Artists

He shared a birthday with composers Benjamin Britten and Joaquín Rodrigo. He died the same day as Andrés Segovia. Hailed as “one of our age’s truly important composers,” Frank Wallace was a rare artist whose wizardry on his instrument rivaled the range and depth of his musical ideas in composition. He left us at 67 at the height of his powers, having enjoyed a distinguished career as a concert and recording artist, composer, director, and teacher. The American Record Guide calls Wallace’s music “exciting, unpredictable, and fresh” and Guitar Review “a brilliant collection of new repertoire performed by its composer, who happens to play with equal amounts of grace, sensitivity, and virtuosity.”  His colleagues speak with one voice—guitarist Bill Kanengiser: “What a shining and big-hearted spirit, imbued with laughter, love and boundless creativity. [His] grace and artistry are an inspiration to us all.”—composer Stephen Goss: “a wonderful human, a deep thinker and a fantastic musician…Inventiveness, creativity, and fantasy in abundance.”

Ralph Sorrentino is the Director of Percussion Studies at West Chester University, where he teaches applied percussion and directs the West Chester University Percussion Ensemble. Sorrentino also serves as Principal Percussionist with the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra and Section Percussionist with the Pennsylvania Ballet Orchestra. Sorrentino’s work with Opera Philadelphia includes critically acclaimed performances at Philadelphia’s historic Academy of Music, the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, and Harlem’s world-famous Apollo Theater. Sorrentino was the principal percussionist for Opera Philadelphia’s April 2016 New York premiere performances of Charlie Parker’s YARDBIRD, which marked the first time that opera was performed on the Apollo Theater stage.

Believing that opera should be theater grounded in climactic expression and deliver larger-than-life stories with music that harnesses the full athletic thrill of singing, Evan Mack has devoted much of his compositional life to opera and song. His first major operatic composition, Angel of the Amazon was premiered in 2011 by Encompass New Opera Theatre at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City and was subsequently released on CD worldwide by Albany Records. Two years later, Fresno State Opera Theater premiered another composition by Mack, The Secret of Luca. This was the first of several collaborations with librettist Joshua McGuire.

Herbert Deutsch was a composer, author, educator, and performer, and was Professor of Music at Hofstra University for 57 years. He is a composer of music in various media and his work has been widely performed, and commissioned works have been featured at national and regional conferences. In 1972, Deutsch co-founded the Long Island Composers Alliance. During his career at Hofstra, he founded Jazz Ensemble, Electronic Music Studios, New Music Ensemble, and created the B.S. Degree programs in Jazz, Composition/Theory and Music Business. He received the George Estabrook Distinguished Alumni Award in 1996 and the Hofstra Alumni Achievement Award in 2001. The Music Department has established the Herbert Deutsch Award for highest honors in Music Education.

Ergon is an Athens based contemporary music ensemble created in 2008 for performing works by living composers as well as masterpieces of the 20th and 21st-century avant-garde. Noted for its exciting interpretations and meticulous preparation, it has received praise from critics and audiences alike, making it the leading ensemble of its kind in Greece. An extremely flexible and versatile ensemble, Ergon is based on a core formation that is further reinforced, depending on the project, by a great number of guests and exceptionally talented musicians. Directed by a five-member musician team, responsible for planning, and collaborations, its original and adventurous programming includes chamber and orchestral music, musical theatre works, dance, contemporary opera, and cinema.

Jonathan Badger is a guitarist, composer, and video artist. He studied composition with Stephen Jaffe, Scott Lindroth, and John Harbison at Duke University; he also studied Guitar Craft, a tradition founded and guided by Robert Fripp of King Crimson. Badger’s work ranges from postrock sludge to neobaroque chamber music, and includes compositions for solo piano, string quartet, and vocal ensembles. In his live solo performances his compositions and improvisations are rendered using a variety of electronic implements while maintaining the character of solo guitar.

Composer and guitarist William Kentner Anderson began playing chamber music at the Tanglewood Festival at age 19. He later performed with the Metropolitan Opera Chamber Players, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, NY Philharmonic, and many other NYC-based ensembles and organizations. Anderson was recently featured at the Festival Internacional Camarata 21 in Xalapa, Vera Cruz, Mexico, Ebb & Flow Arts in Maui, and Moderne Mandag in Copenhagen and was a member of the Theater Chamber Players, the resident ensemble at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC.

Betty R. Wishart and music are synonymous. Her earliest memories involve singing in church choirs and playing the piano. She was introduced to contemporary music while studying with Richard Bunger at Queens University. At the end of her junior year, she wrote her first composition, submitted it to a music fraternity and was invited to perform a mini-recital of her music at their international conference. That event inspired her to continue composing while earning an M.M. degree in piano performance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While pursuing further study in piano and composition in New York City, she accepted and won a challenge from a writer to see who could get published first.

