Author: Maddy Doss

Since arriving in the U.K. from Senegal in 1999, Seckou Keita has been on an epic creative journey that has seen him broaden the idiomatic scope of his instrument as well as spread his wings, literally and figuratively. Nicknamed “the Hendrix of the Kora,” he has been celebrated for his ingenious tunings and virtuosity and praised as “one of the finest exponents of the kora.” Performing all over the globe as a solo artist and with his groundbreaking quintet, he has captivated audiences at WOMAD, Hay, Glastonbury, Tokyo Jazz, Chicago World Music Festival, Sydney International, Montreal Jazz Festivals and many more places.

Acclaimed collaborations with numerous jazz, pop, Latin, folk, and classical artists, notably include Damon Albarn & the Africa Express; Welsh harpist Catrin Finch; Cuban pianist Omar Sosa; AKA trio with Italian guitarist Antonio Forcione and Brazilian percussionist Adriano Adewale; Paul Weller and the Folk Collective; The Lost Words: Spell Songs (2019) joined by the words of Robert Macfarlane and artwork of Jackie Morris. Since 2007, he has had several opportunities to perform with classical ensembles including Orchestre National de Bretagne, which has spurred him towards his dream of leading an orchestral work specifically for the kora.

Seckou Keita has released 11 albums as a leader and co-leader. Through this work, he has earned numerous accolades including three Songlines Music Awards, and several BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, including 2019 Musician of the Year. “I don’t know if I’m a folk musician, a jazz, or a world one,” he said at the time. “Forget about categories. My music is just music for the soul.”

Seckou Keita released African Rhapsodies (Claves Records), a work for kora and orchestra arranged by Italian composer and bass player Davide Mantovani and recorded with BBC Concert Orchestra. Directed by Royal Northern College of Music’s Head of Conducting Mark Heron, Keita also invited Mantovani on double bass and his brother, Gambian percussionist (and kora player) Suntou Susso; pride of place was given to the outstanding South African cellist and vocalist Abel Selaocoe.

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Michael Preacely, an American baritone based in Lexington, KY, has proven himself a rising star on the operatic stage. Over the course of his burgeoning career, he has worked with numerous major and regional opera houses and orchestras in the United States and abroad and has consistently garnered critical acclaim. Preacely’s international career has spanned the globe, having featured performances in Europe, Asia, Russia, and Canada. Domestically, he has been featured with the Cincinnati Opera, Opera Company Philadelphia, Opera Memphis, Kentucky Opera, and Cleveland Opera, rank among the multitude of reputable opera companies with whom he has been featured as a performer. Likewise, he has performed alongside many of the nation’s top leading orchestras — including the Cincinnati Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Hilton Head Symphony, Asheville Symphony, Oakland East Bay Symphony, Memphis Symphony, Hamilton-Fairfield Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland Pops, Cincinnati Pops, American Spiritual Ensemble, and most recently the American Pops Orchestra.

Alongside his noteworthy stage credits and history of critical acclaim, Preacely has also received a great many accolades, including his reception of awards in the Fritz and Jensen Vocal Competition and the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. Preacely is on faculty at the University of Kentucky as a lecturer in voice. Upcoming engagements include his debut singing the title role of oratorio Elijah with the Hilton Head Symphony Orchestra.

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Rising tenor Limmie Pulliam thrills audiences with his captivating stage presence and his “stentorian, yet beautiful,” sound. Pulliam was praised by the San Francisco Chronicle for his “full-throated vocal power, and intimate lyricism” in his debut at Livermore Valley Opera in Verdi’s Otello.

On December 17, 2022, Pulliam made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Radamès in Verdi’s Aida, which also served as his role debut. He recently reprised the role of Radamès with Tulsa Opera for their 75^th anniversary gala concert. Elsewhere during the season, he returns to The Cleveland Orchestra for his first performances as Dick Johnson in Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst. In concert, he debuts with the San Diego Symphony singing Verdi’s Requiem and makes his Carnegie Hall debut performing The Ordering of Moses in collaboration with his alma mater, The Oberlin Conservatory. He also joins pianist Mark Markham for a series of recitals entitled “Make Them Hear You: A Spiritual Journey” and will also be featured on “operatic greatest hits” concerts with the Lincoln Symphony Orchestra and Delta Symphony.

