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The artistry of internationally, renowned Sheng virtuoso Wu Wei reaches far beyond the traditional boundaries of his more than 3000-year-old Chinese instrument and brings it well into the 21st century.

The Sheng, a mouth organ, formed out of a bundle of bamboo reeds and cased in a metal bowl, sounds as the singing phoenix from a Chinese legend: silvery and fleeting as the wind.

Wu Wei’s radiant and transparent tone as well as the infinite possibilities offered by his instrument in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm, polyphony have led him to collaborating with many artists and ensembles in traditional, chamber or orchestral settings, improvising in solo concerts or with jazz big Bands, playing electronic music as well as taking part to minimal, baroque music performances.

Wu Wei’s desire to experiment with new sound and types of musical expression and his extraordinary capacity to create an individual world out of each performance are reflected in his collaborations with distinguished composers writing concertos for Sheng and orchestra especially for him: Huang Ruo (The color of yellow – 2007), Guus Janssen (Four Songs – 2008), Unsuk Chin (Su – 2009), Jukka Tiensuu (Teoton – 2015), Bernd Richard Deutsch (Phaenomena – 2019), Ondrej Adamek (Lost Prayer Book – 2019), Donghong Shin (Anecdote – 2019), Enjott Schneider (change – 2003 and several other concerti).

In the last decade, Wu Wei has performed with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic under Kent Nagano, the Seoul Philharmonic under Myung Whun Chung, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, BBC Symphony under Ilan Volkov, the Cabrillo Festival and Sao Paulo Symphony under Marin Alsop, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic under Susanna Mälkki, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden and Edo de Waart, Helsinki Philharmonic under Matthias Pintscher, ensembles such as the Holland Baroque, the Ensemble intercontemporain, the Atlas Ensemble and the NDR Big Band, and soloists like Guus Jansen (organ), Wang Li (Jew’s harp) or Pascal Contet (accordion).

He is regularly invited by international festivals such as the BBC Prom’s in London, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Edinburgh International Festival, Suntory Hall Summer Festival Tokyo, Dresdner Musikfestspiele, Festival Achtbrücken Cologne, Grafenegg Festival, Lincoln Center Festival New York.

Upcoming events include Wu Wei’s debuts with the New York Philharmonic and Sao Paulo Symphony orchestra in 2019,  the Chinese premiere in Beijing of Bernd Richard Deutsch’s Sheng concerto Phaenomena with the China NCPA Orchestra under Jia Lü, the world premiere of a new Sheng concerto by Enjott Schneider with the Taipei Chinese Orchestra and a tour to America and Canada with the Chinese NCPA Orchestra in 2020.

As a composer, Wu Wei has received commissions from the Fondation Royaumont, Musica Viva in Munich, the Hanse Culture Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony and several other institutions.

With Martin Stegner (viola) und Matthew McDonald (double bass), both members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, he founded the Wu Wei Trio which appears each season in the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie. As a founder of the Berlin based Ensemble Asianart, he likes to share transcultural programs with instrumentalists from all around the world. He is an ideal partner for interdisciplinary projects involving literature, dance, theatre, architecture.

Wu Wei has recorded for Deutsche Gramophon, Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Wergo, Pentatone and several of his CDs and DVDs have been distinguished by international Awards: International Classical Music Award 2015 and BBC Music Magazine Award 2015 for the Unsuk Chin concertos CD with Deutsche Gramophon, the German Critic Award in 2012 for the “AsianArt Ensemble” CD to note a few.

He also received the Best Sheng Soloist Award China in 2017, the Herald Angels Award 2011 at the International Festival Edinburgh, the Global Root German World Music Prize 2004 in Rudolstadt (Germany).

Wu Wei was born in 1970 in Gaoyou (China). He studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and started his career in 1993 as a Sheng soloist in China where he performed among others with the Chinese Music Orchestra Shanghaï. In 1995, he was selected by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and FNS (Friedrich Naumann Foundation) to take part in a four-year scholarship which brought him to Berlin, where he is still currently living. Since 2013, Wu Wei has been a Professor teaching the Sheng at the Shanghaï Conservatory of Music.

