Artists

Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Sydney Hodkinson (January 17, 1934 – January 10, 2021) led an impressive career in conducting, composition, and music education, having received a bachelor’s and master’s of music from the Eastman School of Music, and a doctorate of musical arts from the University of Michigan in 1968.

Vincent Ho is a multi-award winning composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, and theatre music. His works have been described as “brilliant and compelling” by The New York Times and hailed for their profound expressiveness and textural beauty, leaving audiences talking about them with great enthusiasm. His many awards and recognitions have included three Juno Award nominations, Harvard University’s Fromm Music Commission, The Canada Council for the Arts’ “Robert Fleming Prize,” ASCAP’s “Morton Gould Young Composer Award,” four SOCAN Young Composers Awards, and CBC Radio’s Audience Choice Award (2009 Young Composers’ Competition).

Pianist Russell Hirshfield has received critical acclaim for his original and powerful interpretive insights across a wide repertoire. He has performed in recitals regularly throughout the world, giving concerts across the United States, Brazil, China, Belgium, England, Serbia, Costa Rica, and South Africa, including recent performances at the Sheldonian Theater and Holywell Music Room in Oxford, and the Royal Flemish Academy in Brussels. His latest solo recording, ALEXANDER SCRIABIN: EARLY WORKS (Navona Records, 2020) has been programed in radio broadcasts in at least 20 countries. It features a brilliant program of Scriabin’s earlier, and lesser-known, works for solo piano.

Having been praised by the press as “precise and keenly projective” and demonstrating “the highest level of proficiency,” Japanese-Canadian pianist Yoko Hirota is considered one of the leading interpreters of contemporary piano repertory of her generation. Hirota received her doctoral degree in piano performance under Louis-Philippe Pelletier at McGill University. Grants from the Canada Council for the Arts allowed her to study in Europe, with Gabor Eckhardt in Hungary, Herbert Henck in Germany, and Florent Boffard in France.

For Edie Hill, writing music is an opportunity to research, learn, muse, reach down deep, and allow inspiration to come from the stuff of life. Her compositions are fueled by her experiences, passions, and curiosities.

Born in Detroit MI in 1970, Sean Hickey’s earliest music education began at age 12 with an electric guitar, a Peavey amp, and a stack of Van Halen records (the early ones of course). He studied jazz guitar at Oakland University, later graduating with a degree in composition and theory from Wayne State University. His primary instructors were James Hartway, James Lentini, and Leslie Bassett. After moving to New York, Hickey pursued further studies with Justin Dello Joio and Gloria Coates. His works include a symphony (Olympus Mons), concertos for clarinet, cello and mandolin, two string trios, a string quartet, a flute sonata, a woodwind quintet and trio, numerous pieces for solo instruments, church, theater and orchestral music.

Roaring onto the operatic stage in recent seasons, Melanie Henley Heyn made her Straussian and Wagnerian debuts as Salome & Brünnhilde, followed closely by a harrowing portrayal of Magda Sorel in Gian Carlo Menotti’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, The Consul. Singing a vast repertoire of music spanning the opera, concert, and folk worlds, her 33 divas recording project combining classic Wagner, Verdi, and Puccini roles with modern American opera heroines remains the No. 1 Most Funded Kickstarter for a Solo Classical Artist.

Matthew Hetz (b. 1957) is a native to Los Angeles where he still resides. His formal music studies began at age 16 with piano lessons, and composing has always been in the forefront. He began playing the violin in his 20s, and joined local orchestras, an experience of tremendous importance and influence for composing. His study of composition and music at California State University, Dominguez Hills in the 1980’s was at the height of atonality, with the dissolution of harmony as the accepted compositional practices.

Mara Helmuth was composes music and sonic spaces often involving the computer, focusing recently on environmental issues and wildlife. Her recordings include Irresistible Flux on Esther Lamneck’s Tarogato Constructions, from O on Open Space CD 33 Benjamin Boretz 9x9, Lifting the Mask on Sounding Out! (Everglade), Sound Collaborations, (CDCM v.36, Centaur CRC 2903), Implements of Actuation (Electronic Music Foundation EMF 023), and works included on Open Space CD 16 and the 50th Anniversary University of Illinois EMS collection. Scores are published in Open Space Magazine Issues 19-20 (from O), and Notations 21 (String Paths), edited by Theresa Sauer.