The 2021–22 season was highlighted by his highly anticipated Los Angeles Opera debut as Manrico in Verdi’s Il Trovatore, where he was lauded by the Los Angeles Times for his “healthy, focused, ringing tenor.” He followed that with a successful role debut as Turiddu in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana with Vashon Opera. Upcoming performances include his company debut with Livermore Valley Opera in the title role of Verdi’s Otello, his company debut in Fort Worth Opera’s A Night of Black Excellence concert, and his rescheduled appearance with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra as the tenor soloist in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He is set to take the stage again as Verdi’s Otello in his highly anticipated debut with The Cleveland Orchestra.

Future engagements include a mainstage debut as Cavaradossi in Puccini’s Tosca with Madison Opera, and international debuts with the Gewandhausorchester in Leipzig, Germany, in Verdi’s Requiem, and The Vienna Volksopera in Vienna, Austria, in John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary.

Visit Limmie Pulliam’s Website

PeiJu Chien-Pott is an internationally acclaimed award-winning contemporary dance artist and choreographer from Taiwan, celebrated particularly for her work as a principal dancer for the Martha Graham Dance Company. Described as “one of the greatest living modern dancers” and “the most dramatically daring and physically chameleon-esque Graham dancer of her generation,” Chien-Pott has interpreted the iconic lead roles of Martha Graham’s repertoire. She holds a BFA in Dance from Taipei National University of the Arts, where she has been honored with “Outstanding Alumni Award.” Chien-Pott has received many prestigious international recognitions, including a Bessie from the NY Dance and Performance Awards; Positano Premia La Danza Leonide Massine for Best Female Contemporary Dancer; an honoree of the Women’s History Month by Hudson County; named by Dance Magazine one of its Best Performers in 2014 and 2017; and received the Capri International Dance Award 2018. Chien-Pott was selected as a young influencer in performing arts by The Generation T List of Asia Tatler in 2018 and 2019; and one of 10 Outstanding Young Persons of Taiwan by Junior Chamber International. She was named one of the Best Dancers of 2021 in Richard Move’s Herstory of the Universe by the New York Times.

Her recent choreography includes Rebirth in collaboration with sculptor Kang Mu-Xiang for Taipei 101; Island, created during the pandemic on commission from the Iron Rose Festival of Taiwan; Unity, completed for the late choreographer Nai-Ni Chen and premiered at the New York Live Arts; Split, commissioned by Periapsis Music and Dance; and she was one of the collaborating choreographers for the evening-length work The Threads Project #1 Universal Dialogues of Buglisi Dance Theater, premiered at the Chelsea Factory. She has recently premiered her work Lion in the City, a hip-hop Chinese Lion Dance for Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company’s Lunar New Year program celebrating the Year of the Water Rabbit. Chien-Pott’s appearance in a short film NALA, directed by British filmmaker and choreographer Darshan Singh Bhuller, has received 10 international film awards.

Chien-Pott was awarded a 2023 choreography fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She is a faculty member at The Ailey School and Martha Graham School.

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Chou Wen-Chung was born in Yantai, China, in 1923, and moved to the United States in 1946. His earliest work, Landscapes, written in 1949, is often cited as the first composition in music history that is independent of either Western or Eastern musical grammar. The piece premiered in 1953 with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, and launched the young composer onto a career which steadily gained in momentum over the next two decades.

His unique canon of work, a contemporary expression of the principles of traditional Chinese aesthetics, has had a momentous impact on the development of modern music in Asia and in post-colonial cultures. He exhorted young composers to study their own cultural heritage and warned: “If you don’t know where you came from, how do you know where you are going?” His students represent an international mix of accomplished composers, including the acclaimed Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Chen Yi and Bright Sheng. His vision for the music of the future, however, extends far beyond the preservation of any particular heritage. He foresaw a flourishing of creative output, benefitting from a “confluence” of many cultures, but grounded in an understanding of the history and traditions of each.