Visit Wu Wei’s Website

M.A. Tiesenga is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice delves into the intricate interplay of procedure and enaction within collaborative performance contexts, deftly shaping these dynamics through various idioms. Inspired by an affinity for the outdoors, Tiesenga draws analogies between these concepts and the art of cartography, illuminating the parallels between a map and a musical score. This exploration opens doors to musically navigate, inhabit, and realize theoretical terrains.

As a composer, visual artist, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and improviser, Tiesenga merges these creative identities by embracing the potential of expanded notation systems as an inquisition into new sonic possibilities. Their lifelong passion for collage, maps, puzzles, and asemic languages fuels an enchantment with encoding and decoding musical territories, allowing lexical approaches to transform into palpable expressions. Within their artistic vision, Tiesenga seeks to convey inner worlds where protocols and rules converge with intuition and mystique.

Tiesenga approaches sound-making as a collaborative exchange – central to Tiesenga’s artistic inspiration is the creation of works that cultivate connection and reciprocity in contemporary music. Their understanding of the musical score as both an art object and a notated intention for performance/action facilitates the construction of modular, living landscapes that reflect the people and spaces present. Graphic scores, for Tiesenga, serve as intermediaries bridging Karreideas and actions, visual and aural experiences, and the externalization of internal processes. As an ardent experimentalist, they find inspiration and excitement in exploring improvisation and indeterminacy, elevating and weaving performers’ agency by inviting personal interpretation into the fabric of a composition. Informed by their own extensive performance practice, Tiesenga is committed to crafting works that engage both performers and audiences alike to see their environment a little differently.

Tiesenga’s compositional collaborations include work with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Wild Up, Théâtre Musical Tokyo, Long Beach Opera, Kunsthalle for Music, SPEAK Percussion, Dog Star Orchestra, Ensemble Supermusique, and ensembles at the Eastman School of Music, New England Conservatory, California Institute for the Arts, Yale University, and Darmstädter Ferienkurse. 

M.A. Tiesenga holds an MFA in Composition – Experimental Sound Practices and an MFA in Experimental Animation with a Concentration in Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, where they studied with Michael Pisaro, Sara Roberts, Eyvind Kang, Alexander Stewart, Pia Borg, and Tom Leeser. Previously, Tiesenga earned a Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music in saxophone performance under the guidance of Dr. Chien-Kwan Lin.

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Joshua Nathan Rubin served as the Program Director and then Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble from 2011-2018, where he oversaw the creative direction of more than one hundred concerts per season in the United States and abroad. As a clarinetist, the New York Times has praised him as, “incapable of playing an inexpressive note.”

Joshua has worked closely with many of the prominent composers and performers of our time, including George Crumb, Matana Roberts, Alvin Lucier, David Lang, Chaya Czernowin, Du Yun, Christian Wolff, Cory Smythe, George Lewis, Steven Schick, Kaija Saariaho, Craig Taborn, Pauline Oliveros, Okkyung Lee, Nathan Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, John Zorn, and Mario Davidovsky. Joshua can be heard on recordings from the Nonesuch, Kairos, New Focus, Mode, Cedille, Naxos, Bridge, New Amsterdam, and Tzadik labels. His album There Never is No Light, available on the Tundra label, highlights music that uses technology to capture the human engagement of the performer and the listener.

This season he will perform on modern and historical clarinets in New York with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Teatro Nuovo, the American Composers Orchestra, at Harvard University, in Los Angeles with Wild Up, Monday Evening Concerts, Tesserae Baroque, at the Ojai Music Festival with Rhiannon Giddens, and in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Berlin, Miami, Boston, Houston, Kansas City, San Diego, and Chicago.

