Originally from Chicago, Marissa Simmons is a contralto, noted for her “deep, evenly produced mezzo and theatrical magnetism” (South Florida Classical Review). She is also distinguished by her “comic precision” (San Francisco Examiner) and praised as “una formidable” (Especial/El Nuevo Herald). Simmons earned a Master of Music under Catherine Cook at the San Francisco Conservatory […]
Composing and performing her own compositions in public since age 7, Dr. Lois Veenhoven Guderian has been active as a composer, performer, educator, and author throughout her professional life. She is a versatile composer, composing in several genres, and in a variety of levels of compositional complexity. Lois has composed hundreds of songs and instrumental […]
Chloe Liuyan Liu is a composer who earned her Master of Music in Music Composition from Indiana University in May 2023, following her Bachelor of Music in Composition at Wheaton College in 2021. In 2019, she achieved recognition by winning both the Schultheis Composition Competition Award and the Josephine Halvorsen Memorial Composition Prize. Liu has […]
Michael Chipchak (b. 1999) is a composer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and student at Elmhurst University. He considers himself to be a contemporary-style composer, taking great influence from the Second Viennese School. He’s most inspired by composers including Claude Debussy, Anton Webern and Samuel Barber. He focuses most of his music on impressionistic, dissonant and pointillistic sounds.
Equally influenced by atonal modern classical, the ambient music of Brian Eno, the nuanced and free improvisation approach of AMM, the chamber pop of Burt Bacharach, and the industrial machinations of Throbbing Gristle, minimalists Reich and Glass, as well as jazz, rock, prog, & punk, Dan has been playing with sound since the early 80’s […]
Matthew is a Cellist/Composer hailing from Rochester New York. As a composer, he studied under Georg Friedrich Haas and Zosha DiCastri at Columbia University and Margaret Henry at the Eastman Community Music School. As a cellist, Matthew is a member of the Evanston Symphony Orchestra and is interested in doing community outreach with contemporary classical […]
Timothy W. McDunn (b. 1994) is a composer and theorist with a distinguished international profile. He specializes in just intonation and electroacoustic composition. His music and research is regularly presented and performed at major peer-reviewed conferences and festivals including NYCEMF, SEAMUS, SCI National Conference, Convergence, MOXSonic, ChimeFest, NSEME, and others. His background in classical languages […]
Jadie Reeves (they/she) is a Chicago-based musician who recently graduated from Western Michigan University with their Bachelor’s in Music Composition and Vocal Performance. Through the careful creation, performance, and instruction of new music, they hope to substantively contribute to their communities by realizing projects which highlight underrepresented perspectives in the classical concert space. At Western, […]
Tabes Bridges is a Chicago-based composer and baritone whose music takes listeners on fantastic journeys of harmony, language, and color. A longtime choral singer, Tabes is obsessed with the interplay between words and music, and his long-term artistic goals include 1) pushing the limits of textual sources in choral music, and 2) expanding the boundaries […]
Composer Myron Silberstein (b. 1974) began his career as a pianist dedicated to bringing attention to composers whose work had fallen into obscurity. Immersion in the music of Vittorio Giannini, Nicolas Flagello, Ernest Bloch, and Paul Creston led to the development of his own compositional voice. Silberstein’s music is Romantic in outlook while making liberal […]
Megan DiGeorgio is a composer, violist, vocalist, educator, and arts administrator based Chicago, Illinois. As an artist, Megan believes in collaboration and community, rather than competition. She takes joy in creating and inspiring others to create. She most enjoys working in a spirit of genuine collaboration with other artists, musical and non-musical, and she strives […]
Han geul Lee is a multifaceted musician, known for his innovative approach to the piano as a composer, improviser, and instrument maker. He has explored a wide range of piano repertoire, from early baroque to premiere performances of new music and continues to explore theuntapped sonic capabilities of the piano with experimental techniques and electronics […]
Mark Snyder is a drummer, tubist, video artist, composer, engineer, producer & teacher living in Chicago. Mark’s multimedia compositions have been described as “expansive, expressive, and extremely human.” As a producer, writer, engineer, and performer, his discography includes world, electroacoustic, pop, rock, classical, and country records. A two-time quarterfinalist for the Grammy Music Educator of […]
