Speakers
Norma Beecroft (Toronto, ON, Canada)
Norma Beecroft is part of a generation of pioneering professional composers that firmly established Canada's place on the world's musical map. An award-winning composer renowned for her use of electronic sound, Beecroft has been commissioned by many of Canada's leading artists, ensembles and organizations. She has also enjoyed a long career in broadcasting, in television and as a radio producer, commentator and documentarist for the CBC and CJRT-FM radio.
Many of Beecroft's compositions combine electronically produced or altered sounds together with live instruments, with the electronic music serving as an extension of vocal and/or instrumental sounds. Due to her intense interest in technology in music, in 1977/78 she interviewed many of the world's leading composers who were the first to use technology in their music. This extensive research resulted in her book Conversations with Post World War II Pioneers of Electronic Music, which documents a new period in musical history through the voices of 26 major figures, most of whom are now deceased.
For her service to Canadian music, Norma Beecroft was awarded a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from York University in Toronto in 1996. She is an honorary member of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community.
Hannah Bosma (University of Amsterdam)
Hannah Bosma is a postdoc researcher at the University of Amsterdam (ASCA) for her research project Preservation as performance: Liveness, loss and viability in electroacoustic music (2019-2023, NWO Veni innovation grant). Other projects include MA-courses on Archiving Art (UvA since 2019) and on Gender, Voice and Music technology (Kunstuniversität Graz 2017-2019), the conference "The Art of Voice Synthesis" (UvA 2016) and The Electronic Cry: Voice, gender and electroacoustic music (PhD UvA 201,). Her publications on gender and electroacoustic music appeared in Organised Sound, Contemporary Music Review and The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, inter alia. For more information, see http://www.uva.nl/en/profile/h.m.bosma
Kitty Brazelton (Bennington College)
For pioneering NYC composer, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist Kitty Brazelton, music is personal, and the personal is universal. Brazelton has connected language and practice across expectation since the 1970s when she led avant-folk-chamber Musica Orbis, to the ‘80s when she fronted Hide the Babies at CBGB’s, to the present lockdown, during which she has undertaken an ambitious choir recording project—working title ‘COVID CHOIRS’—enlisting dozens of out-of-work musicians to sing messages of hope together remotely from their homes. Recently interviewed in fall 2020 for inclusion in Yale’s Oral History of American Music, Brazelton has won OPERA America’s 2015 & 2016 Grants for Female Composers, the Copland, the Ossietzky, and commissions including two new works for Boston Opera Collaborative’s 2021 online ’Love in the Time Of….’ production as well as “O Joy!” for choir VocalEssence’s NPR quadrennial. New York Times writes: “brilliant”; Los Angeles Times: “boisterous”; Rolling Stone: “impressive nerve”; John Zorn: “visionary”. Prior to COVID, Brazelton produced hybrid string concerts in LA, a cappella prayer cycles in private homes, and band festivals in NYC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Vermont.
Courtney Bryan (Tulane University)
Courtney Bryan is “a pianist and composer of panoramic interests” (New York Times). Her music is in conversation with various musical genres, including jazz and other types of experimental music, as well as traditional gospel, spirituals, and hymns. Bryan has academic degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (BM), Rutgers University (MM), and Columbia University (DMA) with advisor George Lewis, and completed postdoctoral studies in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Bryan is currently the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts, Tulane University and a Creative Partner with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. She was the 2018 music recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2019 Bard College Freehand Fellow, a 2019-20 recipient of the Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition, a 2020 United States Artists Fellow, and is currently a recipient of a 2020-21 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship.
Kamari Carter (Columbia University & New York, NY)
Kamari Carter (b. 1992; lives and works in NYC) is a producer, performer, sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter’s practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Fridman Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, and Issue Project Room, to name a few. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.
