Caroline Adelaide Shaw was trained primarily as a violinist in North Carolina. She is also a Grammy-winning singer in Roomful of Teeth and in 2013 became the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for her composition Partita for 8 Voices, also nominated for a Grammy. Caroline has also performed with American Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Trinity Wall Street Choir, Alarm Will Sound, and many others including appearances on violin or vocals on Saturday Night Live with Paul McCartney; Letterman with The National; and the Tonight Show with the Roots.

Caroline has been commissioned to  for the Carmel Bach Festival, the Guggenheim Museum, The Crossing, and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Other personal projects include the development of an evening-length theater work, Ritornello, and an ambient electronic album.  Caroline was a Rice Goliard Fellow and a Yale Baroque Ensemble fellow, and a recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. As a teenager many years ago, she spent a summer playing chamber music at Kinhaven Music School in Vermont, which is probably why she prefers to perform barefoot whenever possible.

Caroline holds a BM from Rice and an MM from Yale, and is currently a doctoral candidate in composition at Princeton.

By & By

These songs of By & By use the lyrics from several of my favorite old bluegrass and gospel songs, reimagined in a gentler, darker context. The melody is loose and limber, straying far from the shape and character of the original tunes, and the string textures enveloping the voice both draw from and undermine the traditional, familiar harmonic framework.

The music of composer Judah Adashi is grounded in the classical tradition and imbued with soul and pop influences ranging from Nina Simone to Björk. Among Judah’s recent works is ‘Rise’, a collaboration with the poet Tameka Cage Conley. The piece bears witness to America’s fraught civil rights journey from Selma to Ferguson and beyond, with all proceeds going to the family of Freddie Gray, whose death in police custody sparked the Baltimore Uprising. Judah is the founder and artistic director of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series, established in 2005 in Baltimore. Judah has been a member the faculty at Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University since 2002. He also directs Junior Bach, a one-on-one mentoring program in composition for students in Baltimore schools.

He has been honored with awards, grants and commissions from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the ASCAP and BMI Foundations, the American Composers Forum, New Music USA and the Aspen Music Festival, as well as residencies at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Judah holds an MM and doctorate from Peabody, and a BM from Yale University. He lives in Baltimore with his fiancée and frequent collaborator, cellist Lavena Johanson.

Sestina
I first encountered the poetry of Ciara Shuttleworth in The New Yorker, in November 2010. Her poem “Sestina” made an immediate impression on me, with its simplicity and depth of feeling. Ciara reimagines the traditional form for which her poem is famed, compressing it – and the entire life cycle of a relationship – into six words, variously rotated. “Sestina” is at once intimate and epic; I tried to reflect that sensibility in this spare musical setting for voice and orchestra.

Melody Eötvös is an Australian composer whose work draws on both multi-media and traditional instrumental contexts, as well substantial extra-musical references including a broad range of philosophical topics and late 19th Century literature. Melody has received awards including the 3MBS National Composers Award, an APRA PDA, and the Soundstream National Composer Award.  Her music has been performed by ensembles and orchestras such as the London Sinfonietta, BBC Singers, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and the Australian String Quartet. Melody has participated in several electronic music festivals including SEAMUS 2011, ACMC 2012, and ICMC 2011 and has composed for video games such as Avatar: The Last Air Bender. Melody is an alum of the American Composers Orchestra’s Underwood New Music Readings. Current projects include a comission by the League of American Orchestras, the EarShot Foundation premier at Carnegie Hall, and a commission for the Synergy 40×40 project.

Melody holds a Doctorate from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and a MA from the Royal Academy of Music and is currently a composer fellow at the Aspen Music Festival & School.

Red Dirt | Silver Rain

This piece is first and foremost about connecting and reaching out to my homeland and childhood, because no matter how much I try to bring it closer both of these things are always going to feel so far away (in time, distance, and memory).  Writing this piece was a way for me to acknowledge my past and nod my head to the beautiful expanse that is Australia, and wave a grateful hand at my past memories and a childhood full of music and barefoot outdoor adventures in the dirt and rain.

This piece was commissioned by the League of American Orchestras and American Composers Orchestra with the generous support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.

The title of this piece reaches back across the Pacific Ocean and into the heart of two memories I have of my homeland.  As a child I grew up on Tamborine Mountain (Queensland) where the dirt is a vibrant volcanic red.  I was more use to seeing my feet stained with this color than having them in shoes. The second memory is of the torrential downpours we would experience during the summers and of falling asleep to the sound of it pelting against the corrugated iron roof.  The rhythm of these rain showers, in my recollection amplified by the material of the roof, would fluctuate between violent hammering and delicate pattering.

