America, and Who's Who In American Education.
Christian Onyeji holds a Doctor of Music degree from the University of Pretoria, Republic of South Africa, a Master of Arts degree in composition, a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Music as well as a Diploma in Music Education from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. A Professor of music at the Department of Music, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Christian is an internationally recognized music composer, educator and scholar who specializes in Research-Composition, a compositional approach that applies ethnomusicological procedures in the composition of modern African art music that is a logical continuum of African traditional music. His numerous compositions for different media have been performed within and outside Nigeria.
He is a researcher on African music as well as composes from the African stock. He has made contributions to modern African art music for symphony orchestra, drummistic piano style of modern compositions for the piano, choral compositions, solo voice and piano compositions as well as scholarly works in some leading journals. His Christmas Choral composition titled “N’ihi n’amuworo ayi otu nwa” published by Oxford University Press has been performed by different choirs of the world including the Mommon Tabernacle Choir, the world’s best choir. His publication of a collection of twenty Nigerian songs composed or arranged by him for solo voices have become valuable resource for voice students. He was the Festival Lecturer for the 2008 National Festival of Arts in Grahamstown, South Africa at the Art Music Performance part of the festival.
He is a member of International Society of Music Education where he served on two Standing Committees; Pan African Society for Musical Arts Education; International Association of Audiovisual Archives; International Association of Music Libraries Archives and Documentation Centres, Association of Nigerian Musicologists and International Council for Traditional Music where he is a member of the Committee on Online Dialogues on Decolonization of Music. He was a member of the Academic Staff Union of Universities’ National Committee on Ethics and Grievances.
He completed the Post Doctoral Research Fellowship at the School of Music, North-West University in South Africa in 2011, during which he pioneered the research on the indigenous music of the Batswana people of the North-West Province of South Africa. He serves as the Editor or a member of Editorial Board of Different Journals and reviews articles for international journals. He was awarded Global Lifetime Achievers International Gold Award (GLAIGA) in 2012 in a Grand Ceremony held in Accra, Ghana, by Nigerian Top Leaders International Magazine. He was also given the Outstanding Vocational Service Award in 2014 by Rotary Club, Nsukka. He presented the 102nd Inaugural Lecture of the University of Nigeria titled “Composing Art Music from Indigenous African Musical paradigms”. He was the Dean of Faculty of Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka from 2016 to 2018 after having served as Head of Department of Music University of Nigeria and University of Uyo as well the Associate Dean of Faculty of Arts and the School of Postgraduate Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Enugu State.
Considered by some Hip-Hoppers to be the great grandfather of Hip-Hop, because of the confrontational quality of his musical film work, Ed Bland has left his mark in several fields.
In concert music, Bland's "Piece For Chamber Orchestra" (1979) was called, "An amazing tour de force in terms of relentless energy and build up of tension...a fascinating strong piece," by Gunther Schuller, American composer/conductor/author; and "Original and Fresh," by Bruce Creditor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Bland's synthesis of three canons of music, Western, Jazz and West African Drumming, made it possible for him to work as composer, producer, arranger, orchestrator in the recording, and film industries. Among those sessions was one using Jimi Hendrix in his early days.
Bongani Ndodana-Breen has written a wide range of music encompassing symphonic work and opera. According to The New York Times his “delicately made music – airy, spacious, terribly complex but never convoluted – has a lot to teach the Western wizards of metric modulation and layered rhythms about grace and balance.” He has received commissions from Wigmore Hall, Vancouver Recital Society, Madam Walker Theatre, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Luminato Festival and Haydn Festival. He is the composer of Winnie, The Opera based on the life of Winnie Mandela and Harmonia Ubuntu commissioned for and performed by the Minnesota Orchestra. Dr. Ndodana-Breen holds a PhD in Composition from Rhodes University. He was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 1998 and was one of the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans of 2011.