Seth Cluett (Columbia University)
Seth Cluett is a composer and visual artist who creates work that explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, examines minutae by amplifying impossible tasks, and tries to understand the working of memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society. Ranging from photography and drawing to installation, concert music, and critical writing, his “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail” (e/i) and “dramatic, powerful, and at one with nature” (The Wire). The recipient of grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Fund and Meet the Composer, his work has been presented internationally at venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, Moving Image Art Fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, GRM, and STEIM. His concert work has been commissioned by ensembles ranging from the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the International Contemporary Ensemble to So Percussion, Catch Guitar Quartet, and Clogs and is documented on Line, Sedimental, Notice, and Winds Measure recordings. Cluett is the Assistant Director of the Computer Music Center and Sound Art Program at Columbia University and is Artist-in-Residence with Experiments in Art and Technology at Nokia Bell Labs where he maintains a studio and is active in research on virtual and augmented reality acoustics and multi-sensory communication.
Brigid Cohen (New York University, FAS)
Brigid Cohen is Associate Professor of Music at New York University. She has taught and published on the politics of 20th-century avant-gardes, archive studies, diaspora and cosmopolitanism theory, 20th-century German-Jewish thought, histories of genocide, and intersections of music, literature, and the visual arts. Her book Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (2012) won the Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society. She also edited and convened the round table “Edward Said and Musicology Today,” published in Journal of the Royal Musical Association in 2016. Her second monograph, Musical Migration and Imperial New York (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), explores questions of displacement and citizenship through a study of New York concert avant-gardes, jazz, electronic music, and performance art in the 1950s and 1960s. This book trains its focus on the cultural-political dilemmas navigated by uprooted creators in New York as a capital of empire during the Cold War. Her recent work has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Wellesley College.
Cathy Cox (Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo, Japan)
Cathy L. Cox is a music researcher based in Tokyo, Japan. Her current research focuses on the theory and analysis of electroacoustic music. She completed undergraduate studies in music theory at McGill University in Montréal (Canada), earned an MA from Washington University in St Louis and a PhD from Columbia University in New York City (USA), was a DAAD fellow at the Technische Universität Berlin and pursued supplemental studies in computer science (Informatik) at RWTH-Aachen (Germany). A former CMC staff member and executive editor of Current Musicology, her work has been published in Contemporary Music Review and Leonardo Music Journal, among others, and presented at conferences in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Dr. Cox currently teaches at Kunitachi College of Music (Sonology Department), Hosei University (Department of Global and Interdisciplinary Studies), Tamagawa University (Department of Media Design), and Toho Gakuen School of Music (Music Theory Division), all in Tokyo; Ferris University (College of Music) in Yokohama; and Waseda University (School of Human Sciences) in Tokorozawa.
Teresa Díaz de Cossío (University of California, San Diego/Universidad Autónoma de Baja California)
Teresa Díaz de Cossío is a flutist, improviser and teacher. American born of Mexican descent, and raised in Mexico, Teresa has studied at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, San Diego State University and Purchase College in New York. She is the cofounder of Música para la Paz, a nonprofit that teaches music to kids in orphanages and low-income communities in Ensenada and Tecate. Teresa participated in concerts with Plácido Domingo, the Carnegie Hall-affiliated Decoda ensemble, and Los Tigres del Norte. As a recipient of UNAM’s Resiliencia Sonora: Intérpretes fellowship, next summer Teresa will be recording works of Mexican composers. She cofounded the Kato Trio in 2020, highlighting pieces that merge acoustic instruments and field recordings of urban cities.
Teresa is currently investigating the life and work of Mexican female composers from the 20th century, focusing on Alida Vázquez Ayala, and pursuing a DMA in performance at UC San Diego. She maintains other engagements at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Ensenada, where she teaches flute, and coordinates the Festival de Música Nueva, Ensenada.
Zosha Di Castri (Columbia University)
Co-organizer, Unsung Stories
Zosha Di Castri is a Canadian composer/pianist/sound artist living in New York. Her work, which has been performed internationally, extends beyond purely concert music including projects with electronics, installations, and collaborations with video and dance. She has worked with such ensembles as the BBC Symphony and BBC Singers, San Francisco Symphony, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the L.A. Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, ICE, JACK Quartet, Ekmeles, Yarn/Wire, the NEM, and Talea Ensemble among others. Upcoming projects include a Koussevitzky commission from the Library of Congress for percussionist Steve Schick and ICE and a commission for the Grossman Ensemble in Chicago.