This piece is most of all about reconstructing memories.  These memories hinge around strong sensory moments of my childhood and I have aimed to give them clear motivic/thematic life within the music.  A wonderful phenomena that occurs in the recalling of memories is our ability to manipulate and alter the way we may have originally remembered these things – the way I remember my dirt red toes the very same evening I washed them clean (perhaps I was annoyed that they were still slightly stained red even though I’d scrubbed them for ages), will be completely different to how I remember them now (as symbolizing fun, freedom, color, warmth, childhood).  So the trajectory of the motives/themes across this piece explore an array of possibilities and forms in how they can be remembered, recalled, and readjusted… sometimes more with the methodical mind of my adult-self, other times with what I imagine is my care-free inner child.

Conrad Winslow’s buoyant, hard edged, and deeply architectural music has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the New York Youth Symphony, New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, and Juilliard Orchestra, among many others. Conrad was featured in the 2008 Underwood Readings with American Composers Orchestra. His songs have been presented by The New York Festival of Song and The Coterie. Awards and support have come from ASCAP, The Jerome Fund, New York Youth Symphony, Yale Glee Club, The Juilliard School, and New Music USA.

Current projects include directing the Wild Shore Festival for New Music in Homer, Alaska where he was raised. Recent commissions include work for the International Double Reed Society, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, and a ballet score for choreographer Justin Peck. Conrad has a forthcoming recording with Gaudete Brass, entitled ‘Record for a Lost Tribe’. The Brooklyn based composer’s scenic, structurally complex style is informed by a childhood spent traveling America, exploring from Hawai’i to Alaska. Conrad holds a MM in Composition from the Juilliard School, an MM degree in film scoring from NYU, and an AB degree in Music from Rollins College.

Joint Account

This piece is a video and orchestra essay inspired by Baroque theorist Johann Mattheson’s Affect techniques on representing emotions in music. The first movement presents a seqence of five different moods, slices them, and pushes them increasingly closer until they smear into each other. The second movement is a single affect, directed by an unchanging melody in the marimba. The third movement suggests constant modulation and yet goes nowhere. The fourth movement brings back the moods from the top and weaves them into the succeeding material.

Alex Mincek is a New York-based composer and performer. Alex was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2012 and was the winner of the Alpert Award in the Arts. Alex’s music has been programmed at venues and festivals around the world including Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre, Wigmore Hall, and the Strasbourg Music Festival. Mincek has collaborated with ensembles including Ensemble Recherche, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Linea, and the JACK Quartet. Alex’s work has also been recognized through commissions and awards from arts institutions such as the French Ministry of Culture, Chamber Music America, ASCAP, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

He is currently the saxophonist, bass clarinetist, and artistic director of the Wet Ink Ensemble, a group dedicated to contemporary music, which he co-founded in 1998. He studied composition at Columbia University where he received his DMA and at the Manhattan School of Music for his MA.

Continuo

To continue, extend, prolong, sustain, revolve, join, connect, unite and rearrange various paths through numerous continuums in which adjacent elements are very similar but elements are very different at the extremes, articulated in and out of sequence, circuitously, radially, axially, dialogically…

Hannah Lash’s music has been performed at the Times Center in Manhattan, the Chicago Art Institute, Tanglewood Music Center, Harvard University, The Chelsea Art Museum, and on the American Opera Project’s stage in New York City as well as international venues and festivals. Commissions come from The Fromm Foundation, The Naumburg Foundation, the Orpheus Duo, and the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble among others. Hannah has received awards from ASCAP, a fellowship from Yaddo Artist Colony, the Barnard Rogers Prize in Composition, and numerous academic awards. Her orchestral work Furthermore was selected by the American Composers Orchestra for the 2010 Underwood New Music Readings.

Hannah obtained her Ph.D in Composition from Harvard University in 2010. She has held teaching positions at Harvard University, Alfred University, and currently serves on the composition faculty at Yale University School of Music.