His clarinet studies were mentored by Lawrence McDonald, Mark Nuccio, and Steven Cohen. He served on the faculty of the Banff Music Centre’s Ensemble Evolution summer program from 2016-2019. Rubin is on the faculty of soundSCAPE Festival and Ensemble Evolution. He serves on the faculty of the College of the Performing Arts at The New School and is Artist-in-Residence at University of California Santa Cruz in 2024.

Joshua holds degrees in Biology and Clarinet from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and a Master’s degree from the Mannes School of Music.

His passion for technology in arts led Joshua to develop LUIGI, management software that is available to ensembles and other arts organizations who value transparency and collective management, as well as his ongoing work to make electronic music technologies easier to use for performers and composers. He maintains an artistic presence in New York and Los Angeles.

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Ross Karre (he/him b. 1983 in Michigan) is a percussionist, filmmaker, and producer based in Oberlin, OH and New York City. He is the associate professor of percussion at Oberlin Conservatory. After completing his Doctorate in Music at UCSD with Steven Schick, Ross formalized his visual studies with a Master of Fine Arts. He is a percussionist for the International Contemporary Ensemble where he was artistic director from 2016 to 2022. He has performed regularly with red fish blue fish, Third Coast Percussion (Chicago), and Yarn/Wire (NYC). He has performed at major festivals all over the world, including the Mostly Mozart Festival (NYC), the Holland Festival (Netherlands), Ojai Festival (CA), LA Phil Noon to Midnight, Lucerne Festival, Taipei International Percussion Festival, Big Ears (TN), MONA FOMA (Tasmania), Diskotek (Greenland), and Music Today Biennial (Brazil). 10.67 Cycles, Karre’s solo album featuring the music of Ash Fure and Pauline Oliveros, is available on Bandcamp. His video design work has been presented all over the world in prestigious venues such as the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen Duisburg, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, BBC Scotland, Western Front, MCA Chicago, the Park Avenue Armory, the Kennedy Center, The Kitchen, Roulette Intermedium, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and the National Gallery of Art. Karre’s archival documentary and documentation work preserves unique moments in the creative processes of Claire Chase, Pauline Oliveros, Vijay Iyer, Steven Schick, Matthias Kaul, Fritz Hauser, and creative collaborations of Third Coast Percussion, Yarn/Wire, ICEensemble, Mount Tremper Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Oberlin Percussion Group.

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Two-time GRAMMY®-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across multiple genres, prompting The New York Times to write, “Woods is an artist rooted in classical music, but whose cello is a vehicle that takes him, and his concertgoers, on wide-ranging journeys.” Woods has served on the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at The University of Southern California since 2022 and was appointed to the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music in 2024.

Among the highlights of his 2024-2025 season, Woods performs in the world premiere of Nathalie Joachim’s new cello concerto, Had to Be, at Spoleto Festival USA, later performing its New York premiere in his debut with the New York Philharmonic. He makes his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut in the world premiere of a new cello concerto by Julia Adolphe. A core member of the music collective Wild Up, Woods is featured as soloist in the group’s Eastman Vol. 4: The Holy Presence, released June 2024 on New Amsterdam Records, and was nominated alongside the group for a 2023 GRAMMY® Award.

During the 2023-2024 season, Woods brought his GRAMMY®-nominated, autobiographical tour-de-force Difficult Grace to San Diego and Philadelphia, following the world premiere at 92NY and performances at UCLA and Chicago’s Harris Theater. Difficult Grace was released as an album on Cedille Records in 2023 and nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Highlights of last season include performances with Hilary Hahn at Konzerthaus Dortmund in Germany and touring a new version of John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered with American Modern Opera Company (AMOC).

In addition to his post at The University of Southern California, Woods serves on the artist faculty of the Music Academy of the West each summer. He holds degrees from Brooklyn College and Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, as well as a PhD from the University of Huddersfield.

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Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over 25 years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise and avant-garde contexts.

Taborn has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvised, new music and electronic music including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Dave Holland, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Steve Coleman, David Torn, Chris Potter, William Parker, Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis, Nicole Mitchell, Susie Ibarra, Ikue Mori, Carl Craig, Dave Douglas, Meat Beat Manifesto, Dan Weiss, Chris Lightcap, Gerald Cleaver, and Rudresh Manhathappa.

