Artists

Su Chen-Hsin was born in Chiayi City, Taiwan in 1989. He is a licensed doctor who graduated from the Department of Medicine at China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan, in 2015. Su has been in psychiatry residency training programs at the Taoyuan Psychiatric Center, Taiwan since August 2017.

Born in the Boston MA area, Karen A. Tarlow now lives in Western Massachusetts and composes music on commission. She has written for a wide range of vocal and instrumental forces, including ballets, solo and chamber works, choral music and music for orchestra. Most recently (2011), she composed a new work for Mak’hela: The Jewish Chorus of Western Massachusetts; new music for the Da Camera Singers; and completed music for a series of multi-media ballets and puppet shows for children for Picture Book Theatre and the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

When Bill Sherrill (b. 1939) departed for college with piano and voice scholarships, there were fond hopes within his family of a musical career for him. College tennis and the study of Chemistry soon displayed and delayed those hopes. After college and during a working career which included stints as a Naval Flight Officer, Intelligence Officer, and Chief Administrator for large law firms, he kept in touch with music by singing in varied oratorio and symphonic choruses. He retired early to study music and has been composing ever since. He also serves as a Church Musician which provides a ready venue for conducting, composing, and arranging.

Ron Nagorcka (born 1948) composes in his hand-built solar-powered studio in a remote forest in Tasmania (the island state off Australia's south coast) where the natural world provides him with much of his inspiration. He has been exploring both music and nature since his childhood on an Australian sheep farm and studied music - including pipe organ, harpsichord, and composition - at the University of Melbourne and the University of California, San Diego. In the 1970s he was a prominent and influential figure in Melbourne as an innovative composer, teacher, keyboard performer and improviser with electronics. He was also one of the first non-indigenous musicians to master the didjeridu and pioneered its use in classical composition.

Since beginning her musical career as a cellist, Samantha Sack has been exploring the full range of musical expressions. Performing was only the beginning of her journey, as she quickly understood the greatest expression of music was creation. After receiving private composition lessons with Mara Gibson in secondary school, Samantha entered Missouri State University under the John Prescott Composition Scholarship and the Claude T. Smith Composition Scholarship. Graduating with a Bachelor of Music Composition further led her to Dublin, Ireland, to earn a Master of Arts in Scoring for Film and Visual Media from Dublin Institute of Technology.

Alexis Alrich started piano lessons at age eight with a rare teacher who encouraged her to start music composition at the same time. Her studies continued at the New England Conservatory of Music, California Institute of the Arts, and with Lou Harrison at Mills College in California. Harrison was a key mentor, and Alrich’s music is also influenced by West Coast Minimalism, French Impressionism, Asian music, and American roots music. Her compositional style is tonal and melodic, using lively rhythms and colorful timbres to weave a musical narrative.

Like many composers, I have a hard time classifying my music. My unconscious influences undoubtedly include the 20th c. Russian composers that I so enjoyed as a young trumpet player, the vocal music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance I discovered when I started singing, and the 20th c. French and American music I came to love in college. That aside, I often draw inspiration from visual sources, including the Pre-Raphaelites, Japanese animation, and abstract expressionism, as well as literary sources, such as poetry and the genres of fantasy and science fiction. I am fascinated with how these art forms make the normal seem strange and the strange seem normal.

Kevin McCarter writes music for chamber groups, solo performers, choral ensembles, and orchestras. His music has been performed in a variety of venues. The Chicago Chamber Orchestra gave the premiere of Opening Ideas at the Chicago Cultural Center. The Manhattan Choral Ensemble commissioned As the Earth Brings Forth Her Bud for a spring performance on the Columbia University campus.

Rosśa Crean (they/them) jokingly says they “create music that they like to listen to when they are by themself, eating raw cookie dough in a dark closet,” but in truth, their music has been referred to as being “funny...and virtuosic” (Classic Concert Nova Scotia), having “exceptionally different, outstanding quality” (Download), and music that “stirs you deep, undertones of humanity” (Access Contemporary Music).

An Italian native, Christian Paterniti graduated in piano with honors under the guidance of Caterina del Campo at the Arcangelo Corelli Conservatoire in Messina, Italy. Under Gaetano Indaco, he obtained a degree in piano and recommendation to publish his dissertation on Traité historique d'analisé harmonique (1982) by the composer and musicologist Jacques Chailley.