Matthew Heap, born in 1981, is an internationally-performed composer whose music has been featured in several American and English cities and on WQED and WCLV radio. He is also very involved in the theater community as an actor, director, and writer. Matthew received his B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University, M.M. from the Royal College of Music in London, and  Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. He has studied with Leonardo Balada, Eric Moe,  Nancy Galbraith, Mathew Rosenblum, Amy Williams, and Timothy Salter.

Born in Hong Kong, Dr. Po Sim Head is a pianist, educator, and musicologist who has a strong passion for discovering lesser-known piano repertoire from Latin America. Head received a doctorate degree in piano performance and pedagogy from the University of Kansas under the instruction of Scott McBride Smith. Her thesis introduced a few piano compositions written by a Peruvian composer Francisco Pulgar-Vidal, some of which are included on her Navona Records release. Prior to her doctorate degree, Head received her master’s degrees in piano performance and musicology from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) and earned a bachelor’s degree in music composition and production at Hong Kong Baptist University. 

Tyler Hay was born in 1994 in Kent and began learning the piano at the age of 6. He studied with the Head of Keyboard, Andrew Haigh at Kent Music Academy for three years before gaining a place to study at the Purcell School for Young Musicians in 2007 where he continued under Tessa Nicholson. He completed his studies as an ABRSM scholar at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2016 where he studied with the Head of Keyboard Graham Scott and Professor Frank Wibaut.

Patrick Hawkins holds degrees in performance from the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University, East Carolina University, and Arizona State University. Post-graduate studies in music education were taken at California State University, Los Angeles, and at the University of Washington, Seattle. His major teachers have included Janette Fishell, Peggy Haas Howell, Kimberly Marshall, and Carole Terry (organ); Shirley Mathews, and Webb Wiggins (harpsichord); and Shuko Watanabe and Joseph Rackers (piano).

Growing up on a farm outside of Spartanburg SC, Dr. Phillip Chase Hawkins serves as Principal Trumpet with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, a position he has held since 2013. He is also a member of the cornet section in Fountain City Brass Band and is an active performer on historical instruments as a member of Kentucky Baroque Trumpets and Saxton’s Cornet Band. Hawkins can also be heard as a performing and recording artist for the Nashville Music Scoring Studio and Sound Lair Studio.

Malcolm Hawkins, British composer born in Portugal, has lived in New Hampshire since 1995. He graduated from the Royal Academy of Music, and was subsequently awarded a scholarship to study at the Mozarteum, Salzburg, with Cesar Bresgen, where he won an international song competition Das Neue Lied with 4 Songs for Baritone, Saxophone and Piano. These and a solo piano work were broadcast on Austrian Radio, and his wind quintet was performed in Salzburg and Vienna.

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.

Jean Hatmaker is a founding member of the Kontras Quartet, the internationally acclaimed quartet-in-residence at Grace Lutheran Church of River Forest IL. Known for their well-crafted performances, diverse programming, and accessible audience relations, Kontras Quartet has brought their message of inclusivity to concerts across the United States, Europe, and Africa. In addition to classical concerts, Kontras Quartet performs with the bluegrass trio the Kruger Brothers, with whom they have appeared at festivals internationally.

Semir “Sammy” HASIĆ (b. 1964) began playing music at the age of 6. He attended music school in Zenica and studied theoretical and pedagogical direction under professor Vinko Kreitmeyer in Sarajevo, eventually completing his studies of composition and conducting in Würzburg where he became professor of composition and conducting.

Edward Hart’s music has been performed in the United States, Latin America, Africa, and Europe including performances in New York, Los Angeles, Kiev, Vienna, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Boston, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Reviewers have described his music as “mesmerizingly rich,” “clearly visual,” and “an accessible style that clearly communicates to audiences.” His works include concerti for violin, piano, string quartet, guitar, various orchestral works, chamber music, solo piano compositions, choral music, and art songs.

For Gregory Harris, the process of becoming a composer was one of absorption. By opening himself to soak up an unbounded array of sounds, influences, and genres -- a process he began formally at age 6, with piano lessons at his grandfather’s bench -- he has lived a life of near-constant immersion in music. His childhood years of youth orchestras, jazz band, chamber music and piano recitals led to writing music for some of the small ensembles he played with. The first time he heard one of those ensembles play a piece of his music, the experience supercharged his passion for composition.