Taborn is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Avenging Angel), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), an electronic project (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts Quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts) and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith as well as piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus) and Cory Smythe. He is also a member of the instrumental electronic art-pop group Golden Valley is Now and performs frequently on solo electronics. Taborn lives in Brooklyn.

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Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. Hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as, “one of our supreme living virtuosos, not just of percussion but of any instrument,” he has championed contemporary percussion music for nearly 50 years, and in 2014 was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.

Steven Schick is music director emeritus of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, serving as its music director from 2006–22, and the artistic director of the Breckenridge Music Festival. He has guest conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Ensemble Modern, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble. He was artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (2010–18) and directed programs at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity from 2009–19, the last three as co-artistic director, with Claire Chase, of the Summer Classical Music program. He was the music director of the 2015 Ojai Music Festival.

In 2020, Schick won the Ditson Conductor’s Award, given by Columbia University for commitment to the performance of American music. Schick’s publications include a book, The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams; and numerous recordings including the 2010 Percussion Works of Iannis Xenakis and its companion The Complete Early Percussion Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen in 2014 (Mode). The latter received Germany’s award for the best new music release of 2015. 

Steven Schick is distinguished professor of music and the inaugural holder of the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego.

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Pianist Cory Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including multi-instrumentalist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, violinist Hilary Hahn, and transdisciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own “perplexingly perfect” (The Wire) music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader). Smythe has been featured at the Newport Jazz, Wien Modern, and Darmstadt festivals, as well as at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, where he premiered new work created in collaboration with composer-improvisors Peter Evans and Craig Taborn. He has received commissions from Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Wiener Festwochen, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which he is a longtime member. Smythe’s recent critically acclaimed albums on the Pyroclastic label have been made with the support of The Shifting Foundation. He has received a Grammy award for his work with Ms. Hahn and a 2022 Herb Alpert Award in music.

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Aotearoa New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) brings vibrant energy, ceaseless curiosity, and a profound sense of openness to her music. Lockwood’s lifelong fascination with the visceral effects of sound in our environments and through our bodies—the way sounds unfold and their myriad “life spans”—serves as the focal point for works ranging from concert music to performance art to multimedia installations.

In recent years Lockwood and her music have received widespread attention, including a Columbia University Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert, a feature article in The New York Times, a SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, a documentary film by director Sam Green, and most recently, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her recent collaborative works Into the Vanishing Point with the ensemble Yarn/Wire and Becoming Air with avant-garde trumpeter Nate Wooley were released on Black Truffle Records to great acclaim. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tectonics Athens Festival, Signale Graz, Counterflows International Festival of Music and Art, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and many others.

Lockwood has received commissions from numerous ensembles and solo performers, including Bang On A Can, baritone Thomas Buckner, pianists Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, and Jennifer Hymer, the Holon Scratch Orchestra, Essential Music, Yarn/Wire, and Issue Project Room.

Her music is recorded on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Recital, Harmonia Mundi, CRI, Superior Viaduct, Black Truffle, New World, Gruenrekorder, and Moving Furniture Records. Hearing Studies, co-authored with Ruth Anderson, was published by Open Space in 2021.

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Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983) is a Kanaka Maoli composer, multimedia artist, curator, scholar, and educator. Lanzilotti’s practice explores radical indigenous contemporaneity, integrating community engagement into the heart of projects. By world-building through multimedia installation works and nontraditional concert experiences/musical interventions, Lanzilotti’s works activate imagination around new paths forward in language sovereignty, water sovereignty, land stewardship, and respect. Uplifting others by crafting projects that support both local communities and economy, the work inspires hope to continue.

Lanzilotti was honored to be a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for with eyes the color of time (string orchestra), which the Pulitzer committee called, “a vibrant composition . . . that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.”

