Sune Anderberg is a writer, musicologist and co-editor of the Danish online new music journal Seismograf. He studied at the University of Copenhagen, immersing himself in pop culture to begin with but making a late arrival at the new music scene, intrigued by its tradition of reflective criticism.
Joshua Banks Mailman has been teaching music at Columbia University, NYU, University of California Santa Barbara, and University of Alabama, since earning his PhD in Music Theory from the Eastman School in 2010. He has written on narrative, embodiment, electroacoustic music, interactive music technologies, and post-tonal analysis. His writings appear in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Perspectives of New Music, Journal of Sonic Studies, Psychology of Music, Music Theory Online, Open Space Magazine and Leonardo Electronic Almanac. He is co-chair of the Analysis of Post-1945 Music Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory.
Diego Castro-Magas is a guitarist specialising in contemporary performance. He has collaborated with composers such as Aaron Cassidy, James Dillon, James Erber, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Finnissy, Christopher Fox and Bryn Harrison towards the performance of their solo guitar music. Recently, he launched Shrouded Mirrors, a CD of recent British guitar music on Huddersfield Contemporary Records. His research interests are concerned with performing issues in contemporary guitar (both classical and electric), body, gesture and critical theory. Since 2007 he has been lecturer in performance at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile; he is completing a PhD at the University of Huddersfield.
Julian Day is a composer, artist, researcher and broadcaster. His work is conceptually and materially driven, drawing on both music and visual art. He has presented work at Whitechapel Gallery, Royal Academy of Music, Café Oto, MATA, Bang On A Can Marathon, Museum of Contemporary Art and the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial. His music has been performed by Third Angle, Ensemble Offspring, Synergy Percussion, Lisa Moore and Zubin Kanga. Day co-directs the participatory project Super Critical Mass and performs as AIR (An Infinity Room). He has presented papers at Harvard and Goldsmiths as well as on many programmes for ABC and BBC radio.
Frank Denyer is a composer. Born in 1943, he studied at the Guildhall School of Music, subsequently forming the new music group Mouth of Hermes (1968–74) which focused in particular on music by the New York School and new Japanese composers. Following a PhD in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University and a stint as Research Fellow in African music, University of Nairobi, in 1981 he joined the teaching staff of Dartington College, where he later became Professor of Composition. He is founder and long-term member of the Amsterdam-based Barton Workshop. Albums of his work have been released on Orchid, Continuum, Etcetera, Tzadik, amongst others; the latest, Whispers (2015), is on Another Timbre.
During and after studying architecture at Mimar Sinan University, Turkish artist and musician Cevdet Erek was a member of the music band Nekropsi. He finished a Master's in Sound Engineering & Design at ITU MIAM and was an artist-in-residence at Rijksakademie (Amsterdam, 2005–06). Erek's installations were shown in dOCUMENTA (2012), Istanbul Biennial (2003, 2013 and 2015), Sydney Biennial (2016) and MAXXI (2014 and 2015), among others. His published books are: SSS – Shore Scene Soundtrack (2008, BAS), Room of Rhythms 1 (2012, Walther König) and Less Empty Maybe (2015, Revolver). A record on vinyl of excerpts from his soundtrack to Frenzy (72nd Venice Film Festival, Special Jury Prize) was released by Subtext Recordings UK in 2016. He works at Istanbul Technical University.
Max Erwin is a musicologist and composer originally from Franklin, Tennessee. His research is primarily focused on the post-war European avant-garde, especially so-called ‘total serialism’. His concert music has been performed in North America, Europe and Australasia, and he has scored more than 30 film, TV, video game, commercial and multimedia projects. He graduated cum laude from the University of Southern California on a Presidential scholarship in 2013 and is currently completing a PhD at Leeds University, where he is the recipient of the Herbert Thompson Scholarship.
Christopher Fox is a composer who sometimes writes about music too. He is widely regarded as one of the most individual composers of his generation, often working at a tangent to the musical mainstream and basing his compositional career around close collaborations with particular performers, including the instrumental groups the Ives Ensemble, KNM Berlin and Apartment House, and the vocal ensembles The Clerks and EXAUDI. His work is the subject of the book Perspectives on the Music of Christopher Fox: Straight Lines in Broken Times to be published by Routledge in June 2016.
Journalist, author and disc jockey Kurt Gottschalk has published two books of fiction, Little Apples: A Story Cycle and Sentences, both through Lulu press. His writings about music have appeared in The Wire, New York Classical Review, New Music Box, All About Jazz, Downbeat, NYC Jazz Record, The Brooklyn Rail and Time Out-New York, as well as publications in France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal and Russia. He is the producer and host of the programme Miniature Minotaurs on WFMU radio. A native of central Illinois, he has lived in New York City for more than 20 years.
Stephen Graham is a Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. His book, Sounds of the Underground, was published in April 2016 by University of Michigan Press.
Paul Griffiths has been writing about new music for almost half a century, and is the author of Modern Music and After (third edition, 2010), La musica del novecento (2014) and several monographs. He has also, as a writer, collaborated with several composers, including Elliott Carter (What Next?), Hans Abrahamsen (let me tell you) and James Wood (Gulliver).
Adam Harper is based at the University of Oxford, where he researches the relationships between technology and aesthetics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western musics of all kinds. He is also a critic for Wire and The Fader, and the author of Infinite Music.
