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Nell Shaw Cohen

Nell Shaw Cohen (b. 1988) is a composer, librettist, and multimedia artist. She evokes landscapes, visual art, and the lives of mavericks in her lyrical works for the stage, concert hall, and digital media. Her commissions have included Houston Grand Opera, Skylark Vocal Ensemble, Boston Choral Ensemble, Juventas New Music Ensemble, American Wild Ensemble, The Brass Project, Laura Strickling, and Montage Music Society. Her operas have had workshops with Fort Worth Opera, The American Opera Project, New Dramatists, New York University, and University of New Mexico, and she was first runner-up for the 2020 Zepick Modern Opera Competition. Cohen earned degrees in composition from NYU and New England Conservatory, where her teachers included Herschel Garfein and Michael Gandolfi. A past Artist-in-Residence with Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Cohen has received an OPERA America Commissioning Grant for Female Composers, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Arts Award, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music. As Founder & Director of Landscape Music, an international network of composers and performers, she advocates for music inspired by landscape, nature, and place. She lives in the Shawangunk Mountains of New York's Hudson Valley.

Loser Dumplings from Interstate

Melissa Li

At a Dinner Party from Three Amy Levy Songs

Hope Salmonson

Melissa Li

Melissa Li (she/her) is a composer, lyricist, performer, and writer based in NYC. She is a recipient of the 2021 Kleban Prize, Jonathan Larson Award, a Dramatists Guild Foundation Fellow, a Lincoln Center Theater Writer-in-Residence, a 2019 Musical Theatre Factory Maker, a MacDowell Fellow, a Company One Pao Arts Fellow, and a former Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellow. Musicals include Interstate (New York Musical Festival, Winner “Outstanding Lyrics”), MISS STEP (5th Avenue Theatre commission), Cancelled (Keen Company), May Day (NewYorkRep), Surviving the Nian (The Theater Offensive, IRNE Award Winner for "Best New Play" 2007), and 99% Stone (The Theater Offensive). Upcoming: BachelorX (Playwrights Horizons), Adventurephile (Keen Company), and OSF Presents (Oregon Shakespeare Festival). Her works have received support from 5th Avenue Theatre, The Village Theater, Musical Theater Factory, Playwrights Horizons, Keen Company, Weston Playhouse, NewYorkRep, Company One Theatre, National Performance Network, and New England Foundation for the Arts, among others. Melissa has released music solo and collaboratively, including 2 Seconds Away, Drive Away Home (as Good Asian Drivers), and The Beginning (as Melissa Li & The Barely Theirs).

Hope Salmonson

Hope Salmonson, from Kjipuktuk (Halifax, Nova Scotia), is a queer, trans composer and tubist, trying to navigate the very big world around her. In 2017, she was accepted to Mount Allison University under a Mary Emerancy Pickard Music Scholarship, and studies composition under Dr. Kevin Morse. She has studied tuba and euphonium with Drs. Linda Pearse, Dale Sorensen and Olivier Huebscher. Hope will be graduating from Mount Allison in Spring 2022, and hopes to pursue a master’s degree. Hope’s compositional practice is inspired by community and connection to others. Her works have been performed by Ensemble Allure, the andPlay Duo and the Mount Allison Elliott Chorale, among others, and in April 2021 she hosted a recital of her compositions, featuring seventeen performers and five premiere performances. Hope has composed for the 2020 Art Song Lab and the 2021 Wildflower Composers Festival. Hope's work can be found in a few places. In 2019, her essay “Not Quite Romeo: Berlioz, Smithson and the Unspoken Truth” was published in Nota Bene: Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Musicology. Her art song "At a Dinner Party" is published in the NewMusicShelf Anthology of New Music: Trans & Nonbinary Voices, vol. 1 curated by Aiden K. Feltkamp. In her free time, Hope enjoys gaming, cooking for her loved ones, and singing.

