Colin McAllister, guitar
Colin McAllister is Director of Humanities and an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, where he directs the Sagitta Guitar Ensemble and organizes the Solertia Humanities Speaker Series. His performances as a guitarist and conductor have been hailed as ‘sparkling…delivered superbly’ (San Francisco Chronicle), ‘ravishing’ (San Diego Union …
Wesley Sumpter, percussion
Wesley Sumpter is one of the most in-demand percussionists in the United States. He has performed with some of the world’s leading orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco, National, and Atlanta Symphonies, Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Cabrillo Festival, Lakes Area Music Festival and the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, UK. He has played …
Alex Peh, piano
Pianist Alex Peh collaborates with musicians globally in search of shared resonances that emerge from friendship and connection. A 2021 Fulbright Global Scholar and 2019 Asian Cultural Council Fellow, he has worked with notable musicians and composers such as Claire Chase, Susie Ibarra, Anna Clyne, U Yee Nwe, Hafez Modirzadeh, Senem Pirler, and Phyllis Chen. …
Micheal Matsuno, flute
Michael Kento Matsuno is a flutist whose work traverses the classical canon, contemporary music, improvisation, music psychology, and 20th-century history. He can be heard performing throughout Southern California and holds positions as lecturer at Chapman University and flute studio instructor at CalArts and Pierce College. Matsuno has appeared with a wide range of ensembles throughout …
Kathryn Schulmeister, double bass
Praised for her “expressive and captivating performance” (GRAMMY.com), bassist Kathryn Schulmeister brings radiant energy to her creative musical practice ranging from classical to experimental. With a fearless curiosity for collaborative environments, Schulmeister’s enthusiasm for seeking opportunities to integrate improvisation, movement and theatre into her creative practice have led her to thrive as an active performer …
Levy Lorenzo, percussion
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. On an international scale, his body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. …
Esa-Pekka Salonen, 2026 music director
Esa-Pekka Salonen is known as both a composer and conductor. He is the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony and Conductor Laureate for the Philharmonia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. As a member of the faculty of Los Angeles’s Colburn School, he develops, leads, and directs the pre-professional Negaunee Conducting …
Liza Lim, composer
Liza Lim is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works such as Sex Magic (2020) for flutist Claire Chase; the orchestral cycle, Annunciation Triptych: Sappho, Mary, Fatimah (2019-22), and Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time (2023) for gestural performer, film …
Wu Wei, sheng
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 …
M.A. Tiesenga, saxophone & electronic hurdy-gurdy
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 …
Joshua Rubin, clarinet
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.” …
Ross Karre, percussion
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 …
Seth Parker Woods, cello
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 …
Craig Taborn, composer & piano
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 …
Steven Schick, percussion
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 …
Cory Smythe, composer & piano
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 …
Annea Lockwood, composer
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 …
Leilehua Lanzilotti, composer & viola
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. …
Tania León, composer
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 …
Katinka Kleijn, cello
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 …
JACK Quartet
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 …
Susie Ibarra, composer & percussion
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 …
Marcos Balter, composer
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 …
Xuan, new media artist
Xuan, new media artist, is also a filmmaker and pianist working at the intersection of music, visual art, and technology. A trained classical pianist, she actively develops innovative, cross-disciplinary projects that broaden the immersive scope of new music and performance through the lens of “visual music.” Her work encompasses experimental animation, abstract scenography, music videos, …
José Maria Blumenschein
José Maria Blumenschein, a native of Freiburg (Germany) born of Brazilian parents, currently serves as 1st Concertmaster of the WDR Radio Symphony Orchestra in Cologne after serving as Associate Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra for three seasons. During his tenure with WDR he also took two Seasons off to perform as first Concertmaster of the …