Zosha is currently the Francis Goelet Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University and recently finished a year-long fellowship at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. Her debut album Tachitipo, released November 2019 to critical acclaim, can be found on New Focus Recordings, and the title track was nominated for The JUNO Awards’ 2021 Classical Composition of the Year.
Natacha Diels (University of Pennsylvania)
Natacha Diels’ work combines choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes Papillon and the Dancing Cranes, for construction cranes and giant butterfly (Borealis Festival 2018); and forthcoming is a 6-part TV-style miniseries with the JACK quartet (TIME:SPANS and Banff Centre for the Arts) and a collaborative work for shadowed audience with Ensemble Pamplemousse (Darmstadt 2021). Natacha’s compositions have been described as “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About) and “the liveliest music of the evening” (LA Review of Books).
Natacha is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse, which specializes in unique aspects of new music composition, from complex virtuosic instrumental performance to electronic and robotic performance. Natacha holds degrees in performance, digital media, and composition from New York University and Columbia University. She is currently an Assistant Professor of composition at the University of Pennsylvania.
Brad Garton (Columbia University)
Brad Garton serves as Director of the Computer Music Center (formerly the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center). He has assisted in the establishment and development of a number of computer music studios throughout the world, and is an active contributor to the greater community of computer musicians/researchers, formerly serving on the Board of Directors of the International Computer Music Association as editor (with Robert Rowe) of the ICMA newsletter and artistic director/co-organizer of several high-profile festivals and conferences of new computer music.
His current work includes focused research on the modeling and enhancement of acoustic spaces as well as the modeling of human musical performance on various virtual "instruments". He is also the primary developer (with Dave Topper) or RTcmix, a real-time music synthesis/signal-processing language. The point of all this work is to continue to make fun new pieces of music, which he does every day.
Bob Gluck (University at Albany)
Bob Gluck is Professor of Music at the University at Albany, where he teaches in the departments of Music and Theatre, Africana Studies, Art, and Judaic Studies. Gluck is a pianist, writer, and composer. After years of conservatory training, his musical life changed dramatically after hearing Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and Miles Davis' electric bands. Bob's repertoire spans jazz performance integrating electronics and free improvisation, avant-garde concert music, and music for home designed electronic expansions of acoustical instruments. Gluck has written numerous articles documenting the international history and cultural contexts of electroacoustic music and jazz. Brief country-specific histories and composer interviews, arising from his historical study of the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Studio, have been published in the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC)’s eContact!, on the internet.
Gluck has released eleven recordings and his work appears on several compilations. Gluck's musical training is from the Juilliard, Manhattan, and Crane Schools of Music, as well as the State University of New York at Albany (B.A., 1977) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (M.F.A., 2001). Gluck is also a rabbi (Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, rabbinic title and Master's in Hebrew Letters, 1989); he also holds a Master's in Social Work from Yeshiva University's Wurzweiler School of Social Work (1984). He has held various senior leadership positions in the Jewish Reconstructionist movement. Bob is author of You’ll Know When You Get There: Herbie Hancock and the Mwandishi Band (Chicago, 2012), and The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles (Chicago, 2016; Quodilibet Chorus, revised Italian edition, 2020).
Mara Helmuth (University of Cincinnati)
Mara Helmuth composes music often involving the computer, and creates multimedia and software for composition and improvisation. Her music has been performed internationally at conferences, festivals and arts spaces, and is on recordings from PARMA, INNOVA, Centaur (CDCM), Open Space, Electronic Music Foundation and Everglade. Her software for composition and improvisation involves wireless sensor networks, granular synthesis, Internet2, and the RTcmix music programming language. She created two installations for the Sino-Nordic Arts Space in Beijing. She is Professor of Composition at College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati and director of its Center for Computer Music. She holds a D.M.A. from Columbia University, and earlier degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She served on the board of directors, as vice president for conferences and as president for the International Computer Music Association, and has written about gender and computer music. She also plays tennis and practices T’ai chi ch’uan, and lives with her partner Teri and their dog, Ella Fitzgerald.
Ellie Hisama (Columbia University)
Co-organizer, Unsung Stories
Ellie M. Hisama is Professor of Music (Theory and Historical Musicology) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University, where she has taught since 2006. She is the author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (a Choice Outstanding Academic Title) and co-editor of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-century American Music and Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies. She has published widely in twentieth- and twenty-first century music and on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, society, and power.