Blair Boyd is a Chicago-based composer whose highly energized compositions engage with physical movement and the perception of time. Her works have been performed throughout the U.S. and internationally including Cheltenham Music Festival (U.K.), impuls Festival (Austria), and HighScore New Music Festival (Italy), as well as broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Dr. Boyd holds degrees […]
Cole Reyes (b. 1998) is a Michigan-based composer, educator, conductor, and performer originally from the Chicagoland Area. His music explores the intersection between personal experience and the world beyond. He has collaborated with artists such as JACK Quartet, the Rhythm Method Quartet, Bergamot Quartet, Juventas New Music Ensemble, BlackBox Ensemble, Del Sol Quartet, Transient Canvas, […]
Xu Han 许瀚 ( Beijing China) is a composer, scholar, sound artist, trombone & euphonium player, instrument hacker, coder, and improviser who draws inspiration from Buddhist Philosophy and hands-on aesthetics. Han is currently a composition doctoral candidate at Cornell University. He finished a music master degree in composition (graduating with distinction) from the Royal Northern […]
William Copper is an American composer of contemporary classical music, a theorist, and the world’s authority on Intonalism, the science of structuring music according to intonation. His music is praised for its beauty, structural integrity, and innovative originality. Copper’s studies began in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and as his interests turned to […]
Known for his energetic rhythms, rich harmonic language, and striking colors, award-winning composer Josh Rodriguez (b. 1982) continues to gain recognition as an emerging composer and collaborator on a national and international scale. Born in Argentina and raised in Guatemala, Mexico and the United States, Rodriguez’s musical imagination has been formed by this bilingual, multi-cultural […]
Trevor Patricia Watkin is named after his grandmother, a fellow native of Southern California. A teacher since 1997, from 2013-2022 Trevor taught at Access Contemporary Music in Chicago, where he served first as Director of Operations and ultimately as Director of Artistic Activities. In 2019 he created the ACM Film Scoring Class, which is the […]
Anthony Joseph Lanman is an active and passionate musician that divides his time between composing, performing, teaching and advocacy for new classical music. As a composer, Anthony creates music that reaches general audiences as well as new music connoisseurs. Embracing influences that range from progressive rock and metal, to medieval and renaissance music, to jazz, […]
“I’m originally from Cincinnati, Ohio. I grew up in a household of music lovers, who encouraged me to pursue music. I picked up guitar at age 12 and immediately started composing my own songs. I attended the University of Chicago where I studied Music Composition under Mwata Bowden, Augusta Read Thomas, and Anthony Cheung. I […]
Natasha Bogojević is an award winning and internationally acclaimed composer and pianist. She is regarded as the creator of highly original, passionate and imaginative pieces. Her music is not possible to categorize; while deeply rooted in classical tradition she is constantly searching for different inspiration to create new, engaging and inventive scores. She is the […]
Elliott Lupp is a composer, improvisor, visual artist, educator, and sound designer whose work often invokes images of the distorted, chaotic, visceral, and absurd. This aesthetic approach as it relates to both acoustic and electroacoustic composition has led to a body of work that, at the root of its construction, focuses on the manipulation of […]
Carlos Bandera is a composer whose music is characterized by a glacial unfolding of sonic landscapes. He often expands simple elements into large-scale musical structures, through which he explores the interplay of harmony, noise, and texture. Carlos received the Underwood Commission to write a new work for the American Composers Orchestra after his piece Lux […]
Pedram Diba (b.1993) is an Iranian-American composer of acoustic, acousmatic, and mixed music residing in Chicago. Diba’s music and research has been showcased in festivals such as IRCAM Forum 2022, Festival Temporel 2021, NOVA Contemporary Meeting 2021, 4th Annual Research on Contemporary Music Conference, Concert Vivier InterUniversitaire 2020, New Music Gathering 2018, White Ibis Ensemble […]
Logan Rutledge is a composer of contemporary classical music that hails from Gainesville, Florida! Rutledge holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago where he studied Composition with Marc Mellits, and a Masters of Music in Composition from the University of Miami studying with Charles Norman Mason. Rutledge has also […]
Olivia Kieffer is a composer, percussionist, and educator. A native of Wisconsin, her music has been described as “immediately attractive,” “like a knife of light,” and “honest, to the point, and joyful!” Olivia is former adjunct music faculty at Reinhardt University (2009 – 2017), where she taught percussion and World Music. She studied percussion at […]
