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.
Asher Ian Armstrong is a native of Knoxville, Tennessee. As a child he took piano lessons with an enthusiastic pianist from South Africa, and began playing bluegrass with his sisters. This led to formal study at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, the Ian Tomlin School of Music in Edinburgh, and the University of Toronto, where Asher is now a Lecturer of Piano. Asher has performed, taught and lectured throughout North America and in Europe, and he is actively involved in performances and the creation of new music, having premiered works by such emerging artists as Tasmanian composer Dylan Sheridan. Asher has also taught at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and given guest recitals and masterclasses in Canada and the USA.
Jorge Boehringer is a composer, performer, artist and researcher. Prior to moving to Huddersfield to pursue a Doctorate in Music Composition he taught Experimental and Interactive Media in the Czech Republic. Boehringer utilizes a protean platform for artistic experimentation and presentation, composing installations, musical performances, recordings, texts, three-dimensional objects and other situations related to processes of emergent form and the variable nature of time and personal experience. He is also responsible for the solo performance catastrophe known as Core of the Coalman. Illustrated examples may be found at http://jorgeboehringer.tumblr.com/.
Liam Cagney earned 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.
Leo Chadburn is a writer, performer and composer of experimental music, pop music and music for the gallery. Recent non-pop works include The Indistinguishables (2014) for Quatuor Bozzini and Freezywater (2016) for Apartment House, and collaborations with visual artists Jennet Thomas and Cerith Wyn Evans. His music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 1, 3 and 6 Music. His writing has appeared in publications including The Wire, the Quietus and Frieze.
Susanna Eastburn took up the role of Chief Executive of Sound and Music in September 2012. This is the latest senior appointment in a varied career that has included being Artistic Director and Chief Executive of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Director (Music) at Arts Council and Executive Director of London International Festival of Theatre. Her background and particular interest is in new music and in supporting composers at different times in their career. She is on the Board of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and is a Trustee of Trinity College London. She is a keen chamber musician and plays the viola.
James Gardner is a freelance composer, broadcaster, performer and lecturer based in Auckland, New Zealand. He co-founded the group/remix team Apollo 440 in London, leaving in 1993 in order to concentrate on notated composition. Between 1996 and 2010 he was the artistic director of the ensemble 175 East. He has written and presented many features for Radio New Zealand Concert, including ‘These Hopeful Machines’, an acclaimed six-part history of electronic music. James has lectured on composition, 20th and 21st century music history and music technology at the University of Auckland and the University of Canterbury, where he is an Adjunct Senior Fellow. He is currently working on a comprehensive history and study of Peter Zinovieff's EMS studio and EMS synthesisers.
Stephen Graham completed a PhD on underground experimental music under the supervision of Keith Potter and Keith Negus at Goldsmith's College in January 2013, where he is currently a visiting lecturer leading undergraduate and postgraduate courses across the popular and contemporary music modules. He is currently turning his thesis into a book and also collaborating on a book about the twentieth century and music. He blogs at robotsdancingalone.wordpress.com.
Mark Hutchinson is a Lecturer in Music at York St John University. His research focuses upon creative approaches to 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, is due for publication by Ashgate in early 2016.
Jennifer Iverson is assistant professor of music theory at the University of Iowa, where she teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level theory and analysis. She is working on a book about the WDR studio in Cologne and its role as the central locus for the so-called ‘Darmstadt’ group of composers, providing a laboratory to work out a shared conceptual framework for both electronic and acoustic composition. She is also involved in disability studies, publishing an essay on the music in Bjork's film Dancer in the Dark in Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability and Music (ed. Lerner and Straus, 2006); an essay that further explores the disabled body in electronic music will appear in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (forthcoming 2016).
