Following studies at the University of Manchester and specialising in tuba at the Royal Northern College of Music, Jack Adler-McKean gained a Masters in Music in Hannover, generously supported by fellowships from, amongst others, The Leverhulme Trust and the Deutsche Akademischer Austauchdienst. He is frequently asked to collaborate with new music ensembles including Klangforum Wien and Ensemble musikFabrik, orchestras including the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with conductors including Sir Simon Rattle and Heinz Holliger, with period instrument ensembles on the serpent and the ophicleide, dubstep club nights on the sousaphone, and as a composer and arranger for Potenza Music.
Laura Bowler is a composer living and working in London and Manchester. She has been commissioned by ensembles and orchestras across the globe including BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini (Canada), Ensemble Linea (France), Ensemble Phace (Austria), Ensemble Lydenskab/Den Jyske Opera (Denmark), RADA, ROH2, The Opera Group and Manchester Camerata, amongst many others. As well as being a Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama she has recently joined the Composition Faculty at the RNCM. She is currently working on an opera with internationally renowned playwright, Edward Bond premiering at the Arcola Theatre in August 2016.
Leah Broad is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Daniel Grimley, specialising in Scandinavian modernist theatre. She also edits an arts website, The Oxford Culture Review, where more of her work can be found.
Liam Cagney did his doctorate at City University London, supervised by Ian Pace. His dissertation is a historiographical study of the early emergence of French Spectral Music with a particular focus on Grisey's oeuvre. As a music critic he has written for the Telegraph, Opera Magazine and Sinfini Music, among other publications.
The work of the American artist and composer Seth Cluett explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, celebrates minutae by amplifying impossible tasks, and explores the working of memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society. Creating work 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 in 13 countries on five continents at venues such as MoMA/PS1, The Kitchen, GRM, and STEIM and is documented on Line, Sedimental, Notice and Winds Measure recordings. Cluett is an Assistant Professor of Music and Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology where he teaches courses in electronic music and experimental sound practices.
John Croft is a composer and Reader in Music at Brunel University London.
Since studying in Holland in the early 1990s, Rose Dodd has received numerous prizes for her electronic works, including a Mention at Prix Ars Electronica'99. Completing her PhD in 2006 with Christopher Fox, in 2011 she began a substantial residency period supported by NOTAM, Oslo, creating a number of works including mobius ii for Hardanger & electronics, 2011, Waternish Ballad for Scottish fiddle & electronics, 2014, recently completing pieces for the pianist Philip Thomas (2013) and the 31-tone Huygens-Fokker organ, Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam, March 2015. Her first book, an edited volume Perspectives on the Music of Christopher Fox (Ashgate) will be published in 2016.
William Dougherty is an American composer whose works have been performed internationally by leading ensembles and soloists. With a special interest in the music of Horatiu Radulescu, William has written and presented research into the composer's life and works in the UK and Switzerland and as a contributor to TEMPO. William is currently pursuing a Doctorate of the Musical Arts in composition at Columbia University in New York City under the guidance of Georg Friedrich Haas, George Lewis and Fred Lerdahl.
American soprano Christie Finn has performed with ensembles such as Asko | Schoenberg, ekmeles, Experiments in Opera, Hezarfen, Ictus, Nadar, and VocaalLAB. She is co-founder of the experimental music duo NOISE-BRIDGE and a member of Forum Neue Vokalmusik and Ensemble Hörwerk. Festivals include the Beijing Modern Music Festival and Festival Mixtur (Barcelona), and recordings include Ligeti's Aventures and Nouvelles Aventures for Saarländische Rundfunk. She is an active blogger and poet and, since 2012, has served as managing director of the Hampsong Foundation, developing multimedia projects to tell the history of culture through art song. She currently resides in Stuttgart, Germany.
Cameron Graham is a composer, performer and occasional music writer living in London. His music explores electroacoustic treatments, spatial perception, acoustics and resonance. He is the co-founder and director of Spun Through Shadows, an organisation that promotes cross-arts practice in the UK and Europe. He also leads the experimental punk jazz group Bald Dog. He recently completed the Mmus in composition at the Royal College of Music, receiving a distinction as an RCM scholar.
Martin Iddon studied composition and musicology at the Universities of Cambridge and Durham and studied composition privately with Steve Martland, Chaya Czernowin and Steven Kazuo Takasugi. His music has been performed in North America, Europe, and Australasia by Ensemble SurPlus, Distractfold, ekmeles, the Kairos Quartett, Heather Roche, Eva Zöllner, Rei Nakamura, and others; it is published by Composers Edition. His books New Music at Darmstadt and John Cage and David Tudor are both published by Cambridge University Press. He is Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds.