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Nina Barzegar is an Iranian composer and actress and is currently a DMA student in Composition at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also has a Bachelor of Piano Performance and a Master of Composition from the University of Tehran in Iran. As a composer, Barzegar writes music for various mediums, from concert music, film scores to tutorial piano compositions. Her compositions are inspired mainly by Iranian classical music, and she usually applies elements of Iranian music in her works.

Michi Wiancko is a versatile and highly imaginative composer, violinist, and collaborator, whose multifaceted creative projects and organizational work prioritize artistic discovery, as well as community resilience and social change.

Recent chamber music commissions include works for Boston Chamber Music Society, Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, Schubert Club, Accordo, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, East Coast Chamber Orchestra, Anne Akiko Meyers, Ecstatic Music Festival, Aizuri Quartet, Parker Quartet, Friction Quartet, and the Jupiter Quartet, to name a few. She has composed three operas: Murasaki’s Moon (2019), commissioned by Met Live Arts, Onsite opera, and American Lyric Theater; Arkana Aquarium (2021), commissioned by Experiments in Opera; and The Stream (2022) commissioned by Baldwin Wallace and the Cleveland Lyric Theater. Wiancko has also composed music for short and feature-length films, commercials, and for her own band, Kono Michi.

A passionate collaborator, she has been fortunate to work and tour with renowned artists from across a vast musical spectrum: Gabriela Lena Frank, Missy Mazzoli, PaviElle French, Vijay Iyer, Steve Reich, Emily Wells, Laurie Anderson, William Brittelle, Kaoru Watanabe, Qasim Naqvi, Mark Dancigers, Satoshi Takeishi, Mazz Swift, Sandeep Das, Jessie Montgomery, Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma, Matt Berninger, Dolio the Sleuth, and Rench. A member of Silkroad Ensemble and the East Coast Chamber Orchestra, she has also performed with The Knights, A Far Cry, Mark Morris Dance Group, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, and International Contemporary Ensemble.

Described by Gramophone Magazine as an “alluring soloist with heightened expressive and violinistic gifts,” Wiancko made her violin solo debuts with the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performed her recital debut in Weill Hall, and released a solo album of new works on New Amsterdam called Planetary Candidate, as well as an album of the complete violin solo works of Émile Sauret on Naxos.

A native of California, she holds degrees from CIM and Juilliard, where she studied with Donald Weilerstein and the late Robert Mann, respectively. In addition to her composition and performing career, Michi Wiancko is director and curator of Antenna Cloud Farm, a music festival, arts retreat, and community organization based in western Massachusetts.

Jon Reimer is a freelance theatre artist and educator. He holds a doctorate from the Joint Ph.D. program in Theatre and Drama at the University of California, San Diego and UC Irvine, and an M.F.A. in Directing from UC San Diego.

Born, raised, and educated in eastern Pennsylvania, U.S.A., Jon also earned a B.A. in Theatre Arts (Directing and Design) with a minor in Religion (Asian Studies) from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He is now based in Tokyo, Japan, where he lives with his husband and works as a drama teacher at the International School of the Sacred Heart.

Jon’s doctoral dissertation, “Proximal and Reminiscent Nostalgias: Queer Potentiality in Postwar Japan and the Post-Method American Theatre,” explores how an expanded understanding of nostalgia on postwar Japan can influence acting pedagogy and play analysis. Its chapters center around concepts of nostalgia, traditional and modern Japanese performance (particularly that of Yukio Mishima), active-listening-based acting techniques, and cross-cultural theatre. His current research is focused on inter- and intra-cultural Japanese performance and their relevance amongst international perspectives of performance.

Jon has served as a Visiting Professor in Theatre for the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego, an Adjunct Lecturer in the Japanese Program of the Department of Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages at San Diego State University where he taught Japanese Popular Culture, and a Guest Lecturer in Theatre at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he taught Japanese Theatre, Pan-Asian Theatre, Dramaturgy/Play Analysis, and Theatre & Society.

Accomplishments he is most proud of in his life so far: completing his dissertation during a global pandemic, converting to Judaism at the age of 16, moving to and living in Japan multiple times, marrying his wonderful husband Andy, and traveling the globe to better understand others’ cultures and customs.