Hisama is Founding Director of For the Daughters of Harlem: Working in Sound and was named the Kenneth H. Peacock Lecturer at the University of Toronto; the keynote speaker for the Music of the Americas conference, University of Texas, Austin; and the Robert Samels Visiting Scholar at Indiana University. She is an inaugural recipient of the Provost’s Faculty Mentoring Award at Columbia and received a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, a Tsunoda Ryusaku Senior Fellowship at Waseda University, and a Faculty Fellowship from the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities. In July 2021, she will become the fourteenth Dean of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music.
Yvette Janine Jackson (Harvard University)
Yvette Janine Jackson is a composer and sound installation artist focused on bringing attention to historical events and social issues. Her works have been featured at the Fridman Gallery; Fylkingen; Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier Tonspur Passage; International Festival of Computer Art in Maribor; the Cube at Virginia Tech; Tonband Fixed Media Festival at Audiorama; Spreckels Organ in Balboa Park; the San Diego Art Institute; San Francisco International Arts Festival; Stockholm’s Kulturnatten; the Borealis Festival; and in residency at Elektronmusikstudion. Recent commissions include Fear Is Their Alibi for soprano, bassoon, and electronics for the PROTOTYPE Festival; Lot’s Wife, for ensemble and electronics, by Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Remembering 1619 for violin and tape; Atlantic Crossing read by the Naples Philharmonic with support from the American Composers Orchestra; and Cannot Be (Unrung) for carillon and electronics co-commissioned by the University of Chicago and University of Michigan for Tiffany Ng. Yvette's chapter "Narrative Soundscape Composition: Approaching Jacqueline George's Same Sun" is in Between the Tracks: Musicians on selected electronic music edited by Miller Puckette and Kerry L. Hagan for MIT Press.
Yvette is an assistant professor in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry in the Department of Music and teaches for the Theater, Dance & Media program at Harvard University.
Miki Kaneda (Boston University)
Miki Kaneda researches transcultural movements and the entanglements of race, gender, and empire in experimental, avant-garde and popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published on topics including the transnational flows of experimental sonic arts, art and the everyday, and video game sound. Her book project, titled Transpacific Experiments: Intermedia Art and Ambivalent Listening in 1960s Japan is under contract with the University of Michigan Press. She is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Boston University. She has also held fellowship positions at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University and the Museum of Modern Art, where she was a founding co-editor of the web platform, post.moma.org.
Roshanak Kheshti (University of California, San Diego)
Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego and Associate Editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015) and Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 33 1/3, 2019). She is currently completing her third book, tentatively titled “We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Hermeneutics” as well as a performance piece “Veil Manifesto” (with Sara Mameni). Her scholarship has appeared in the Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theater Survey, and Sounding Out!.
Judy Klein (New York, NY)
Judy Klein is an American composer and educator. She holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, the Conservatory of Music in Basel, Switzerland, and the Gallatin School at New York University. She studied computer music with Charles Dodge at the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music (BC-CCM). She taught computer music composition at New York University (SEHNAP) in the 1980’s and founded a computer music studio there. She was the consultant for electroacoustic music preservation at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (1990-2006). She has been artist-in-residence at various institutes, including Dartmouth College and the International Institute of Electroacoustic Music (Bourges, France), and guest composer and lecturer at at Brooklyn College (BC-CCM), the Cincinnati College Conservatory and the Columbia University CMC, among others.
Klein composes almost exclusively in the C programming language and the Csound computer music language. Her works are primarily acousmatic and increasingly combine her interest in sound with her commitment to animal rights. In an interview with Peter Shea, she talks about this and about her piece “The Wolves of Bays Mountain.” She currently resides in New York City, works in her home studio, and serves on juries and selection committees for electroacoustic music competitions, festivals and conferences. She is a contributing editor for The Open Space Magazine and for Perspectives of New Music. Her music is recorded on ICMA, SEAMUS, Cuneiform and Open Space compact discs.