Concerto for Harp and Chamber Orchestra

My piece reflects my love of the harp, but also addresses the idea of the harp as an instrument which carries an implication of being an outsider; mysterious, ephemeral, etc. I thought about what it means to play an instrument that is often thought of in these terms, and how the specialness of the harp could also create a sense of isolation on the part of the player: loneliness. A soloist in a concerto is naturally “other” to the ensemble, and the drama of a concerto often plays out in an almost adversarial relationship between the soloist and the ensemble. I wanted to explore this idea of the loneliness of the soloist in my own concerto, specifically through the lens of the harp’s particular “otherness” which is inextricably linked to what makes it special. The harp’s final cadenza reveals the most personal material in the piece: a slow Landler-like dance hovers like a memory in the harp, unaccompanied except for occasional small twitches from the ensemble towards the very end. It is as if the harp were revealing a music that the ensemble never participates in– a music that is special, beautiful, other-worldly, and fragile, like the harp itself.

Judd Greenstein composes structurally complex, engaging works for varied instrumentation. Judd has composed for institutions such as the Minnesota Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, the Lucerne Festival, yMusic, and Roomful of Teeth among many others. Judd is a founding member of NOW Ensemble, the composer/performer collective, and is the co-director of New Amsterdam Records/New Amsterdam Presents, an artists’ service organization that supports post-genre musicians through the development of performances and new recordings. He is the curator of New York’s Ecstatic Music Festival, an annual showcase of new collaborative concerts between artists from different musical worlds, and co-curates the Apples & Olives festival in Zurich, Switzerland.

Judd has received degrees from Williams College, the Yale School of Music, and Princeton University, and has won fellowships from the Tanglewood Music Center, the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, the Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists, and the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab.

Michael-Thomas Foumai is inspired by storytelling, constructing compelling musical journies.  Previous performances have been presented at venues including The Juilliard School, Osaka College of Music, June in Buffalo Festival, Aspen Music Festival and School, and Disney Hall. Michael-Thomas’ music has previously been featured in American Composers Orchestra’s Underwood Readings and EarShot Readings. Michael-Thomas has recorded ‘Momentum 21: Music for a New Century’, ‘In Paradisum’ performed by guitarist Ian O’Sullivan and ‘Auld Lang Syne Fantasy’ by the Royal Hawaiian Band. A forth-coming recording by the Royal Hawaiian Band featuring ‘Spiritus Mundi’ will be released in the 2015-16 season.

He has received numerous awards including a Fromm Foundation Commission, Presser Foundation Award, three BMI composer awards, 2014 Intimacy of Creativity Fellowship at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Music Teachers National Association Composer of the Year. Michael-Thomas holds degrees in composition from the Universities of Hawaii (BM) and Michigan (MM,DMA). Dr. Foumai currently serves on the faculty of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The Spider Thread

My piece is inspired by a short tale of morality by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa about a criminal who is given a chance at salvation.As the story unfolds, a spider’s thread is lowered into the darkness of Hell, allowing the criminal an escape into Paradise. As he climbs, his joy is short lived as other sinners have started climbing the thread behind him. Fearing the thread will break, he claims the tread for himself and at this moment the thread breaks casting all back into darkness.

The work is in three parts and follows the narrative of the story. It opens with a murky “paradise” music meant to convey the ethereal realms of Heaven and Hell. A dashing scherzo signifies an exasperating orchestral climb to paradise and builds to a climactic fall with musical gestures stumbling over each other. The music recedes, returning to the murky Paradise music of the beginning.

Andy Akiho is an eclectic composer and performer of contemporary classical music. Recent engagements include premieres by the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and Carnegie Hall. Andy’s awards include 2014-15 Luciano Berio Rome Prize, Chamber Music America Grants in 2012 and 2014, and the 2011 National Composition Competition Grand Prize. He has attended the Aspen Music Festival, Heidelberg Music Festival, Bang on a Can Festival, and Avaloch Farm Music Institute, where he is the Composer-in-Residence. His compositions have been played during American Composers Orchestra’s Underwood Readings.

Akiho was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and is based in New York City. He graduated with a BM from University of South Carolina, the Manhattan School of Music with an MM, and the Yale School of Music with another MM. Akiho is currently pursuing a PhD at Princeton University. Andy recently debuted CD ‘No One To Know One’, on Innova Recordings.

Tarnished Mirrors

I enjoy observing obscured reflections in antique mirrors. The layer of tarnish that stands between reality and the veiled reflection is where the story begins.

I am very grateful for everyone at American Composers Orchestra, the SONiC Festival, and Paul Underwood for giving me the opportunity to write my first standard, non-concerto orchestral wor