Tag: 2016 Artists

Leila Adu is a New Zealand composer of Ghanaian descent who has composed for the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Brentano String Quartet, So Percussion, Gamelan Padhang Moncar, and Orchestra Wellington. Based in Brooklyn, she is currently a Princeton doctoral fellow and also teaches music to prisoners at Sing Sing Correctional Facility as a faculty member of Musicambia – music for social change. (more…)

Jean-Baptiste Barrière was born in Paris in 1958. He has studied music, art history, philosophy, and mathematical logic. He made a career at IRCAM/Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where he started as a researcher in 1981, before becoming a director of musical research, education, and finally production. In 1998, he left IRCAM to concentrate on his own composition and multimedia projects. (more…)

Julia Bullock, equally at home with concert repertoire and opera, has been hailed for her versatile talent. This season, she appeared as soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle, the New World Symphony with Christian Reif, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Alice Tully Hall, and in recitals at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Kennedy Center, to name a few. In November, she sang the lead role in the Berlin Philharmonic’s Orchestra Academy performance of Saariaho’s La Passion de Simone, directed by Peter Sellars, which she now reprises at the Ojai Festival. (more…)

Cambalache is the direct result of Los Angeles musicians, community workers, and artists creating a space and cultivating relationships with Jarocho musicians and community workers in Veracruz, Mexico. Their primary concept of organizing and exchange comes from the “el fandango” model which is: building community through participatory music. In January of 2003, Los Angeles music group Quetzal, along with a dozen other musicians, visual artists, writers, and community workers from LA visited Xalapa, Veracruz to help organize and form part of the first encuentro Chicana/o/Jarocha/o. This dialogue, from which a myriad of projects, recordings, writings, performances, and relationships have evolved, extended that concept of el fandango to a transnational network of artists, community workers in Veracruz, and the Chicano and Mexican immigrant communities in Los Angeles.

Cesar Castro lead vocals, requinto jarocho, jarana, quijada
Xochi Flores vocals, jarana tercera, zapateado
Chuy Sandoval vocals, jarana segunda, jarana tercera, pandeiro
Juan Perez bass

Noted for her vibrant performances in a wide diversity of musical styles, Joana Carneiro has attracted considerable attention as one of the most outstanding young conductors working today. In 2009, she was named music director of Berkeley Symphony, succeeding Kent Nagano and becoming only the third music director in the 40-year history of the orchestra. She also currently serves as official guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra, working there at least four weeks every year. In January 2014 she was appointed principal conductor of the Orquesta Sinfonica Portuguesa.
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The Calder Quartet, called “outstanding” and “superb” by the New York Times, performs a broad range of repertoire at an exceptional level, always striving to channel and fulfill the composer’s vision. Already the choice of many leading composers to perform their works – including Christopher Rouse, Terry Riley and Thomas Adès – the group’s distinctive approach is exemplified by a musical curiosity brought to everything they perform, whether it’s Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, or sold-out rock shows with bands like The National or The Airborne Toxic Event. Winners of the 2014 Avery Fisher Career Grant, they are known for the discovery, commissioning, recording and mentoring of some of today’s best emerging composers (over 25 commissioned works to date). (more…)

Through his activities as a conductor, vocalist, pianist, and composer, Eric Dudley enjoys a busy schedule of performances in the United States and abroad. After distinguished tenures as assistant conductor for both the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Princeton Symphony, he recently appeared as principal conductor for the 2015 Bendigo Festival of Exploratory Music in Australia. Among his latest guest conducting engagements are the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, Hartford Symphony Orchestra (CT), Adelphi Chamber Orchestra (NJ), TENET Vocal Ensemble (NY), Signal Ensemble (NY), International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and the Melbourne International Arts Festival. He served for four years on the part-time faculty of Mannes College in New York as director of the Mannes Prep Philharmonic and The New School Chorus, and begins his next appointment as music director of the San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra in the 2016–17 concert season.
As a founding member of Roomful of Teeth, Dudley is a performer on the group’s 2014 Grammy Award–winning debut album; their latest album, Render, was nominated in the same category in 2016 and includes one of his compositions. For eight seasons, Dudley has also been a tenor in the Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Wall Street, where in addition to his role as an ensemble and solo singer, he has prepared the choir for performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performed as a pianist and harpsichordist on Trinity’s chamber series, and served as assistant and guest conductor for a number of the Trinity Choir and Baroque Orchestra’s concert offerings. His own works have received premieres by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, Roomful of Teeth, Quey Percussion, and through a residency grant from Meet the Composer and the New England Foundation for the Arts. Born in Canada and raised in Connecticut, Dudley received his bachelor’s degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, and earned master’s and doctorate degrees in orchestral conducting as the recipient of the Dean’s Prize from Yale.