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An invaluable new-music advocate and a preferred collaborator of composers like Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen” (New York Times), Grammy- and Emmy-winning pianist Gloria Cheng has long been devoted to creative collaborations with composers of our time. She has been a concerto soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez, and on its acclaimed Green Umbrella series under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Oliver Knussen. She has been a recitalist at the Ojai Music Festival (where she began her association with Boulez in 1984), Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Mendocino, and Chautauqua Music Festivals, and annually on Los Angeles’s Piano Spheres series. She has premiered and been the dedicatee of countless works that include John Williams’s Prelude and Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Dichotomie, and John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction for two pianos. In duo-recitals with the composers, she premiered Thomas Adès’s two-piano Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face and Terry Riley’s Cheng Tiger Growl Roar. Winner of the Best Instrumental Solo Performance (without orchestra) Grammy for her 2008 recording Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutosławski, she received a second nomination for her 2013 disc The Edge of Light: Messiaen/Saariaho. Her film project, MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano, featuring Bruce Broughton, Don Davis, Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino, Randy Newman, and John Williams, aired multiple times on PBS SoCal and won the 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy. Garlands for Steven Stucky was her 2018 star-studded CD tribute to the late composer by 32 of his friends and former students. Her education includes a BA in economics from Stanford University, a Woolley Scholarship for study in Paris, and graduate degrees in performance from UCLA and the University of Southern California, where her teachers included Aube Tzerko and John Perry. She teaches graduate seminars and chamber music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.

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Niloufar Shiri is a kamancheh player, composer, and improviser from Tehran, Iran. Her music weaves Iranian musical structure from the Radif with timbres, textures,  noise, techniques, and perspectives of contemporary music. She focuses particularly on the investigation of timbral and textural components, as well as the sonic capabilities of the kamancheh, a bowed string instrument. Her distinctive language and approach explore the radical self-transformation that comes with displacement and the strive to reconnect to her sense of self as a woman.

She is a graduate of Tehran Music Conservatory, UC San Diego, and UC Irvine. She is artist in residence at Pomona College at Claremont

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Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Aida Shirazi is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. In her works for solo instruments, voice, ensemble, orchestra, and electronics, Shirazi mainly focuses on timbre for organizing structures inspired by language and literature. Shirazi’s music has been featured at festivals and concert series, including Manifeste, Wien Modern, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Mostly Mozart, OutHear New Music Week, MATA, Marlboro Music Festival, Direct Current, Taproot, and Tehran Contemporary Music Festival. Her works are performed by Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Oerknal, Quince Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, among others.

Shirazi holds a Ph.D. in composition and music theory from the University of California, Davis. She has studied with Mika Pelo, Pablo Ortiz, Kurt Rohde, Yiğit Aydın, Tolga Yayalar, Onur Türkmen, and Hooshyar Khayam and participated in workshops and masterclasses by Kaija Saariaho, Mark Andre, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Riccardo Piacentini, and Füsun Köksal.

Shirazi is a 2022 graduate of IRCAM’s “Cursus Program in Composition and Computer Music.” She holds a B.M. in music composition and theory from Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey) and a B.A. in classical piano from Tehran University of Art (Iran.) She has studied santoor (traditional Iranian hammered dulcimer) with Parissa Khosravi Samani. Shirazi is a co-founder and co-artistic director of the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA.)

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Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang is the winner of the Rome Prize, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto for saxophone and orchestra, Xiaoxiang, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

Lei Liang was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert for the inaugural concert of the CONTACT! new music series. His ten portrait discs are released on Naxos, New World, Mode, BMOP/sound, Encounter, Albany and Bridge Records. As a scholar and conservationist of cultural traditions, he has edited and co-edited five books and editions, and published more than forty articles.

From 2013-2016, Lei Liang served as Composer-in-Residence at the Qualcomm Institute/Calit2 where his multimedia works preserve and reimagine cultural heritage through combining scientific research and advanced technology. He returned to the Institute as its first Research Artist-in-Residence in 2018.

Lei Liang’s recent works address issues of sex trafficking across the US-Mexican border (Cuatro Corridos), America’s complex relationship with gun and violence (Inheritance), and environmental awareness through the sonification of coral reefs.

Lei Liang is Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego where he served as chair of the composition area, acting chair of the Music Department, as well as chair of campus-wide committee on committees. His catalogue of more than a hundred works is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York).

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