Recently a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation’s SHIFT – Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts awardee, Lanzilotti has received additional distinguished fellowships & residencies through The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Casa Wabi, Bogliasco Foundation, the Merwin Conservancy, the McKnight Visiting Composer Residency Program, and the MacGeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.

As a composer, Lanzilotti’s works are characterized by expansive explorations of timbre. These works have been premiered at international festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), Thailand International Composition Festival, and Dots+Loops—Australia’s post-genre music and arts series. Lanzilotti has written new works for ensembles such as Roomful of Teeth, ETHEL (with guest Allison Logins-Hull), and Sō Percussion. Additionally, Lanzilotti is part of the network of musicians / artists in the Wandelweiser collective.

Lanzilotti’s new multimedia work, the sky in our hands, our hands in the sky, is currently on tour through 2026, having premiered at The Noguchi Museum in Spring 2024. The tour continues to the Cranbrook Art Museum (October 9, 2024–January 12, 2025), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 2–May 18, 2025), the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison (September 8–December 23, 2025), and the Honolulu Museum of Art (February 13–July 26, 2026).

As a recording artist, Lanzilotti has played on albums from Björk’s Vulnicura Live and Joan Osborne’s Love and Hate, to David Lang’s anatomy theater. Lanzilotti has premiered many new works including Wayfinder—a viola concerto by Dai Fujikura inspired by Polynesian wayfinding. in manus tuas—Lanzilotti’s solo viola album debut—was featured in Steve Smith’s Log Journal Playlist (Live life out Loud), Bandcamp’s Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2019, and The Boston Globe’s Top 10 classical albums of 2019, and was called “an entrancing new album” by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross.

As a performer, projects include: performing Dai Fujikura’s Wayfinder Concerto as a soloist with the Nagoya Philharmonic, a project that uplifts native knowledge and indigenous intuition while encouraging courageous and active listening; performing with object instruments created by Adam Morford (metal), Toshiko Takaezu (ceramic), and others; and improvising as a member of The Yes &. Lanzilotti’s curatorial work extends from museum collaborations such as the currently touring Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, to institutional commissioning at EMPAC as the Curator of Music.

As an educator, Lanzilotti has been on the faculty at New York University, University of Northern Colorado (Director and founder of the experimental UNCOmmon Ensemble and Asst. Professor of Viola), and University of Hawaiʻi—Mānoa in both composition and viola. Additionally, Lanzilotti createdShaken Not Stuttered, a free online resource demonstrating extended techniques for strings.

Written publications include contributions to a new monograph honoring the life and work of Toshiko Takaezu published by Yale University Press, and to Tuning Calder’s Clouds, edited by Vic Brooks and Jennifer Burris (Calder Foundation and Athénée Press)—the first book to explore the artistic, technological, and political intersections of Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling. Other contributions to books include featured works: the work beyond the accident of time (2019)—honoring Noguchi’s never-fully-realized Bell Tower for Hiroshima (1951)—is included in Walking From Scores, a bilingual anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental music and performance. “Lanzilotti’s score brings us together across the world in remembrance, through the commitment of shared sonic gestures.” (Cities & Health)

Dr. Lanzilotti is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Yale School of Music, and Manhattan School of Music. In addition, Lanzilotti was an orchestral fellow in the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and New World Symphony, participated in the Lucerne Festival Academy under Pierre Boulez, and was the original violist in the Lucerne Festival Alumni Ensemble. Mentors include Hiroko Primrose, Peter Slowik, Jesse Levine, Martin Bresnick, Wilfried Strehle, Karen Ritscher, and Reiko Füting.

Visit Leilehua Lanzilotti’s Website

Tania León (b. Havana, Cuba) is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 2022, she was named a recipient of the 45th Annual Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements. In 2023, she was awarded the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University. Most recently, León became the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s next Composer-in-Residence—a post she will hold for two seasons, beginning in September 2023. She will also hold Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair for its 2023-2024 season.

