Following two postdoctoral periods at IRCAM and at the University of Strasbourg, José L. Besada is currently a mid-term research fellow at the Complutense University of Madrid. His research mainly focuses on the formal, technological and cognitive features of both contemporary musical practices and music theory. He has twice been a guest editor for Contemporary Music Review and is the editor of the arts section of the Journal of Mathematics and Music. He is a founding member of the Sociedad de Análisis y Teoría Musical (SATMUS) in Spain, and the editor-in-chief of its journal, Súmula.
Edward Cooper is a composer and musicologist completing a Ph.D. at the University of Leeds, supervised by Scott McLaughlin and Martin Iddon, fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, through the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities. His practice considers the listening body as simultaneously acting as both a boundary and transmitter to itself, exploring various musical liminalities. As such, his work is often very quiet and fragmentary.
The cellist Ellen Fallowfield is an active interpreter and researcher in the field of contemporary music. Research grants from the Leverhulme Trust, Swiss National Science Foundation and Maja Sacher Stiftung supported her in the creation of the Cello Map App and webpage (www.cellomap.com). She performs in leading international festivals and is a member of several ensembles, including Ensemble Aventure, Freiburg. She is Head of Studies of the specialised master's programmes in research, new music and music in context at the Hochschule der Künste Bern.
Callum G'Froerer is an Australian trumpet player and composer based in Naarm/Melbourne. He has developed new repertoire and projects in collaboration with composers and artists such as Ann Cleare, Cat Hope, Anthony Pateras, James Rushford and Laure Hiendl. He is a founding member of the international improvisation ensemble Phonetic Orchestra, and is a director of the Naarm experimental concert series New North. His composition series Charcoals includes a wide range of site- and occasion-specific works, including interdisciplinary works. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Monash University.
George K. Haggett graduated from Oxford University with a BA in music in 2017 and received his MMus in musicology from Royal Holloway in 2018. He will return to Oxford in October 2019 to begin AHRC-funded doctoral research on medievalism in contemporary opera, supervised by Laura Tunbridge and Elizabeth Eva Leach. He currently works as an assistant lay chaplain at King's College London.
Roger Heaton is Emeritus Professor of Music at Bath Spa University. He performs with groups such as the Kreutzer Quartet and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble and was Music Director of Rambert Dance Company and Clarinet Professor at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik during the 1990s. Recent recordings include works by Trandafilovski, Radulescu and Boulez. He has contributed to the Cambridge History of Musical Performance and a chapter on Bryars’ music for dance is forthcoming.
Nicolas Hodges is based in Germany where he is Professor for Piano at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule. He also teaches regularly at the Accademia di Musica in Pinerolo (Italy) as well as (continually since 2000) at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse. He studied composition with Michael Finnissy, also attending masterclasses with Morton Feldman; piano privately with Susan Bradshaw and Sulamita Aronovsky; and musicology at Cambridge University, where he received the William Barclay Squire Prize for outstanding academic achievement. He has occasionally edited works for publication, by composers such as Bill Hopkins, Justin Connolly, and George Antheil. His playing features on over 60 CDs.
Alex Huddleston is a composer, graphic designer and artist currently living in Buffalo, New York. His music occupies a liminal space in which serendipitous relationships emerge and collapse in a play of familiarity and otherness. Centred on themes of alienation, sorrow, anxiety, schizophrenia and fear, his work embodies a singular affect – there is too much and too little; it is too fast and too slow; it is elegant and awkward; it makes too much sense and makes no sense.
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 www.evanjohnson.info.
Simon Kaplan is a French composer, researcher and pedagogue. He has master's degrees in composition from the Royal Flemish Conservatoire of Brussels and in compositional didactics from the Royal Conservatoire of Mons. In 2021 he invented diahemitonicism, a quarter-tonal composition system that has governed his works ever since. His music includes solo and chamber pieces and has been premiered internationally by renowned performers, particularly in Europe and Japan. He is currently working as a teaching fellow at the University of North Texas, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in composition. He regularly lectures on the design of microtonal composition systems.