Yuriko Hase Kojima (Shobi University)
Dr. Yuriko Hase Kojima serves as the Professor of Composition at Shobi University in Japan. She also teaches as a lecturer at Toho Gakuen College School of Music and Senzoku Gakuen College of Music. She is the founder and the artistic director of a non-profit organization, Glovill, which introduces new music to Japan. Graduating as a piano major from Osaka College of Music, Ms. Kojima studied music composition in America for ten years. She got B.M. from Boston Conservatory, M.A. and D.M.A. in compposition from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Andrew Mellon fellowships and Rapaport Composition Prize. Her main teachers include Tristan Murail, Jonathan Kramer, Fred Lerdahl, Brad Garton, David Rakowski, and Isao Matsushita. In 1997, she studied with Betsy Jolas and Philippe Leroux at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau.
Her works have been presented at the international festivals such as the ISCM World Music Days, the ACL Asian Music Week, and the ICMC, performed by prominent ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, the Pearls Before Swine Experience, and the New York New Music Ensemble. Ms. Kojima continues her researches on electroacoustic music presenting papers at the EMS and the ICMPC conferences.
Sky Macklay (Valparaiso University)
Sky Macklay (b. 1988) is a composer, oboist, and installation artist currently based in Chicago. Her music is conceptual yet expressive, exploring extreme contrasts, audible processes, humor, and the physicality of sound. She has been commissioned by Chamber Music America (with Splinter Reeds), the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University (with Ensemble Dal Niente), the Barlow Endowment (with andPlay), and The Jerome Fund for New Music (with ICE saxophonist Ryan Muncy). Sky’s work has also been recognized with awards and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, The International Alliance for Women in Music, and Civitella Ranieri. Recent projects include an opera set in a uterus and three interactive installations of harmonica-playing inflatable sculptures. Sky completed her D.M.A. at Columbia University and her music is published by C. F. Peters. She will spend much of 2021 in Paris as a fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Miya Masaoka (Columbia University)
Miya Masaoka works at the intersection of sound and resonance, composition, spatialized perception, and social interaction. Her work encompasses notated compositions, objects infused with sound, instrument building, computing wear-ables, and sonification of the behavior of plants, brain activity, and insect movement. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Venice Biennale, MoMA PS1, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Masaoka has taught at New York University, Bard College (since 2003). In 2017, her installation “Vaginated Chairs” was shown as the Kunstmuseum Bonn, and in 2018 she premiered work for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Glasgow Chamber Choir. Masaoka has created a new chamber Noh opera, and is a Park Avenue Armory Studio Artist for 2019. She has a Duo CD with Anthony Braxton, a Trio with Zeena Parkins and Myra Melford. In 2018, she was named Director of the Sound Art MFA program at Columbia University in the School of the Arts.
Joyce Solomon Moorman (Columbia, SC)
Joyce Solomon Moorman was born in the campus hospital of Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her childhood was spent in Columbia, South Carolina, where she attended segregated public elementary and high schools. She earned the B. A. degree from Vassar College, the M. A. T. degree from Rutgers University, the M. F. A. degree from Sarah Lawrence College, and the Ed. D. degree from Columbia University. In 1990 she was a finalist in the first Detroit Symphony African-American Composers’ Competition. Her compositions have been performed by Lilan Parrot, Triad Chorale, Wilson Moorman, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble, Louise Toppin, and the Rose City Brass Quintet, among others.
Ms. Moorman was a winner of the Vienna Modern Masters 1998 Millennium Commission Competition. She received honorable mention in the International Alliance for Women in Music Competition for the Year 2000 Women of Color Commission. She is included in several books, including Piano Music by Black Women Composers: A Catalogue of Solo and Ensemble Works, and Music by Black Women Composers: A Bibliography of Available Scores. In 1997, she was appointed by the Governor of New York to the Advisory Music Panel for the New York State Council on the Arts, which she served on for three years. Pen and Brush, Inc. of New York City presented her with the June Jordan Award in 2003, for excellence in the field of arts and performance and the perpetuation of African-American culture. Currently, she is retired from Borough of Manhattan Community College where she held the rank of Professor in the Music and Art Department.