Recent premieres include works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Grossman Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Modern Ensemble, Jennifer Koh’s project Alone Together, and The Curtis Institute. Appearances as guest conductor include Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, Gewandhausorchester, Orquesta Sinfónica de Guanajuato, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuba, among others. Upcoming commissions feature a work for the League of American Orchestras, and a work for Claire Chase, flute, and The Crossing Choir with text by Rita Dove.

A founding member and first Music Director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, León instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, co-founded the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas Festivals, was New Music Advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and is the founder/Artistic Director of Composers Now, a presenting, commissioning and advocacy organization for living composers. Honors include the New York Governor’s Lifetime Achievement, inductions into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowship awards from ASCAP Victor Herbert Award and The Koussevitzky Music and Guggenheim Foundations, among others. She also received a proclamation for Composers Now by New York City Mayor, and theMadWoman Festival Award in Music (Spain).

León has received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Colgate University, Oberlin, SUNY Purchase College, and The Curtis Institute of Music, and served as U.S. Artistic Ambassador of American Culture in Madrid, Spain. A CUNY Professor Emerita, she was awarded a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, Chamber Music America’s 2022 National Service Award, and Harvard University’s 2022 Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award. In 2023, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired Tania’s León’s archive.

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Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she has since cultivated an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, and performance art.

Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised piece Water On the Bridge. Similarly, Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) uses a shared-circuit synthesizer to articulate relationships between the human and cello body. RESIDUUM (2022), a short experimental film for Cello and Trash, pairs Kleijn’s cello with large amounts of mylar, plastic bottles and soda cans. An ongoing collaboration with Aliya Ultan, the film received its premiere at NYC’s Roulette Intermedium April 2023. Her collaborations with composer Daniel Dehaan and the Chicago-based performance art duo Industry of the Ordinary resulted in the widely publicized Intelligence in the Human-Machine (2014), a duet between Kleijn’s cello and her own brainwaves which Time magazine called “a balancing act for Kleijn’s whole body.”

Kleijn presents many of her conceptual projects as co-constructions with the performer(s) or audience, calling upon them to collectively negotiate a way forward. Inspired by Civil War–era drum commands, her composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), performed by Ensemble Dal Niente at Big Ears Festival, tasks two spatially separated ensembles with reacting to one another based on each other’s rhythms. Alternately, Kleijn’s silent video project Screenplay in 4 (2021) explores touch as a vector for human connection and its new implications in pandemic-enforced solitude.

An active musician in classical and contemporary classical spheres, Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble. She has performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Hague Philharmonic, and the Chicago Sinfonietta, and presented her solo multimedia presentations at the Library of Congress, North Carolina Performing Arts, and the Chicago Humanities Festival. Kleijn’s 2016 world premiere performance of Dai Fujikura’s cello concerto at Lincoln Center was released by SONY Japan. As an improviser, she has collaborated with musicians like Bill MacKay, Ken Vandermark, Macie Stewart, Joe McPhee, Claire Rousay, Caroline Davis, Damon Locks, and Du Yun.

Kleijn is a Drag City recording artist, releasing STIR with Bill MacKay (2019), Momentum 5: Stammer (triptych) with Ken Vandermark (2021), An Ayler Xmas with Mars Williams (2017),  and SINE NOMINE with Mark Feldman (2022).

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Undeniably our generation’s “leading new-music foursome,” the GRAMMY®-nominated JACK Quartet’s “stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles” (The New York Times). Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK Quartet celebrates their landmark 20th anniversary season in 2024-2025, embarking on their third decade as a pioneering string quartet synchronized in their mission to create an international community through transformative, mind-broadening experiences and close listening. Founded in 2005, the ensemble operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of 20th and 21st century string quartet music, delving deeply into challenging new compositions and musical practices outside the classical mainstream. Through intimate, long-standing relationships with many of today’s most creative voices, JACK Quartet has a prolific commissioning and recording catalog, has been nominated for three GRAMMY® Awards, and is the 2024 recipient of Chamber Music America’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.