Anton Lukoszevieze is a Lithuanian–English cellist, composer and visual artist. He is descended from a retreating Napoleonic soldier and a Lithuanian noblewoman. Anton is the founder and director of the ensemble Apartment House, notable for its extensive performances and recordings of contemporary and experimental music. He has collaborated with a multitude of composers, artists and performers. His artistic practice embraces photography, drawing, painting, animation, collage and sound art. Anton's current work includes compositions for cello and fixed media, derived from the work of poet Robert Lax, and artworks relating to the city of Vilnius, the Vilkaviškis region, time and memory.
Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez is a Mexican composer and electronic music performer. He began his studies in his hometown and subsequently moved to Austria to study composition, music theory and computer music. He is a founding member and a continuing collaborator of Schallfeld Ensemble, based in Graz, Austria, devoted to the promotion of contemporary music and sound art. He holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from UCSD and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in music perception at McGill University in Montreal.
Hugh Morris is a freelance journalist and critic based in Manchester who contributes to the New York Times, Guardian, VAN Magazine, Bandcamp and Jazzwise on jazz, classical, improvised and contemporary music.
For Paul Norman composing is a way of trying to understand the world and a way to point at the situations he finds intriguing in such a way that he can share that intrigue with others. Together with Michael Wolters (Difficult Listening) he's made multiple interdisciplinary works, and their recordings have been played on BBC Radio 3. With Leander Ripchinsky (Tedious Work) Paul has created several participatory works, also collaborating with Ensemble Modern, Ligna, Zaungäste, Frankfurt Lab and Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm. Paul has a Ph.D. in composition from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire funded by AHRC Midlands3Cities.
Carles Vicent Pascual is a musicologist and composer based in Madrid. His research focuses on interdisciplinarity and collaborative creative processes in Western art music, with a special interest in intermediality and the use of technologies, particularly in music theatre and opera. He has a master's degree in musicology from the Universidad de Salamanca and a bachelor's degree in composition from the Conservatori Superior de Música ‘Óscar Esplà’ d'Alacant. He is currently studying sonology at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid.
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 most recent book, Erik Satie, a Parisian Composer and His World (Boydell Press, 2016), was named Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year.
Ryan Pratt is a composer and educator based in New York. He has composed for NYC ensembles including Ensemble Pamplemousse, Wet Ink, New Thread Quartet, Chartreuse String Trio, Talea Ensemble and Yarn/Wire as well as for several soloists. His works often explore the acoustic space of an instrument through a perspective of proportional relationships. Following the work of the late Maryanne Amacher, his compositions sometimes evoke otoacoustic emissions (OAEs). Related research includes musical measurement and various tuning systems found in musics of the world that are sometimes described as microtonal’. Ryan holds a doctor of musical arts degree in composition from Columbia University, where he currently teaches music humanities.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson is the author of The Music of Liza Lim (Wildbird, 2022) and Music after the Fall (University of California Press, 2017), and the co-author, with Stephen Graham, Tom Perchard and Holly Rogers, of Twentieth-Century Music in the West (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Livia Teodorescu-Ciocanea is a Romanian composer, pianist and Professor of Music at the National University of Music, Bucharest. She was an Adjunct Associate Professor (Research) at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University, Australia, between 2017 and 2021, where she is now an Affiliate Professor. In 2022 she was elected as a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. For a brief period in 2021 she was Artistic Director of the Bucharest National Opera. She has written over 80 compositions, three books and articles in Contemporary Music Review and Perspectives of New Music. Her music is published by Toccata Classics.
Thierry Tidrow is a Canadian composer currently living and working in Germany. He holds a B.Mus. (Hons) in composition and music theory from McGill University and an M.Mus. from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, under Richard Ayres. His music has been performed across North America and Europe and recent works have focused on vocal- and text-based music, including four chamber operas. Thierry has won many prizes, including the Berliner Opernpreis 2018 and the Canada Arts Council's prestigious Jules-Léger Prize.
Julie Zhu is a composer, artist and carillonneur. She is the recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for her interdisciplinary work, visual and aural, that has since been exhibited and performed internationally. Zhu studied at Yale University (mathematics), the Royal Carillon School and Hunter College (MFA art), and is currently pursuing a DMA in composition at Stanford University.