Frances Morgan (University of Lincoln)
Frances Morgan is a Lecturer in Sound and Music Theory at University of Lincoln, UK. With a background in journalism, Frances has worked as a music and film critic for publications including The Wire and Sight & Sound. Recent journal papers have appeared in Organised Sound and Dancecult. Frances has recently completed a PhD at the Royal College of Art, London, in collaboration with the Science Museum, focusing on the construction of electronic music histories.
Matthew Morrison (New York University, Tisch School of the Arts)
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University. He has worked in collaboration with the opening of The Shed, NYC, with the Glimmerglass Festival Opera, and has held fellowships at Harvard University and the Library of Congress. His published work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, The Oxford Handbook of Music & Philosophy, art forums/publications, and on Oxford University Press's online music blog. He is currently completing a book entitled Blacksound: Making Race & Popular Music in the U.S., which considers the making of race, intellectual property law, and American popular entertainment out of blackface minstrelsy.
Katharina Rosenberger (University of Music Lübeck)
Katharina Rosenberger, born in Zurich, is Professor of Composition and has taught composition and sound art at the University of California San Diego for 12 years. From April 2021 she will hold the professorship for composition at the University of Music Lübeck. Her compositions, installations and interdisciplinary stage work have been featured at festivals such as the Warschauer Herbst, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Heroines of Sound, Berlin, ZeitRäume Basel, Festival Les Musiques, Marseille, among others, as well as in many concert series throughout Europe and the United States. Rosenberger is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. In the past, she has been awarded with the Hellman Fellowship, San Francisco, the Sony Scholar Award, and Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Commissions.
Her installation work VIVA VOCE and Room V won the “Mediaprojects Award” / Sitemapping of the Swiss Federal Agency (OFC), Berne. Her portrait CD TEXTUREN with the Wet Ink Ensemble, released on HatHut Records, has been awarded the prestigious Copland Recording Grant and was selected for the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Bestenliste 4_2012. Her music can be heard on Hat Hut Records, Unit Records and Akenaton.
Daria Semegen (Stony Brook University)
Daria Semegen is a composer of instrumental, vocal and electronic music. As a recognized pioneer and authority on electronic music composition , she has been the subject of many articles and several dissertations including A. E. Hinkle-Turner's doctoral dissertation "Daria Semegen: A Study of the Composer's Life", Work and Music (University of Illinois-Urbana). Semegen's writings on creative process, esthetics and pedagogy have been published in the U.S. and abroad. She studied at the Eastman School of Music, in mixed-media workshops at the Rochester Institute of Technology, at Yale and Columbia Universities and in Warsaw, Poland as a Fulbright fellow. She taught at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center from 1971-1975 and was a sound engineer at the Collection of World Music (Columbia University) working with field recordings of native musics from many continents. Her awards include six National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the 2009 Susan B. Anthony Lifetime Achievement from the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Leadership.
Recordings of her music include Rhapsody (for Yamaha MIDI grand piano), Electronic Composition No. 1; Arc (electronic/dance); Spectra, Music for Violin Solo; Jeux de Quatres. A performance of Daria Semegen’s work “Bargello” for electronic sounds with live instrument(s) features Dylan Ebrahimian with electric violin improvisation and Monica Bello on effects pedal. From 1990-1999 ,Daria Semegen was commissions coordinator for the World Premieres Concert series presented by the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players (CCP) at Stony Brook and in New York City.
Alice Shields (CPEMC/CMC 1964-1996)
Alice Shields creates cross-cultural electronic and acoustic operas and works for fixed media, voices, instruments, dance, theater, video and film. Her work is heavily influenced by non-Western forms of classical music and theater, such as Japan’s Noh Theater and India’s Bharata Natyam dance-drama. One of electronic music’s pioneers, Shields was Associate Director of the CPEMC from 1964-80, working alongside Milton Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevky, Otto Luening, Mario Davidovsky and Pril Smiley as a primary instructor at the Center, and composed electronic music at the Center from 1964-96. She also worked as the CMC’s Associate Director for Development from 1994-96. While working with the CMC’s digital technology from 1987-1996, she also held two residencies at the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music. She continues to create electronic music in her home studio.