Strange Dreams from Proving Up

Missy Mazzoli

Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (NY Times), “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out NY), and praised for her “apocalyptic imagination” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, Scottish Opera and many others. In 2018 she became, along with Jeanine Tesori, one of the first woman to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, and was nominated for a Grammy award in the category of “Best Classical Composition”. She is currently the Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and from 2012-2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia. Her 2018 opera Proving Up, created with longtime collaborator librettist Royce Vavrek and based on a short story by Karen Russell, is a surreal commentary on the American dream. It was commissioned and premiered by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and Miller Theatre, and was deemed “harrowing… a true opera for its time” by the Washington Post. Her 2016 opera Breaking the Waves, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects, was called “one of the best 21st-century American operas yet” by Opera News. Breaking the Waves received its European premiere at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival; future performances are planned at LA Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and the Adelaide Festival. Her next opera, The Listeners, will premiere in 2021 at the Norwegian National Opera and Opera Philadelphia. In 2016, Missy and composer Ellen Reid founded Luna Lab, a mentorship program for young female composers created in partnership with the Kaufman Music Center. Her works are published by G. Schirmer.

Mo Suo's Burial Ceremony

Xinyan Li

Memory: for Viola

Chen Yi

Shuo Chang

Chen Yi

Raspberry Island Dreaming

Libby Larsen

Fathers

Lori Laitman

Unquiet Waters

Kevin Day

An American composer whose music has been “characterized by propulsive, syncopated rhythms, colorful orchestration, and instrumental virtuosity,” (Robert Kirzinger, Boston Symphony Orchestra) Kevin Day (b. 1996) has quickly emerged as one of the leading young voices in the world of music composition today. Day was born in Charleston, West Virginia and is a native of Arlington, Texas. His father was a prominent hip-hop producer in the late-1980s in Southern California, and his mother was a sought-after gospel singer from West Virginia, singing alongside the likes of Mel Torme and Kirk Franklin. Kevin Day is a composer, conductor, producer, and multi-instrumentalist on tuba, euphonium, jazz piano and more, whose music often intersects between the worlds of jazz, minimalism, Latin music, fusion, and contemporary classical idioms. A winner of the BMI Student Composer Award and other honors, Day has composed over 200 works, and has had numerous performances throughout the United States, Russia, Austria, Australia, Taiwan, South Africa, and Japan. His works have been programmed by major orchestras and wind bands including the Boston Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Houston Symphony, Fort Worth Symphony, and the UT Wind Ensemble, and several top military bands. He was also selected as the 3rd Prize winner of the 2020 New Classics International Young Composer Contest of the Moscow Conservatory. His works have also been performed at Carnegie Hall, Rachmaninov Hall (Russia), The Midwest Clinic, TMEA, and other major venues. Day has collaborated with the likes of Jens Lindemann, Demondrae Thurman, Steven Cohen, and Jeremy Lewis on concertos for their respective instruments, as well as chamber ensembles like One Found Sound, Axiom Brass, Ensemble Dal Niente, The Puerto Rican Trombone Ensemble, The Zenith Saxophone Quartet, The Tesla Quartet, and many more. He has been mentored by composers Gabriela Lena Frank, Frank Ticheli, John Mackey, William Owens, Julie Giroux, Marcos Balter, Anthony Cheung, Matthew Evan Taylor, and Valerie Coleman. Day is currently pursuing his Doctor of Musical Arts Degree in Composition at the University of Miami Frost School of Music, where he is studying composition with Lansing McLoskey, Charles Norman Mason, and Dorothy Hindman, as well as jazz piano with Shelly Berg. Day holds a Master of Music in Composition Degree from the University of Georgia, where he studied with composers Peter Van Zandt Lane, Emily Koh, and conductor Cynthia Johnston Turner. He received his Bachelor of Music Degree in Tuba/Euphonium Performance from Texas Christian University (TCU), where he studied tuba and euphonium with Richard Murrow and composition primarily with Neil Anderson-Himmelspach. His works are published with Murphy Music Press, Dev Music Publishing, Cimarron Music, and Kevin Day Music. Day currently serves as the Vice President for the Millennium Composers Initiative and is an alumnus of Kappa Kappa Psi National Honorary Band Fraternity and Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia Fraternity of America.