Ramin Roshandel’s compositional work is based around incorporating ‘experience’ as a fundamental concept through a non-experimental approach in performance. Considering phenomena such as instability, cultural identity, and communicational language on one hand, and being inspired by Persian music intervals as a setār (an Iranian instrument) player on the other, has led him to consider indeterminate, […]
Elizabeth Rudolph is a Chicago-based composer “whose music takes advantage of the rhythmic complexity of minimalism to emphasize thoughtfully composed melodic storytelling.” according to contralto Katherine Dalin. Rudolph’s music has been commissioned, performed, and/or recorded by VOX3, Third Eye Theater, New Moon Opera, Chicago Fringe Opera, Fresh Squeezed Opera, Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus, Interlochen Arts […]
Julian Terrell Otis is a vocalist dedicated to the advancement of Black music in America, spanning genres from creative music and jazz, to contemporary classical. His work explores the limitless possibilities of his instrument’s expressive capacity through song, improvisation, and theater. Known for bringing fresh perspective, nuance, and “high drama” to the contemporary music world, […]
Ben Zucker makes “stirring compositions…built on a lifetime of musical curiosity” (Chicago Reader). As an intentionally wide-ranging composer/performer, he has contributed to experimental scenes across North America and Europe. Performance highlights include working with musicians including Anthony Braxton, Gareth Davis, Myra Melford, Karen Borca, Vocal Constructivists, Rinde Eckert, and the San Francisco Choral Artists, amongst […]
Zachary Guo attends Deerfield High School and studies piano with Dr. Matthew Hagle as well as composition with Dr. Christopher Jones. He is a scholarship fellow at the Music Institute of Chicago’s Academy, a training center for advanced pre-college musicians. At the Academy, Zachary enjoys learning and playing contemporary music with his peers. Zachary began […]
Zoë A. Wallace (formerly known as Zoë Holbrook) is a classical composer and guitarist who is continually striving to broaden the repertoire for instruments in an ensemble setting. She has performed in a number of concerts as a soloist and in a duo throughout California, Illinois, and Utah, and has had the pleasure of playing […]
Molly Jones’ practice incorporates improvisation, composition, and multimedia performance with saxophones, flutes, and electronic samples. Her work originates in a place of playfulness, listening, and attention. Formed by her experiences in jazz, classical, Balkan brass, and Scottish country dance/contradance ensembles, and by her fascination with found sounds, she has created chamber works, graphic scores, electroacoustic […]
“…Zoulek’s performance, on saxophones in every range, is stunningly virtuosic, whatever the genre…none of this would matter much (except to saxophonists) if he were a less imaginative composer.” (The Wall Street Journal). A modern saxophonist of “pure mindfulness and talent” (PopMatters), Nick Zoulek’s artistry as a performer, collaborator, composer, and media artist has led to a diverse portfolio of distinctive […]
Richard Brasseale is a saxophonist, composer, and educator in the Chicago area. An acclaimed saxophonist, he has played with numerous ensembles, including the Milwaukee Symphony, Madison Symphony, Fulcrum Point New Music Ensemble, Camerata Chicago, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and others. Recent solo performances include the DePaul Symphony Orchestra, North Park Orchestra, and various recitals in […]
Abdo Timejardine-Zomeño is a Chicago-based clarinetist, woodwind doubler, composer, and arranger. He is currently earning a double degree in Clarinet Performance and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His on campus ensemble participation includes performing in the UIC Wind Ensemble, Orchestra, Pep Band, as well as various chamber music ensembles. Abdo’s primary […]
Wenbin Lyu is a US-based Chinese composer and guitarist. The compositions written by Wenbin Lyu combines contemporary western techniques with ancient oriental culture. He seeks inspiration from nature, science, and video games. Lyu has received fellowships from Tanglewood Music Center, Cabrillo Festival Composers Workshop, and Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme. Lyu’s works have been performed at […]
Described as “kaleidoscopic,” and praised for its “real power,” “triumphalism,” (Fanfare Magazine) and “depth, beauty, and rich dimension” (The Courier), the multistylistic work of Baltimore-based composer and pianist Adam D. O’Dell (b. 1992) invokes theatre, nature, and human behavior and speech to explore the territory between the profound and the absurd. O’Dell has been commissioned […]
TREY TILLOTSON has worked in the classical music world since 2014. Born in 2002, Tillotson had his first official freelancing opportunity in 2015, and has since then performed, whether clarinet or piano, at various events, such as for a wedding, fundraisers, and multiple churches in the Pittsburgh area. His performance experiences include solo, chamber, choral, […]