Shields created some of the first electronic music cues for operas, including the Lake George Opera's Crucible (1966) and the Metropolitan Opera's Mourning Becomes Electra (1967) with Vladimir Ussachevsky. She created electronic cues for Sam Shepard’s radio plays Icarus and 4-H Club (1966) and The Witches’ Scenes for John Houseman's MacBeth (1967), and some of the first electronic film scores--Incredible Voyage (1967) and Line of Apogee (1968) with Ussachevsky, Luening and Smiley. She created some of the first electronic operas: Shaman (1987), Mass for the Dead (1992), Shivatanz (1993), and Apocalypse (1994). Shields' works are informed by her vocal training and onstage experience singing traditional and modern roles with the New York City Opera, Washington National Opera, Metropolitan Opera at the Forum and other companies from 1966-80. Her own electronic and acoustic music has been performed by New York City Opera VOX, Akademie der Künste (Berlin), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Venice Biennale, Arangham Dance Theater (India), and many others.
Shields holds three degrees from Columbia, including a DMA in composition, which was itself created for her and Charles Dodge. She has taught psychology of music at NYU and Rutgers, has lectured for the International Society for Research on Emotion, the American Psychological Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and Santa Fe Opera, and has served as grant reviewer for the National Science Foundation.
Pril Smiley (CPEMC—1963-95)
Pril Smiley (b. 1943, Mohonk Lake, N.Y.) became involved with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1963, during the pioneering years of the electronic music medium. In addition to composing and teaching at the Center, she served as Associate Director for 25 years, finally retiring in 1995. During her career there, Pril composed electronic music for over forty theatre, film, and dance productions, and served for six years as Electronic Music Consultant for the newly-opened Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City. She is the recipient of various awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Creative Artists’ Public Service grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
Ebonie Smith (Gender Amplified, Inc. & Atlantic Records)
Ebonie Smith is an award-winning music producer, audio engineer and singer-songwriter based in New York City. Ebonie is also the founder and president of Gender Amplified, Inc., an organization that celebrates and supports women and girls in music production and audio engineering. Ebonie received her first Grammy Certificate and RIAA-certified platinum plaque for work as an assistant engineer on Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording). She received her second Grammy Certificate for work as an assistant engineer on Sturgill Simpson's award-winning album A Sailor's Guide to Earth. She also engineered on Janelle Monáe’s Grammy-nominated album Dirty Computer and Cardi B’s Grammy-winning album Invasion of Privacy . In 2017, Ebonie was nominated for a Pensado Award for Best Break Thru Mixing Engineer. She currently works as an engineer, producer and studio coordinator for Atlantic Records. She is also an elected governor of the New York Chapter of The Recording Academy and member of the Producers & Engineers Wing.
Ebonie holds a master's degree in Music Technology from New York University and a bachelor's degree in Africana Studies from Barnard College, Columbia University. While in college, Ebonie received training at Columbia University's Computer Music Center and studied abroad in Cameroon, where she performed with bands, worked in studios and produced local artists.
Danielle Shlomit Sofer (Dublin, Ireland)
Danielle Sofer (she/her/they/them) is a co-founder of LGBTQ+ Music Study Group, where she served as Executive Director until 2020. Her scholarship examines various means of electronic mediation, exploring how gender cuts dynamically across current social justice activism, postcolonial resistances, as well as historical and systemic constitutions of race and sexuality—topics featuring extensively in a forthcoming monograph, Making Sex Sound: Vectors of Difference in Electronic Music (MIT Press). Her publications appear in American Music, Organised Sound, Contemporary Music Review, and the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie. Her research has been funded by the Royal Musical Association, the Society for Musicology in Ireland, the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society’s AMS 75 Publication Awards for Young Scholars Endowment, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Förderprogramm Forschung 2013+, and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). She has also enjoyed touring as a violist, fiddler, chorister, répétiteur, and sound technician, and earned BA with honors from SUNY New Paltz, an MMus in piano performance from Binghamton University, an MA in music history and theory from Stony Brook University, and a PhD with distinction in music aesthetics and musicology from Kunstuniversität Graz.
