Robert Reid Allan is a Scottish composer based in East London. A graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, his work has been performed by ensembles including Ensemble Modern, the Royal Scottish National and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestras, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, and Psappha and Red Note Ensembles. He is also in demand as a pianist, répétiteur and engraver, is a huge bookworm, and is a decent cook of vegan food.
Jessica Aszodi's genre-bounding and label-defying performances have been described as ‘thrilling’. (LA Times) and ‘intense’. (NY Times). She has been a soloist with the Sydney, San Diego, Tirol, Melbourne and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, Victorian Opera, ICE, Sydney Chamber Opera and many others. She has featured in festivals around the world including Klangspuren, Aspen, Tectonics and Tanglewood. Aszodi is co-director of Resonant Bodies Festival Australia and artistic associate of BIFEM. She holds a DMA and has contributed articles to several books and journals.
Michael Baldwin is an American composer currently exploring approaches to composing backgrounds of socio-musical contexts. This has included composing audio guides that lead listeners through discrete musical, choreographic and emotional territories during a range of social and musical activities within concert environments. He holds a PhD in music composition from the University of Huddersfield, acquired under the supervision of Aaron Cassidy and Liza Lim, for a course of research titled Effaced, Reflected, Being: Documents and/of/as Musicking Bodies.
Robert Barry is a freelance writer and composer based in London. His music has appeared in films, dance performances, and the pop charts. As a writer, his work has been published in The Wire, The Guardian, The Atlantic Monthly, and Frieze amongst others. He is currently Art, Books and Film Editor at The Quietus and a faculty member at London's Institute of Contemporary Music Performance. His book The Music of the Future was published by Repeater in March 2017.
Christian Carey is a composer, performer and musicologist specializing in music theory and contemporary music. He is an Associate Professor at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey.
Max Erwin is a musicologist and composer originally from Franklin, Tennessee. His research is focused on the post-war European avant-garde, especially practices associated with so-called ‘total serialism’. He is completing a PhD at the University of Leeds under Martin Iddon, where he is the recipient of a Leeds Anniversary Research Scholarship. His writing has been published in Tempo, Music & Literature, Revue belge de Musicologie, Nuove Musiche and Cacophony. He has also scored several film, video game, and multimedia projects.
Christopher Fox is a composer who sometimes writes about music too. His work is the subject of the book Perspectives on the Music of Christopher Fox: Straight Lines in Broken Times (Ashgate-Routledge, 2016). CDs of his music are available on the Ergodos, HatHut, Metier and NMC labels; the most recent, Headlong, was released in February 2018 and presents Fox's complete music for clarinet, played by Heather Roche. He is editor of TEMPO and professor of music at Brunel University London.
Madison Heying is a Teaching Fellow and PhD candidate in Cultural Musicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on electronic and experimental music. She is particularly interested in how technology shapes musical and compositional practices, and conversely, how musicians and composers craft, manipulate, utilize technology to suit their creative aims. Her dissertation explores these issues through a study of composer and computer scientist Carla Scaletti, her compositions, the Kyma system, and the Kyma user community.
Anna Höstman received a DMA in Composition from the University of Toronto in 2013. Her research focused on the chamber works of Martin Arnold. Her own compositions seek out tactile encounters with the world while also extending into story, history and landscape. From 2005–08, she was composer in residence of the Victoria Symphony. In 2012, she collaborated with Continuum on an anthropological concert-installation for soprano and ensemble featuring Kwagiulth singer Marion Newman, a large hung wall of erasure poetry documenting the near extinction of Canada's aboriginal languages, and multiple videos exploring the intertwined history of the Nuxalk and Norwegians in British Columbia.
Stephanie Jones is currently studying for a PhD in Musicology at the University of Leeds under the supervision of Martin Iddon and Derek Scott.
Violetta Kostka trained as a musicologist at the University of Poznań and received her PhD degree from the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Currently she works at the Academy of Music in Gdańsk. She has won scholarships from the University of Cambridge, the Polish Library in Paris and the State Committee of Scientific Research in Poland. Her output includes a book on Tadeusz Z. Kassern's music and more than 70 articles, mainly on the music of twentieth-century Polish composers. She has participated in musicological conferences in Poland and elsewhere, including Leipzig, Greifswald, Frankfurt an der Oder, London, Canterbury, Vilnius, Lisbon and St Petersburg. In April 2013 she lectured at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna.
Raised in Buenos Aires as a jazz performer and classical composer, Federico Llach creates music that combines the intimacy of concert music with the energy of popular music. His music was forever changed as a result of his experience with modular synthesizers and electronics of all kinds. It has been presented at venues as geographically and aesthetically diverse as the Festival Internacional de Jazz Buenos Aires and the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. As researcher, Llach has focused on the intersection between music technology and theatricality in concert music. He has a PhD in Composition from the University of California Santa Barbara. Llach is the founder and director of the Now Hear Ensemble.
Neil Luck is a composer and PhD researcher at the University of York. His practice-led research focuses on the relationship of experimental music-theatre to other interdisciplinary art forms. He has written for a range of soloists and ensembles in the UK and abroad, and has presented work at music venues, festivals and galleries internationally. Neil is the founder of the music-theatre ensemble ARCO, and co-founder of squib-box alongside Adam de la Cour and Federico Reuben.
Claudia Molitor is a composer/artist whose work draws on traditions of music and sound art but also extends to video, performance and fine art practices. Exploring the relationships between listening and seeing as well as embracing collaboration as compositional practice is central to this work. Recent work includes Sonorama with Electra Productions, Turner Contemporary and the British Library, which received a British Composer Award in 2016, Vast White Stillness for Spitalfields Festival and Brighton Festival, The Singing Bridge, installed at Somerset House and Waterloo Bridge during Totally Thames festival and Walking with Partch for Ensemble Musikfabrik at hcmf//. www.claudiamolitor.org.
Luke Nickel is an award-winning Manitoban artist and researcher currently residing in Bristol, UK. His work investigates notions of memory, collaboration and musical borrowing. He has worked with ensembles such as EXAUDI, the Bozzini Quartet, Architek Percussion and the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, and has collaborated with galleries and organizations such as the Panoply Performance Laboratory (Brooklyn, NYC), G39 (Cardiff, UK) and Arnolfini (Bristol, UK). Luke is also an active curator, and currently co-directs the Cluster: New Music+Integrated Arts Festival in Winnipeg, MB, Canada.
Lauren Redhead is a lecturer in music at Goldsmiths, University of London. 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.
Neil Thomas Smith is a composer and musicologist. He works as a Teaching Associate at the University of Nottingham, where he recently completed his PhD on German composer Mathias Spahlinger.
Matthew Ward is a graduate of the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral thesis was on twelfth-century Anglo-Norman chant. He has lectured on Liturgical Music at St Mary's University, Twickenham, and has taught music at Hampton School and Mayfield School, where he is currently Director of Music. Dr Ward is a choral conductor and singer and an Assistant Director of the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge.
Nick Williams is a Leeds-based composer, lecturer and occasional writer on music. His music has been performed throughout Europe, the USA and Canada. He is currently writing a new work for Dutch ensemble Kluster5 and collaborating with visual artist Kevin Laycock for an exhibition/installation for Southport art gallery due to be shown in late 2019. At present he is senior lecturer in composition at the University of West London.