Among the highlights of the 2024-2025 season, JACK Quartet officially marks their 20th anniversary with a celebratory concert at 92NY in New York City, featuring the world premiere of a new JACK-commissioned work by Anthony Cheung; the U.S. premiere of JACK commission Juri Seo’s Three Imaginary Chansons at Lincoln Center; and the world premiere of Ellen Fullman’s Energy Archive at the Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival 2025 in Pittsburgh. In addition, JACK Quartet celebrates their long association with composer John Zorn with the release of Zorn’s complete string quartets on Tzadik Records, as well as an album release concert at Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium.

International engagements include JACK Quartet’s annual marathon of performances at Wigmore Hall in the UK and appearances at Pierre Boulez Saal and Konzerthaus Berlin in Germany, along with appearances in Toronto, Barcelona, and Lugano and Winterthur, Switzerland. The season also brings the European premiere of Natacha Diels’ Beautiful Trouble at Konzerthaus Berlin.

The JACK Quartet embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform with, yielding a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. Through their successful nonprofit model, JACK Quartet has both self-commissioned and been commissioned to create new works with artists such as Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, and Caroline Shaw, with upcoming and recent premieres including works by John Luther Adams, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Liza Lim, Tyshawn Sorey, Amy Williams, and John Zorn. The world’s top composers choose JACK because of their singular dedication to innovation and experimentation.

According to Musical America, “many of their recordings are must-haves, for anyone interested in new music.” They have been nominated for multiple GRAMMY® Awards, the most recent being their albums of music by John Luther Adams—both were nominated in the 2022 and 2023 Best Ensemble Performance category. Other albums feature music by Helmut Lachenmann, Catherine Lamb, Du Yun, Nick Dunston, Zosha di Castri, Iannis Xenakis, and upcoming releases of the complete quartets of Elliott Carter and John Zorn.

Having long observed how the social, cultural, and economic realities of institutional access disproportionately and unfairly exclude many people, JACK Studio offers composers paid opportunities to develop new work, hear their music performed by JACK Quartet, consult with mentors in the field, and receive recorded documentation. JACK Studio receives hundreds of applications each season and selects up to 15 composers or artists for two distinct opportunities: Two-Year Residencies, offering a longer-term relationship with JACK Quartet, and Reading Sessions, in which recipients have existing works for string quartet read by JACK Quartet.

More than 40 composers have worked with JACK Quartet through JACK Studio thus far, hailing from Argentina, Belarus, Canada, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, South Africa, Syria, and the United States. Their projects have been performed by JACK Quartet at venues including TIME:SPANS, Central Park, the Lucerne Festival, MoMA PS1, and Mannes School of Music, in addition to being recorded for professional releases. Commissioned artists have been paired with musical mentors including Marcos Balter, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Georg Friedrich Haas, Donnacha Dennehy, Claire Chase, and Nadia Sirota.

JACK Quartet has performed to critical acclaim at venues such as Carnegie Hall (USA), Lincoln Center (USA), Berlin Philharmonie (Germany), Wigmore Hall (United Kingdom), Muziekgebouw (Netherlands), The Louvre (France), Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Suntory Hall (Japan), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexico), and Teatro Colón (Argentina). Among their honors, they have earned an Avery Fisher Career Grant and Fromm Music Foundation Prize, been selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year, and received Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA’s Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming.

JACK Quartet makes their home in New York City, where they are the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music at The New School and provides mentorship to Mannes’s Cuker and Stern Graduate String Quartet. They also teach each summer at New Music on the Point, a contemporary chamber music festival in Vermont for young performers and composers. JACK has long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall and spring.

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Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice spans formats, including performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multi-channel audio installations, recording, and documentary. Many of Ibarra’s projects are based in cultural and environmental preservation: she has worked to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, such musika katatubo from the North and South Philippine islands; her sound research advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters; and she collaborates with The Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage with sustainable music practices and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities.

She is a recipient of the Foundation For Contemporary Arts Award in Music/ Sound (2022), a National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship (2020); United States Artists Fellowship in Music (2019); the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship (2018); and a TED Senior Fellowship (2014). 

Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Zildjian Drum Artist.