Mark Hutchinson is a Lecturer in Music at York St John University. His research focuses upon creative approaches towards the analysis of recent contemporary music, and in particular upon ways of bridging the gap between listening, analysis and critical thought. He is also active as a piano accompanist and oboist. His first book, Coherence in New Music: Experience, Aesthetics, Analysis, was published by Ashgate in July 2016.
Sarah Jeffery is a recorder player and clog dancer currently based in the Netherlands. Having recently graduated cum laude from her master studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Sarah now collaborates closely with composers, in particular to create music theatre. She has founded a range of ensembles, with whom she regularly performs throughout Europe. Fusing her roots in British folk traditions with her experiences in the contemporary music world, she explores the combination of percussive clog dance, live electronics and Carnatic improvisation with contemporary recorder playing. Sarah also writes for publications such as Primephonic and Blokfluitist.
Sarah Nicolls is an experimenting pianist and inventor of the Inside-Out Piano, designed to make ‘inside piano’ playing easier and more visible. Her current vertical grand stands 2.5m tall and swings! Sarah's first own-material solo album is ‘We're inside and outside’, and her theatre show, ‘Moments of Weightlessness’, sees her pushing, ratcheting and swinging the piano, talking about the process of invention and discovery as a metaphor for her journey into motherhood. Her research has been funded by Arts Council England, Sound and Music, AHRC, EPSRC, Athena Swan and BRIEF, and she is currently an OCM BOOM artist, developing new outdoor art.
Patrick Ozzard-Low is a composer, pianist and author. He studied composition with Bill Hopkins—the sole compositional disciple of Jean Barraqué—and much later with Michael Finnissy. In 2015, when Elisabeth Smalt gave the premiere of ‘Sonata: In Oppositio’' (2007) for solo viola in Los Angeles, the LA Times wrote that it was ‘closest to Barraqué’s Piano Sonata … in spirit if not in sound, structure or style’. Since about 2008, however, his music has become increasingly tonal and melodic. He founded in London the Centre for New Musical Instruments (2000–2004); his book New Instruments for New Music, a catalogue raisonné of new acoustic instruments, designs and technologies, is forthcoming.
Paul Rapoport became familiar with Ben Johnston's music in the mid-1960s. He completed a PhD in musicology in the USA in 1975 and was a professor of music at universities in Canada for 30 years. He has written several books on music, many articles, and a few hundred reviews, mostly for Fanfare Magazine in the USA. He is the originator of QuartetWeb, a website devoted to data and documents about string quartets, both the compositions and the performers, of the past hundred years.
British soprano Natalie Raybould studied at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, and the Royal Academy of Music, London, and was awarded an Associateship of the RAM in 2011 for her contribution to contemporary music. Natalie has worked with Opera North, Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera, Little Angel Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, The Old Vic, Aldeburgh Productions and many others in developing new operas, concert works, music theatre and plays. Recent credits include Yesterday Tomorrow (Annie Dorsen), Song Recital (Pierre-Yves Macé) for Festival d'Automne à Paris, Harawi (Messiaen) for London Philharmonia, and Star Me Kitten (Alexander Schubert) for soundinitiative Paris.
Peter Reynolds is a composer and writer on music living in Cardiff. He is a part-time member of staff at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and from September 2016 will take up the post of Composer-in-Residence for Young Music Maker of Dyfed. In 2013 he was awarded a Creative Wales grant from the Arts Council of Wales to develop new compositional work. He is a regular contributor of programme notes, and in 2009 the BBC published his history of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
Sam Richards is an improviser, composer, folklorist, poet and writer. He studied composition, piano and improvisation with Alfred Nieman at the Guildhall, played in events organised by Cornelius Cardew, and was tutored in singing traditional songs and ballads by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. He has made many recordings of improvised, jazz and folk music, and has broadcast talks and performances on BBC Radios 2, 3 and 4. His published books include Sonic Harvest, John Cage As…, The Engaged Musician, and Dartington College of Arts – Learning by Doing. He improvises solo, with the trio Half Moon Assemblage, and leads the Jazzlab. He teaches part time on the music degree at Plymouth University.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson is editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Music. He has written about contemporary music on his blog, The Rambler, since 2003, and for the BBC, Guardian, Southbank Centre and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book on modern music since 1989. He lives in London.
Canadian composer Marc Sabat (born 1965) is based in Berlin. He makes pieces for concert and installation settings, drawing inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of microtonal Just Intonation and of various music traditions – folk, experimental and classical. Sabat studied composition, violin and mathematics at the University of Toronto, the Juilliard School, and McGill University, as well as working privately with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney and Walter Zimmermann. Together with Wolfgang von Schweinitz he has developed the Extended Helmholtz-Ellis JI Pitch Notation. He teaches at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Scores and editions are available from Plainsound Music Edition.
Kevin Volans was born in South Africa, and studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. He now is an Irish citizen. After a productive collaboration with the Kronos quartet in the 1980s, his work, principally in the field of chamber music, has been regularly performed worldwide. Latterly, he has turned his attention to writing for orchestra as well as collaborating with visual artists. Principal performances in the last years include the Berliner Musikfest, Vienna State Opera, Lincoln Center, Conzertgebouw, Pompidou Centre, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts, the Edinburgh Festival, the Barbican, South Bank, Wigmore Hall, London and several times in the BBC Proms.
