The acclaimed musician Rhiannon Giddens uses her art to excavate the past and reveal bold truths about our present. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens co-founded the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops. She most recently won a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album for They’re Calling Me Home, and was also nominated for Best American Roots Song for “Avalon” from They’re Calling Me Home, which she made with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. Giddens is now a two-time winner and eight-time Grammy nominee for her work as a soloist and collaborator.
They’re Calling Me Home was released by Nonesuch last April and has been widely celebrated by the NY Times, NPR Music, NPR, Rolling Stone, People, Associated Press and far beyond, with No Depression deeming it “a near perfect album…her finest work to date.” Recorded over six days in the early phase of the pandemic in a small studio outside of Dublin, Ireland – where both Giddens and Turrisi live – They’re Calling Me Home manages to effortlessly blend the music of their native and adoptive countries: America, Italy, and Ireland. The album speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical “call home” of death.
Giddens’s lifelong mission is to lift people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been erased, and to work toward a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins. Pitchfork has said of her work, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration,” and Smithsonian Magazine calls her “an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and black.”
Among her many diverse career highlights, Giddens has performed for the Obamas at the White House and received an inaugural Legacy of Americana Award from Nashville’s National Museum of African American History in partnership with the Americana Music Association. Her critical acclaim includes in-depth profiles by CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR’s Fresh Air, among many others.
Giddens was featured in Ken Burns’s Country Music series, which aired on PBS, where she spoke about the African American origins of country music. She is also a member of the band Our Native Daughters with three other black female banjo players, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah, and co-produced their debut album Songs of Our Native Daughters (2019), which tells stories of historic black womanhood and survival.
Giddens is in the midst of a tremendous 2022. She recently announced the publication of her first book, Build a House (October 2022), Lucy Negro Redux, the ballet Giddens wrote the music for, had its premiere at the Nashville Ballet (premiered in 2019 and toured in 2022), and the libretto and music for Giddens’ original opera, Omar, based on the autobiography of the enslaved man Omar Ibn Said, premiered at the Spoleto USA Festival in May. Giddens is also curating a four-concert Perspectives series as part of Carnegie Hall’s 2022–2023 season. Named Artistic Director of Silkroad Ensemble in 2020, Giddens is developing a number of new programs for that ensemble, including one inspired by the history of the American transcontinental railroad and the cultures and music of its builders.
As an actor, Giddens had a featured role on the television series Nashville. for the Obamas at the White House and received an inaugural Legacy of Americana Award from Nashville’s National Museum of African American History in partnership with the Americana Music Association. Her critical acclaim includes in-depth profiles by CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR’s Fresh Air, among many others.
Giddens was featured in Ken Burns’s Country Music series, which aired on PBS, where she spoke about the African American origins of country music. She is also a member of the band Our Native Daughters with three other black female banjo players, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah, and co-produced their debut album Songs of Our Native Daughters (2019), which tells stories of historic black womanhood and survival.
Giddens is in the midst of a tremendous 2022. She recently announced the publication of her first book, Build a House (October 2022), Lucy Negro Redux, the ballet Giddens wrote the music for, had its premiere at the Nashville Ballet (premiered in 2019 and toured in 2022), and the libretto and music for Giddens’ original opera, Omar, based on the autobiography of the enslaved man Omar Ibn Said, premiered at the Spoleto USA Festival in May. Giddens is also curating a four-concert Perspectives series as part of Carnegie Hall’s 2022–2023 season. Named Artistic Director of Silkroad Ensemble in 2020, Giddens is developing a number of new programs for that ensemble, including one inspired by the history of the American transcontinental railroad and the cultures and music of its builders.
As an actor, Giddens had a featured role on the television series Nashville.
Nicholas Houfek is an NYC-based lighting designer working in music, dance, and theater. Selected projects include Claire Chase’s Density Project (The Kitchen), International Contemporary Ensemble; Oyá by Marcos Balter (NY Philharmonic, soloist for light); Natalie Merchant; Maya Beiser; Ojai Music Festival; Silkroad Ensemble; Tyshawn Sorey’s Perle Noire directed by Peter Sellars (OMF, Oberon-ART); Marc Neikrug’s A Song by Mahler; Anohni’s She Who Saw Beautiful Things at The Kitchen; Suzanne Farrin’s La Dolce Morte at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, directed by Doug Fitch; George Lewis’s Soundlines featuring Steven Schick and directed by Jim Findlay (Skirball); Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s In The Light of Air; Ash Fure’s The Force of Things (Mostly Mozart); The 39 Steps (Olney Theatre Center). In addition to traditional lighting for live performance, Houfek has been developing a light-organ software interface called the ColorSynth that acts as a link between a performer and their lighting. Houfek has also designed for the Martha Graham Dance Company, Cedar Lake Contemporary Dance, and Ian Spencer Bell Dance; is an ensemble member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a member of USA829, and a graduate of Boston University.
Three-time Grammy nominee Kayhan Kalhor is an internationally acclaimed virtuoso on the kamancheh, who through his many musical collaborations has been instrumental in popularizing Persian music in the West and is a creative force in today’s music scene. His performances of traditional Persian music and multiple collaborations have attracted audiences around the globe. He has studied the music of Iran’s many regions, in particular those of Khorason and Kordestan, and has toured the world as a soloist with various ensembles and orchestras including the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de Lyon. He is co-founder of the renowned ensembles Dastan, Ghazal: Persian & Indian Improvisations and Masters of Persian Music. Kayhan Kalhor has composed works for Iran’s most renowned vocalists Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Shahram Nazeri and has also performed and recorded with Iran’s greatest instrumentalists. He has composed music for television and film and was most recently featured on the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth in a score that he collaborated on with Osvaldo Golijov. In 2004, he was invited by American composer John Adams to give a solo recital at Carnegie Hall as part of his Perspectives Series and in the same year he appeared on a double bill at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, sharing the program with the Festival Orchestra performing the Mozart Requiem. Kalhor was a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma and his compositions appear on several of the ensemble’s albums.
Ross Karre 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 degree. 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 Music 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). Karre’s solo album 10.67 Cycles, 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, Steven Schick, Matthias Kaul, Fritz Hauser, and creative collaborations of Third Coast Percussion, Yarn/Wire, ICE, Mount Tremper Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Oberlin Percussion Group.
Wu Man belongs to a rare group of musicians who have redefined the role of their instruments, in her case, the pipa — a pear-shaped, four-stringed Chinese lute with a rich history spanning centuries. She is celebrated as one of the most prominent instrumentalists of traditional Chinese music, as well as a composer and educator. She has premiered hundreds of new works for the pipa and has performed in recital and with major orchestras around the world. She is a frequent collaborator with ensembles such as the Kronos and Shanghai Quartets and The Knights and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. She has appeared on more than 40 recordings, including the Silkroad Ensemble’s Grammy-winning recording Sing Me Home, featuring her composition “Green (Vincent’s Tune).” She is also a featured artist in the 2015 Emmy Award–winning documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. In the 2023–24 season, Wu Man premieres a new Pipa Concerto by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Du Yun with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and later with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. She returns to Carnegie Hall for performances with the Kronos Quartet and The Knights.