JOHN HAWKES (b. 1942) first obtained a basic knowledge of music notation while in a church choir, but it was not until he was 14, when he heard an orchestra for the first time, that he became interested in composition. This interest has remained ever since, despite his subsequent career in science as a lecturer in Physics at the University of Northumbria in the U.K. Since taking early retirement in 1996, he has devoted his time to composition.

Pierre, a French native, came to music as a child, studying classical piano and transcribing themes from movie composers on the family’s piano. Emotions are in the center of his work, and reviewers have often noted cinematic elements in his music, while describing “an imaginative musical craftsman at work, capable of evoking real wonder, mystery, reverence, and celebration.”

The music of composer and clarinetist David T. Bridges is often driven by motivic transformations and unifies extended techniques with classic and narrative structures to provoke a visceral response. Bridges’s compositions have been performed by ensembles including Del Sol Quartet, Contemporaneous, ensemble mise-en, Mivos, and Cadillac Moon Ensemble and featured at the New Music on the Bayou Festival in Louisiana, Reciprocity Collaborative at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Red Note Festival at Illinois State University, Hot Air Music Festival at San Francisco Conservatory, and Composers Now Festival in NYC. His string quartet This Fragmented Old Man was recorded by the Pedroia Quartet and released on Navona records.

John G. Bilotta was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, but has spent most his life in the San Francisco Bay Area having attended the University of California at Berkeley and, later, the San Francisco Music and Arts Institute where he studied composition with Frederick Saunders.

Hailed in the LA Times as offering a “stunning rendition” of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, and an “exciting” version of the Copland Clarinet Concerto, Joshua Ranz is Principal Clarinet of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO). In addition, he holds the chair of Principal Clarinet of the New West Symphony and the position of Bass Clarinet with the Pacific Symphony.

Over the last 20 years Demondrae Thurman has established a worldwide reputation through his varied experiences as a euphonium soloist, educator, chamber musician, and conductor. He has given performances in Canada, Hungary, Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, France, Spain, Taiwan, Macau, Norway, China, Italy, Austria, England, Wales, and throughout the United States. Thurman is a frequently invited guest at many of the world's most noted festivals and conferences for Low brass including the International Euphonium Tuba Conference, the United States Army Band Tuba Euphonium Workshop, and the Leonard Falcone International Solo Competition.

Jeff Mangels is a composer known for writing expressive, evocative music. His body of work includes a piano concerto and works for orchestra, winds, brass, strings, chorus, voice, percussion, chamber groups, electronics, electric guitar, and piano. His symphonic poem, The Trial, was recorded on volume 11 of the "Masterworks of the New Era" CD series (ERM Media). His Sonata for Piano, “Scenes from the Night,” received recognition by Lowell Liebermann and Chen Yi and he received the Linda Betts Frazier Award for outstanding composer (James Madison University).

Dave Dexter (b. UK, 1985) came to composing relatively late, without formal music education, by unsuccessfully entering a contest with the Liverpool Philharmonic in 2015. The rejection spurred him into a long period of self-tuition in composition, engraving, and orchestration — by the following year he had recorded his first works with string quartet, then orchestra and choir, and finally a full symphony orchestra in 2018.

John Franek (b.1996) is a pianist and composer whose compositions “evoke an epic narrative” (Sonograma Magazine). Franek has had premieres of his own works performed in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, with notable premieres in locations such as in New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Vienna, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Lviv, Krasnoyarsk, Ostrava, Olomouç, Milan, Rome, Havana, Quito, and Tashkent. Among these performances, he has had his works performed by ensembles such as The Siberian State Symphony Orchestra, Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra, The Moravian Philharmonic, KLKNewMusic, the Brightwork Ensemble, the Lontano Ensemble, and Trio Immersio.

Described as “alluringly exotic” (The New York Times), and “hauntingly attractive” (San Francisco Chronicle), the music of Bun-Ching Lam has been performed worldwide by such ensembles as the Macao Orchestra, American Composer’s Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, The Vienna Radio Orchestra, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and the Albany Symphony. Born in Macao, Lam served as the composer-in-residence of the Macao Orchestra from 2008-2016. She began her piano study in her native city, then further pursued her music education in Hong Kong and the United States.