Shades

Marcus Wilcher

El Muro

Ricardo Lorenz

Marcus Wilcher

Dr. Marcus Wilcher is a California-based musician and educator. He has received multiple accolades for his work including an ASCAP Young Composer Award and commissions from organizations and groups including the New York Youth Symphony and the McCain Duo. A graduate of the doctoral jazz studies program at the University of Texas-Austin, Wilcher holds faculty positions at three California institutions--Mt. San Jacinto College, Mt. San Antonio College, and San Bernardino Valley College--and provides clinics, masterclasses, and guest appearances for various high school music programs throughout Southern California's Inland Empire. Additionally, Marcus is a co-founder of Blacklist--a production venture specializing in high quality live music shows--and co-produced the 2018 documentary, The Blacklist: Experience Jazz in Austin.

Ricardo Lorenz

The compositions of Venezuelan-born Ricardo Lorenz have garnered praise for their fiery orchestrations, and rhythmic vitality as well as for raising awareness about global societal challenges that concern the composer. These impressions have earned him two Latin Grammy Award nominations, multiple commissions and performances of his works at prestigious international festivals such as Carnegie Hall’s Sonidos de las Américas, Ravinia Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, France’s Berlioz Festival, Spain’s Festival Internacional de Música Contemporanea de Alicante, the Festival Cervantino in Mexico, Turkey’s Uluslararasi Summer Festival and South Korea’s PAN Music Festival, among others. His orchestral compositions have been performed in the United States by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, New World Symphony, among many others and by orchestras in Venezuela, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Canada, Israel, Argentina, and the Czech Republic. Between 1999 and 2003, Ricardo Lorenz was Composer-in-Residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Armonia Musicians Residency Program and he held the position of Associate Director of the Indiana University Jacob School of Music’s Latin American Music Center between 2003 and 2005. He has received awards and commissions from the MacDowell Colony, National Flute Association, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Meet-the-Composer Midwest, MetLife Creative Connections, Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, Concert Artists Guild, Ravinia Festival, The University of Chicago, and the American Bandmasters Association/University of Florida Commissioning Project. His works for wind ensemble have been performed and recorded by numerous band programs across the United States, including Eastman School of Music, University of North Texas, Michigan State University, University of Michigan, University of Georgia, Ithaca College, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana, and many others. Some of Ricardo Lorenz’s works, his musical viewpoint, and his artistic persona have been the bases for articles that have recently appeared in Current Musicology, Naxos Musicology International “Listening to Latin America” Series, and in the textbook Experiencing Latin American Music published by University of California Press. Ricardo Lorenz is currently Professor and Chair of Music Composition at Michigan State University College of Music has served as Composition Faculty of the Wintergreen Summer Music Academy (Virginia) and as Composer-in-Residence of Music in the Loft (Chicago), Sewanee Summer Music Festival (Tennessee), the Billings Symphony Orchestra (Montana), and the Pan and Young-Nam International music festivals in South Korea. He has adjudicated composition competitions in the U.S., Colombia, South Korea, and the Philippines. Ricardo Lorenz’s compositions are published by Keiser Southern Music and by Boosey & Hawkes and they can be heard on the following record labels: ECM, Naxos, Albany Records, Arabesque Recordings, Navona Records, Cedille Records, GIA Publications, and Blue Griffin Recordings as well as labels in Turkey, Mexico, Venezuela, and the U.K. In 2019, Ricardo Lorenz was honored with the Michigan State University César Chávez Community Leadership Award. He holds a Ph.D. degree in composition from The University of Chicago and a MM degree from Indiana University and studied composition with Juan Orrego-Salas, Shulamit Ran, and Donald Erb. Ricardo Lorenz previously taught at Indiana University, The University of Chicago, and City Colleges of Chicago. He can be contacted at lorenzri@msu.edu