Daniel Agi was born in 1979 in Mashta-Azaar, Syria. He studied flute in the conservatories of Cologne and Freiburg with Hans Martin Mueller and Professor Robert Aitken. In 2006/7, he was a member of the International Ensemble Modern Academy, where he received his master's degree in the performing of contemporary music. The focus of Daniel's work lies in the field of contemporary music. With his ensemble, hand werk, he has played in major festivals such as Acht Brücken – Musik für Köln, and the Wittener Tagen für Neue Kammermusik. Daniel has also played with Insomnio Ensemble, Ensemble Surplus, ensemble musikFabrik, and as a soloist. His flute quartet, Verquer, crosses boundaries between Latin, jazz and pop, while his work with pianist Jamina Gerl, Trio Contrejour and orchestras like Sinfonietta Köln and Folkwang Kammerorchester are dedicated to the classical repertoire.
Michael Baldwin is an American composer currently exploring approaches to composing backgrounds of sociomusical 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.
Mark Barden studied composition with Lewis Nielson, Rebecca Saunders, Mathias Spahlinger, and Jörg Widmann. He holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, and Goldsmiths. His works have won numerous international prizes (Siemens Composer's Prize, residency at the Berlin Academy of the Arts, Commission Prize from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts) and feature regularly at major contemporary music festivals (e.g. Darmstadt, Donaueschingen, Witten). Mark Barden lives in Berlin.
Helen Bledsoe is a flutist based in Cologne, although her solo performances of improvised and composed music have taken her around the block a few times. She has published a number of articles for a number of journals although she is not particularly good with numbers. She has performed with many European groups as a guest and has actually managed to hold down a job for 20 years with Ensemble Musikfabrik.
Christian Carey is a composer, performer, and musicologist specializing in music theory. He edits the contemporary classical website Sequenza 21 and is based in New York and New Jersey in the USA.
Simon Cummings is a composer, writer and researcher based in the Cotswolds. He composes instrumental and electronic music, both of which focus upon gradual processes of transformation. He has recently completed a PhD in composition at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire under the supervision of Richard Causton and Howard Skempton. The primary focus of his research is the exploration and development of new algorithmic and stochastic approaches to musical composition. When not composing, Cummings is an accomplished writer about new music; he is the author of contemporary/avant-garde music blog 5:4 and regularly contributes to assorted print and web journals. www.simoncummings.com.
Lawrence Dunn is a composer based in Manchester. Recent pieces have been written for Philip Thomas, Plus-Minus Ensemble, Quatuor Bozzini, Juliet Fraser, and Ilan Volkov with the BBC Scottish Symphony. He is currently continuing a doctorate at Huddersfield with Bryn Harrison.
Atli Ingólfsson is a composer and professor of composition at the Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavik. Born in Njarðvík, Iceland, in 1962 he studied classical guitar, composition and philosophy before continuing his composition studies at Milan Conservatory and then in France, eventually studying privately with Gérard Grisey. His oeuvre comprises solo, chamber, orchestral and vocal works which have been performed across Europe. He is the author of three music theatre works which have been staged at Cinnober Teater in Gothenburg, and repeated in Oslo and Reykjavik: Suzannah (2005; based on a play by Jon Fosse), Play Alter Native (2011; based on a play by Finn Iunker) and Njals saga (2015; based on the homonymous Icelandic saga).
Evan Johnson is an American composer whose music focuses on extremes of density and of reticence, of difficulty and of sparsity, and on hiding itself. His work has been performed by leading ensembles and soloists throughout North America, Europe and beyond, at American and international festivals of contemporary music and at venues such as Miller Theatre and Wigmore Hall. The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships in composition, he is also active as a writer on music for both specialist and general audiences. More information is available at http://www.evanjohnson.info.
Samuel Johnstone is a writer and musician based in Berlin. He has written on contemporary music for Sinfini Music, Bachtrack and The Cusp, and has contributed programme notes to the BBC Proms and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He completed degrees at the University of Oxford and School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he wrote theses on Krautrock and Japanoise. A collection of his writing is available at www.spljohnstone.com
Phil Maguire is an experimental musician/improviser/sound artist making reductive music that explores emptiness and malfunction. Simplicity is at the core of his work. He uses cheap electronics, open source software, synthesis, and obsolete audio equipment to create sparse sonic environments for personal reflection. These are often very quiet; very loud; loud made quiet; quiet made loud.
Frankie Perry is a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is supervised by Julian Johnson and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Her doctoral project examines twenty-first-century arrangements and re-imaginings of nineteenth-century lieder; broader research interests include the study of musical arrangement and transcription, and the scholarly, performed, and composed reception histories of nineteenth-century music.
David Pocknee is an experimental composer and writer based in Manchester. He is a founding member of the New Fordist Organization artist collective (www.acesinstitute.eu), used to co-run the Weisslich concert series (www.weisslich.com), and he publishes conceptual work as Much Too Much Noise (http://mtmn.ricercata.org). www.davidpocknee.com.
Caroline Potter is a writer and lecturer who specialises in French music. A Visiting Fellow of the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, she has published books on Satie, the Boulanger sisters, and Dutilleux. She is a frequent broadcaster and was Series Advisor to the Philharmonia Orchestra's ‘City of Light: Paris 1900–1950’ season. Her latest book, Erik Satie, a Parisian Composer and his World (Boydell Press, 2016), was named Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson is author of Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (University of California Press) and editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Music, 6th edition. He blogs about contemporary music at johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com.
Matthew Shlomowitz is a composer of concert music and performance pieces. He is Associate Professor in Composition at University of Southampton, and co-directs the new music ensemble Plus Minus with Joanna Bailie. He has three ongoing projects: Popular Contexts, a series combining recordings of recognisable real world sound with instrumental music; Letter Pieces, open score works which combine physical actions and music; and a series of lecture styled performance pieces addressing issues such as aesthetic judgement and emotional responses to art works.
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.
Martin Suckling was born in Glasgow in 1981. After teenage years performing in the National Youth Orchestra and in ceilidh bands around Scotland, he studied music at Clare College Cambridge and King's College London. He was Paul Mellon Fellow at Yale University from 2003–05, undertook doctoral research at the Royal Academy of Music, and subsequently became a Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at Somerville College, Oxford. His teachers include George Benjamin, Robin Holloway, Paul Patterson, Martin Bresnick, Ezra Laderman and Simon Bainbridge. He has won numerous awards including the 2008 Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize and a Philip Leverhulme Prize and been commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Britten Sinfonia and Hebrides Ensemble. Champions of his works include Ilan Volkov, François-Xavier Roth, Robin Ticciati and Pierre-André Valade. He is currently a Lecturer in the Music Department at the University of York.