With her powerful, nuanced voice and authentic style, Egyptian singer and composer Dina El Wedidi (دينا الوديدي) has spent the past six years carving out her place in the Egyptian music scene. While studying oriental languages at the University of Cairo, Dina joined El Warsha Theatre Troupe, exploring Egyptian folklore and performing in such unlikely places as a Cairo prison, and later she performed classical Egyptian and Arabic songs with the Habayebna band. These experiences pushed Dina to sing in many styles, and were the impetus for her to begin composing her own songs. In 2011, she took the fundamental next step and formed her own band; from here her success has soared. (more…)

Born in Grand Rapids, MI, flutist Camilla Hoitenga studied in the United States, England, and France and eventually made her home in Germany, where she worked several years with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Following her own “path less traveled” she cultivates a repertoire ranging from Bach and Schubert to concertos written for her by Kaija Saariaho, Pèter Koeszeghy or Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi; from Stockhausen’s theatrical Zungenspitzentanz for piccolo to Jean-Baptiste Barrière’s state-of-the-art pieces for live video and electronics to improvisations and recitals with pianist and sound-artist Taavi Kerikmäe. Whether accompanied by orchestras such as the Chicago Symphony or the London Philharmonic or playing alone on stage, Hoitenga captivates her audiences with intense performances, acclaimed by the press as “brilliant,” “alluring,” and “ideally transparent and precise.”

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It’s been 15 years since Los Jornaleros del Norte began singing about and for the worker and immigrant community in the United States. It was an immigration raid at a corner of day laborers in the City of Industry, California, which was the impetus for the creation of music and poetry of resistance for them. On that day, a day laborer and musician, Omar Sierra, wrote “El Corrido de Industry” which recounted the events of the raid. This inspired others to share their stories through song and with the help of Pablo Alvarado, founding member and Director of NDLON (National Day Labor Organizing Network), day laborers began to write, sing, and share their struggles and hopes through music and poetry. Since then, they’ve become the soundtrack for the day laborer and immigrant community’s struggle for visibility, inclusion, and equality. Their songs are a historical document of the experiences of the migrant worker community in the United States.

Dr. Susan McClary (Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University; Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA) focuses her research on the cultural criticism of music. Her books include Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality; Georges Bizet: Carmen; Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form; Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal; Reading Music; Desire and Pleasure in 17th-Century Music; and Structures of Feeling in 17th-Century Expressive Culture. McClary received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1995, and her work has been translated into at least 20 languages. She is now completing a book titled The Passions of Peter Sellars: The Staging of Music Drama.

Roomful of Teeth is a Grammy Award–winning vocal project dedicated to mining the expressive potential of the human voice. Through study with masters from singing traditions the world over, the eight-voice ensemble continually expands its vocabulary of singing techniques and, through an ongoing commissioning process, forges a new repertoire without borders. Founded in 2009 by Brad Wells, the group gathers annually at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, MA, where they’ve studied Tuvan throat singing, yodeling, belting, Inuit throat singing, Korean P’ansori, Georgian singing, Sardinian cantu a tenore, Hindustani music, and Persian classical singing with some of the world’s top performers and teachers. Commissioned composers include Rinde Eckert, Judd Greenstein, Merrill Garbus (of tUnE-yArDs), Anna Clyne, Fred Hersch, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Michael Harrison, Sam Amidon, and Ted Hearne.
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About the YOLA at HOLA Symphonic Winds
Through YOLA, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its community partners provide free instruments, intensive music training, and academic support to students from underserved neighborhoods, empowering them to become vital citizens, leaders and agents of change. Inspired by El Sistema – the Venezuelan music education system that nurtured the LA Phil’s Music Director Gustavo Dudamel – YOLA has grown to serve more than 700 students at three sites across Los Angeles since its founding in 2007.

Comprised of 35 students ages 12 – 18, the YOLA at HOLA Symphonic Winds are founding members of YOLA at Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA). Currently, in its seventh year, the site at HOLA serves students ages 6 – 18 with intensive after-school orchestral instruction five days a week. A holistic approach fosters a sense of community and provides students with the opportunity to take advantage of HOLA’s exceptional programs and resource.