Bahar Royaee, composer
Born and raised in Iran, Bahar Royaee is a music educator and a composer/ sound designer who works within the field of concert music and various media arts. The Boston Arts Review praised Royaee’s “haunting sound design” in her work with live theatre. Royaee’s work has been performed at prominent events such as the Time:Spans …
Eduardo Aguilar, composer
Eduardo Aguilar (or Eduardo Ángel Aguilar Vásquez) is a music composer whose work explores process, concepts, ideas, imaginations, perceptions, representations, thoughts, designs, and realities. Aguilar work tends to the investigation and exploration of specific ordinary phenomena by abstracting its elements, specifically by configuring a compositional synthesis between what could belong to the realm of visual …
Vicente Atria, composer
Vicente Atria is a Chilean composer and drummer. His music riffs on a wide range of idioms, from microtonal renaissance dances to Korean sanjo, creating playful, vibrant sonic worlds. A Deutscher Jazzpreis recipient, Atria’s work has been commissioned or performed by the Sun Ra Arkestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, JACK Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble, Ensemble Proton Bern, …
Mattie Barbier, trombone
Mattie Barbier is an LA-based musician and sonic researcher focused on experimental intonation, latent acoustic environments, and the physicality of their instrument. Their playing has been described by the LA Times as “intense, brilliant, virtuosic growling,” by The Wire as “exploring the nooks of instrumental tone far beyond the reach of most mortals,” and by …
Danielle Ondarza, horn
Danielle Ondarza is a highly sought-after French hornist, educator, and recording artist based in Los Angeles. With a career spanning orchestral performance, chamber music, education, and media recording, she creates works that reflect both artistic excellence and a deep commitment to music education. Ondarza performs regularly with ensembles such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los …
Ben Richter, director
Ben Cortez Richter, originally from Pleasanton, CA in the San Francisco Bay, has worked internationally as an opera stage director and assistant director. Having received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music and completed his master’s degree work at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, both in Voice/Opera, he …
Dan Rosenboom, trumpet
Dan Rosenboom is an internationally recognized trumpet player, composer, and producer. He is known as a prolific member of the Los Angeles creative music scene, having released more than 25 albums of original music as a solo artist and bandleader. He has supported over 60 artists across over 100 releases on his label, Orenda Records. …
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. …