Laurie Spiegel (New York, NY)
Laurie Spiegel is an American composer. In the 1970s and ‘80s she worked at Bell Laboratories in both music and computer graphics, and is known primarily for her electronic-music compositions and algorithmic composition software. Her 1980s program Music Mouse for Macs, Amigas and Ataris introduced the idea of “intelligent instruments” to the wider world via personal computers. She plays guitar, lute and banjo and composes for traditional media as well as electronics. Her Night Thoughts for full orchestra was premiered on a BBC Prom concert in 2018.
Spiegel was part of New York’s downtown new music community. She withdrew from that scene in the early 1980s, believing its focus had shifted too far from artistic process to product. She subsequently centering her efforts on music technology, working with alphSyntauri, the McLeyvier, Eventide and on other computer-based creative tools for music as well as publishing her own software.
Spiegel's realization of Johannes Kepler's "Harmonices Mundi" was chosen for the opening track on the "Sounds of Earth" section of the golden record placed onboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Another work, titled "Sediment", was included in the 2012 film The Hunger Games. Spiegel was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2018.
Michael Sy Uy (Harvard University)
Michael Sy Uy (BA, University of California, Berkeley; MPhil, Oxford University; PhD, Harvard University) is the Allston Burr Resident Dean of Dunster House, Assistant Dean of Harvard College, Lecturer and Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Harvard University Department of Music.
His main areas of scholarly research focus on patronage, philanthropy, arts education, cultural policy, expertise, and connoisseurship. His book, Ask the Experts: How Ford, Rockefeller, and the NEA Changed American Music, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. His other published work appears in American Music, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Musicology, and Music and Arts in Action. He is the recipient of several teaching awards, including the Mindich Program in Engaged Scholarship’s Curricular Innovation Award, the Derek Bok Center Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Distinguished Faculty Award by the Harvard Foundation. He is an avid coxswain, runner, indoor rock climber, and plant caretaker.
Asha Tamirisa (Bates College)
Asha Tamirisa [she/her/hers] works with sound, video, film, and researches media histories. Along with many colleagues, Asha co-founded OPENSIGNAL, a collective of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic music and art practice. She now works with the organization TECHNE (technesound.org). Asha has taught sound and media production at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Girls Rock! Rhode Island, and Street Level Youth Media in Chicago. In 2019, she received Ph.D. in Computer Music and Multimedia and an M.A. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. Asha lives and works in Portland, ME and is currently an Assistant Professor at Bates College.
Sondra E. Woodruff II (Kelly Strayhorn Theater)
Sondra E. Woodruff II has spent a lifetime making music with 20 years in the music business, having worked as a recording artist, songwriter and composer, and guitarist. She graduated with a degree from the School of General Studies at Columbia University in 2019. While at Columbia, she worked with the “For the Daughters of Harlem: Working in Sound” program, which brings local young women of color to campus for workshops on recording and producing their own music—everything from creating song lyrics, to playing the guitar, to working with all of the technology in a studio. She is co-founder of Limelight Studios and Producer of Engagement and Social Impact at the Kelly Strayhorn Theater.
Nina Young (University of Southern California, Thornton School of Music)
Composer Nina C. Young writes music characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy. Her experience in the electronic studio informs her acoustic work, which takes as its given not melody and harmony, but sound itself. Young’s music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the New York Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Orkest de ereprijs, Philadelphia Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Argento, Divertimento, Either/Or, JACK Quartet, Metropolis, Scharoun, Sixtrum, wild Up, and Yarn/Wire. Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize in Musical Composition, Nina has received awards and fellowships from the Koussevitzky Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Civitella-Ranieri, the Copland Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, and BMI. Recent commissions include "Tread softly" for the NYPhil's Project 19, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and a multimedia work for the American Brass Quintet and EMPAC’s wavefield synthesis system. Her debut album "Traced Upon Cinders", a collaboration with Ensemble Échappé and Benjamin Grow will be out later this year on Innova.
A graduate of McGill and MIT, Nina completed her DMA at Columbia University where she was an active participant at the Columbia Computer Music Center. Young is an Assistant Professor of Composition at USC's Thornton School of Music. She serves as Co-Artistic Director of NY-based new music sinfonietta Ensemble Échappé. Her music is published by Peermusic Classical.
www.ninacyoung.com