Paul Kilbey lives in London and writes freelance about contemporary and classical music for various publications. Between 2012 and early 2014 he was editor of the classical music website Bachtrack and he now works in the Royal Opera House's Publishing and Interpretation department. He has MA and MPhil degrees in music and musicology from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
Luke Nickel is an award-winning Canadian interdisciplinary artist and researcher currently based at Bath Spa University. His work investigates notions of notation, re-performance, loss of fidelity, and memory. He has worked with ensembles such as EXAUDI, the Bozzini Quartet, and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and has collaborated with institutions such as the Panoply Performance Laboratory (Brooklyn, NYC), G39 (Cardiff), and the Arnolfini (Bristol). He is also the Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Cluster: New Music + Integrated Arts Festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Alistair Noble is a freelance composer, musicologist, pianist and teacher. He was previously a lecturer in music and Associate Dean at The Australian National University in Canberra, and in 2014 was a Visiting Associate Professor in the music college of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. Recent compositions include Glasteppich I-III, for piano, flute, viola and string orchestra, premiered by Arcko Symphonic in Melbourne. Alistair writes about music for The Wire, The Conversation, Partial Durations and White Fungus magazine. His research concerning the music of US composer Morton Feldman has been published in the book Composing Ambiguity: the early music of Morton Feldman (Ashgate, 2013).
Ian Pace is a pianist of long-established reputation, specialising in the farthest reaches of musical modernism and transcendental virtuosity, as well as a writer and musicologist focusing on issues of performance, music and society and the avant-garde. His repertoire focuses particularly upon music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including a wide range of works by contemporary British, French, German and Italian and other composers as well as the ‘classics’ of modern music. Since 2011 he has been Head of Performance at City University London.
Lauren Redhead is a lecturer in music at Canterbury Christ Church University. She is a composer whose work has been performed at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the London Ear Festival, the London Contemporary Music Festival, Full of Noises Festival, Firenze Suona Contemporanea, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, and many venues in the UK and Europe. She is also an organist whose performance focuses on experimental music and the interpretation of graphic and open notation, and her musicological work examines the aesthetics and sociosemiotics of contemporary music.
Camden Reeves is a composer of instrumental and vocal music for concert performance. His catalogue includes a large amount of chamber music, including three string quartets and two piano trios (the first, Starlight Squid, has received over 30 performances world-wide), orchestral music, and works for solo instruments. In recent years he has become particularly renowned for his piano music. His music is published by Edition Peters. Reeves is Senior Lecturer in Composition and Head of Music at the University of Manchester, where he has taught since 2002.
Georgia Rodgers is a composer with a particular interest in sound, space and listening. She often writes music that combines instrumental and electronic sound. In 2015 she was selected for the Sound and Music ‘Embedded’ scheme, taking part in the Quatuor Bozzini's Composers' Kitchen workshop in Montreal. She is studying for a PhD at City University, London under the supervision of Dr Newton Armstrong. Georgia has a background in physics and also works as an acoustician for a firm of consulting engineers.
Robert Stein has contributed reviews of concerts, books and CDs to TEMPO for over 17 years. Starting as a literary critic, his first book The Very End of Air was published in 2011 (Oversteps Books). He is the General Manager of The Little Orchestra.
Philip Thomas specialises in performing experimental notated and improvised music as a soloist and with the ensemble Apartment House. Recent solo projects have included premiere performances of works by Michael Finnissy, Howard Skempton and Christian Wolff and programmes of Canadian and British experimental music. CD releases include a triple-CD set of Wolff's solo piano music, music for multiple pianos by Morton Feldman, and music by Jürg Frey, Christopher Fox, Tim Parkinson, Michael Pisaro and James Saunders. He is currently Professor of Performance at the University of Huddersfield.
Laura Tunbridge is Associate Professor in Music at the University of Oxford. Her research interests currently focus on the twentieth-century reception of German Romanticism, with a particular focus on song. Her publications include Schumann's Late Style (Cambridge, 2007) and The Song Cycle (Cambridge, 2010), and articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Representations.
James Weeks is a composer and conductor. His work typically explores pared-down, ‘primary’ musical syntaxes and systems, with particular interests in modality, microtonality, modularity and indeterminacy. Recent work has been completed for Plus-Minus, Quatuor Bozzini, Apartment House, CoMA, EXAUDI and Ekmeles. He is Artistic Director of EXAUDI, which he founded in 2002 with Juliet Fraser, and is widely active as a conductor in the field of new music. He is Associate Head of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, and lives in Gateshead.
Arnold Whittall is Professor Emeritus of Music Theory & Analysis at King's College London. His recent writings include Introduction to Serialism (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and contributions to Maxwell Davies Studies (CUP, 2009) and Elliott Carter Studies (CUP, 2012). Recently published articles in journals other than TEMPO include ‘Dendritic designs: Birtwistle's String Quartet: The Tree of Strings’ (The Musical Times, Autumn 2011) and ‘Being courteous: the view from the old country’ (Music Theory Spectrum 33/2, Fall 2011). Arnold Whittall also edits the Cambridge University Press Music Since 1900 series (formerly Music in the 20 thCentury).
Nick Williams is a composer living in Leeds. His work has been performed throughout Europe, the USA and Canada. He also writes and teaches at Huddersfield University. He is currently writing a new work for the Dutch ensemble Electra.
Toby Young is a composer and writer from London. Since studying with Robin Holloway at Cambridge, his music has been performed by ensembles and orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Academy of Ancient Music, Fretwork and Endymion Ensemble, and many choirs including Westminster Abbey, King's College Cambridge and the BBC Singers. Toby is a college tutor at Oxford and visiting fellow in creativity at Warwick. In addition to TEMPO, he contributes to Popular Music and Gramophone, specialising in interdisciplinary creative processes and Electronic Dance Music. His music is published by Faber Music.