Her album, Talking Gong ( New Focus Recordings 2021), features soloists and ensemble members Claire Chase ( bass, alto , flute and piccolo) and Alex Peh ( piano) , with its title piece commissioned by SUNY New Paltz when Ibarra was Davenport Composer in Residence 2018. The album is inspired by traditional Filipino southern gong music, Maguindanaon kulintang music and by birdsongs of the region.

Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change (2020) is a collaboration with glaciologist, geographer, and climate scientist Dr. Michele Koppes, which maps water rhythms from source to sink. Ibarra’s composition is derived from field recordings of five global watersheds, including the Greenland ice sheet and glacier-fed rivers of the Himalayas. Water Rhythms is an acoustic story of human entanglements with a changing climate and landscape. The premiere of Water Rhythms was presented by Fine Acts Foundation and TED at Jack Poole Plaza, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and Innisfree Gardens, Millbrook, NY (2020). It has also been shown at The Countdown Summit, Edinburgh, Scotland (2021); as part of Nothing Makes Itself at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, Korea (2021); and as a multi-channel sound installation at Fridman Gallery, Beacon, NY (2021) and the San Francisco Exploratorium (2022).

Ibarra’s piece Fragility Etudes, was a commissioned film by Asia Society Triennial 2021 We Do Not Dream Alone. These compositions are rhythmic studies for solos and ensemble which reflects humanity’s interdependence.  Ibarra explores conduction, polyrhythms and concepts from the physics of glass.  Fragility Etudes was filmed in residency and premiered at MASSMoCA in live performance 2021. The film is directed by collaborating multimedia artist Yuka C. Honda. September 2022 Ibarra conducted multi-ensemble Fragility Etudes in Zamane Festival Morocco. She was commissioned for a new work for percussion in which she created RITWAL solo percussion Susie Ibarra, for the UNDRUM Festival produced by Architek Percussion and Suoni Per Il Popolo 2021 for video which premiered in June 2021.

As a producer, Ibarra collaborates with Splice to create sound packs based in environmental sounds, traditional musical cultures, and her own extended percussion language. Sounds of the Drâa Valley Morocco is a sound pack featuring six traditional ensembles and soloists from South Saharan Morocco (2022). Ibarra has also collaborated with composer and bassist Richard Reed Parry on two sound packs and a new album of compositions focused on breath cycles and heart beats, Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (OFFAIR Records, 2022).

Visit Susie Ibarra’s Website

Praised by The Chicago Tribune as “minutely crafted” and “utterly lovely,” The New York Times as “whimsical” and “surreal,” and The Washington Post as “dark and deeply poetic,” the music of composer Marcos Balter (b.1974, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance.

Past honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow), two Chamber Music America awards, as well as commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Chicago Symphony Music Now, The Crossing, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Recent performances include those at Carnegie Hall, Köln Philharmonie, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Wigmore Hall, ArtLab at Harvard University, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Hall, Teatro Amazonas, Sala São Paulo, Park Avenue Armory, Miller Theater, Villa Medici, Teatro de Madrid, Bâtiment de Forces Motrices de Genève, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. Recent festival appearances include those at Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival, Ecstatic Music Festival, Acht Brücken, Aldeburgh Music Festival, Aspen, Frankfurter Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and Banff Music Festival. Past collaborators include the rock band Deerhoof, dj King Britt and Alarm Will Sound, yMusic and Paul Simon, Claire Chase and the San Francisco Symphony, the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Orquestra Experimental da Amazonas Filarmonica, American Contemporary Music Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, and conductors Karina Canellakis, Susanna Malkki, Matthias Pintscher, and Steven Schick.

His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recording, Parlour Tapes+, Oxingale Records, and Navona Records.

He is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, having previously held professorships at the University of California San Diego, Montclair State University, and Columbia College Chicago, visiting professorships at the University of Pittsburgh, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania, and a pre-doctoral fellowship at Lawrence University. He currently lives in Manhattan, New York.

Visit Marcos Balter’s Website