Dominic Lash is a double bassist, improviser, composer and writer. He leads the Dominic Lash Quartet and co-leads the Set Ensemble. He has released more than 40 CDs and LPs and performed duos with John Butcher, Tony Conrad and Evan Parker. Solo compositions have been written for him by Radu Malfatti and Eliane Radigue. He holds a PhD from Brunel University on Derek Bailey, JH Prynne and Helmut Lachenmann, is published in Perspectives of New Music, and has chapters forthcoming in two edited books (on Eva-Maria Houben, Emily Dickinson and Charles Ives and on Derek Bailey). He will soon commence research into reality and reflexivity in cinema at the University of Bristol.
Rebecca Lentjes studies music and philosophy as a doctoral student and Graduate Council Fellowship recipient at Stony Brook University, having completed her undergraduate degree in musicology and Romance Languages at New York University in 2012. Outside academia, she writes about sound for Music & Literature, I Care If You Listen, and other publications. She also works as an assistant editor at RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and has participated in endeavours with the Americas Society, Argento Ensemble, ensemble mise-en, and other new music collectives as a performer, composer, and administrator. On Friday evenings she can be found monitoring La Monte Young's Dream House in Tribeca.
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).
Peter O'Hagan is a pianist and writer specialising in contemporary music. He has given the premiere of unpublished works by Boulez, including Antiphonie (1963 version) at London's Wigmore Hall. He is editor of British Music of the 1990s (Ashgate, 2003), and co-editor of Boulez Studies (CUP, 2016).
Whilst having never picked up an instrument, Richard Pinnell has been listening to large amounts of improvised and composed experimental music for the best part of a quarter of a century and undertakes various roles within these realms. These have included running the Cathnor label, organising concerts, various graphic design activities and a decade spent writing about music for both his blog, www.thewatchfulear.com, and for various other print and web publications such as The Wire, Sound American, Paris Transatlantic and Reductive Journal.
Ian Power is a composer, teacher and writer in Baltimore, Maryland. He received a PhD from Harvard University under Chaya Czernowin after study at UC San Diego and Ithaca College. His work has been described by the New York Times as having ‘resolute ooze and elemental graininess’, and by Pauline Oliveros as a ‘tough act to follow’. In the past year he was a featured composer at Tzlil Meudcan in Tel Aviv, a speaker and composer at NUNC!2 in Chicago, and a winner of Heather Roche's clarinet commission competition, which will have concerts in London and Leeds in February 2016. Ian is a performer and curator of new music, and writes about new music and politics.
Steph Power is a London-born composer and writer based in mid-Wales. She has been a freelance performer of 20th-century and contemporary music at international level, and has had works performed by PM Music Ensemble and pianist Llŷr Williams among others. Her articles, reviews and interviews have been published in a wide range of journals, and she is music editor of the Wales Arts Review, as well as being an opera and classical music critic for The Independent.
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 has recently completed a three-year period as Composer-in-Residence for Young Composer of Dyfed. Earlier this year he was awarded a Creative Wales grant from the Arts Council of Wales to develop new compositional work during 2013–14. He is a regular contributor of programme notes and in 2009 the BBC published his history of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.
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.
Jacob Slattery is a writer and oboist based in New York City. As a writer, he reviews concerts for Bachtrack and operates a blog with the goal of providing momentum for community-based arts projects. As an oboist, Jacob has performed internationally with orchestras from Vienna to Seoul, and presently studies with the New York Philharmonic's associate principal Sherry Sylar. Born and raised in the lake-ridden, gopher empire of Minnesota, Jacob received a Bachelor of Music degree from Augsburg College. He currently devotes the majority of his day to promoting the legacy and lifework of Leonard Bernstein.
Toby Young is a lecturer in music at Somerville College, Oxford and Research Fellow at the University of Bristol in philosophy. He is also a composer, whose music has been performed by ensembles including the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Academy of Ancient Music, Fretwork and the BBC Singers. His works are published by Faber Music.
Marcus Zagorski is a composer and musicologist with research interests in music since 1945, philosophical aesthetics and the history of music theory. He studied composition at McGill University and musicology at Stanford University, and he now teaches at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia.