Nearly all of Navid Bargrizan’s compositions explore intonational and tuning concepts, ranging from just intonation and extended equal temperaments (e.g. 24-tone or 36-tone equal temperament) to various microtonal concepts adopted from diverse musical cultures. Since 2014, his experiments with microtonality have resulted in 13 premieres and more than 40 performances of his works in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Austria, including at New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium, Eastern Music Festival, Florida Contemporary Festival, and conferences of the Society of Composers, Inc.

Jeffrey Bowen is a composer and guitarist currently living in Seattle, Washington. His compositions feature gradually evolving processes and explorations of liminal spaces, and have been performed by Pascal Gallois, Maja Cerar, Beta Collide, Ensemble DissonArt, and the Luminosity Orchestra, among other ensembles in the USA and Europe.

Julius Bucsis is an award-winning composer, electric guitarist, and visual artist. His compositions span a range of genres and include works for acoustic and electric instruments as well as computer generated audio and video. Since 2011 his works have been presented at almost 200 events across the world. His compositions have been included on albums released by Ablaze, Ravello Records, RMN Classical, and Soundiff. He received a Doctor of Arts degree from Ball State University.

Hubert Howe was born in Portland, Oregon and grew up in Los Angeles, California, where he began his musical studies as an oboist. He was educated at Princeton University, where he studied with J. K. Randall, Godfrey Winham and Milton Babbitt, and from which he received the A.B., M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He was one of the first researchers in computer music, and became Professor of Music and Director of the Electronic Music studios at Queens College of the City University of New York. He also taught at the Juilliard School from 1974 through 1994. In 1988-89 he held the Endowed Chair in Music at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. From 1989 to 1998, 2001 to 2002, and Fall 2007, he was Director of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College.

Composer Gemma Peacocke grew up in Hamilton, New Zealand, and she moved to the United States in 2014. She writes a broad range of music including art-pop songs, EDM-inspired tracks and orchestral music. She has a particular love of interdisciplinary work and often collaborates with artists, writers, and theatre designers.

Composer and Sound Artist Kyle Vanderburg (b. 1986) grew up in southeast Missouri where the Ozark foothills meet the Mississippi River valley. Raised on southern gospel and American hymnody, his music walks the line between eliciting nostalgia and devising innovative sonic worlds. His electronic works often play with familiar sounds in new contexts (like a teakettle that turns into a thunderstorm, or duct tape that brings about the apocalypse); his acoustic works feature memorable melodies and a very fluid sense of time.

Recent winner of the New Music USA Project Grant, and now McKnight Fellow, has presented performances and taught master classes throughout Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. A native Puerto Rican (born and raised in Mayagüez PR) and musician activist, Zayas Cabán now resides in Minneapolis MN and is building an artistic career focused on developing projects, albums, and collaborations that address, respond to, and raise awareness about current events and social issues.

Ken Field is a saxophonist, flautist, and composer. Since 1988 he has been a member of the internationally acclaimed electronic modern music ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic, with whom he has recorded eight CDs. He leads the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, an experimental & improvisational brass band, and performs with the community-based Second Line Social Aid & Pleasure Society Brass Band. Since 2015 he has annually led a pick-up band of unafiliated musicians at the HONK!Oz Festival in Wollongong, NSW, Australia. His solo releases document his work for layered saxophones and his soundtracks for dance and film. Field was named a 2017 Finalist in Music Composition by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Omar Carmenates is currently the Associate Professor of Percussion at Furman University in Greenville SC. He holds a Doctor of Music degree from Florida State University, a Master of Music Degree in Percussion Performance from the University of North Texas, and a Bachelor’s degree in Music Education from the University of Central Florida.

A poet who composes. Refines Chinese ancient essence, which combines with western civilization. Also a writer for film, TV and others, right now looking for someone to mediate.

The Escape Ten (Escape X) duo formed from an epic coast-to-coast road trip taken by Annie Stevens and Andrea Venet in a Ford Escape on the Interstate-10 from Virginia to California in 2012. Today, Escape Ten maintains a steady performance schedule touring as guest artists and clinicians internationally. Regularly premiering new works for percussion, they remain active commissioning composers, collaborating on creative projects, joining consortiums, and writing their own pieces. Their mission is to generate creative and diverse music within a variety of genres and timbral contexts in order to bring challenging, lasting works into the standard repertoire.

The McCormick Percussion Group is recognized by critics and composers throughout the world for their unique recordings and interpretations of music decidedly outside of the mainstream. MPG often collaborates with other non-percussion musicians to explore and develop new trends of compositional thought. Among the most recorded ensembles of the genre, MPG has recorded many award winning albums for Ravello Records (dist. by Naxos). To ensure the original intent of each work, composers are often invited to rehearse with the ensemble and supervise recording sessions. Under the direction of Robert McCormick, MPG is a resident ensemble at the University of South Florida in Tampa.