andPlay

andPlay

Described by I Care If You Listen as “enthusiastic champions for new music and collaboration” and performing “with a welcoming and dynamic spirit,” andPlay is committed to expanding the existing violin/viola duo repertoire by commissioning new works and actively collaborating with living artists. The “genre-busting” (Midwest Records) New York City-based duo of Maya Bennardo, violin, and Hannah Levinson, viola, first played to an eager crowd on Fire Island in the summer of 2012 and has since commissioned over forty works. andPlay’s performances have been described as “sheer virtuosity” (Cinemusical), “otherworldly” (New York Music Daily) and “an awful lot of fun for people who gravitate towards stark, edgy harmonies and textures” (Lucid Culture).

Anastasia Shmytova

Anastasia Shmytova

Anastasia Shmytova is a musicologist, singer, and pianist from Saint Petersburg, Russia. A recipient of the Arthur Mendel University Fellowship in Music, Anastasia is currently pursuing a PhD in Musicology at Princeton University, with a focus on medieval and early modern Slavic and Byzantine chant. As a singer and pianist, Ms. Shmytova has performed with groups including the Seattle Symphony, the Seattle Bach Choir, the Byrd International Singers, the Princeton Glee Club, Early Music Princeton, and the international award-winning chamber choir Art Sonus.

Calvin Hitchcock

Calvin Hitchcock

Calvin Hitchcock is a composer, performer, and music director based in Jersey City, NJ. Described as “impressive,” and having “a fine ear for sonority” (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review), his work explores themes of control and resistance, religious subversion through song, and experiments with narrative form and interdisciplinary integration. He holds a BM in Composition from Cedarville University, a Southern Baptist university in southwest Ohio, and is currently pursuing an MM at Mannes School of Music, studying with David T. Little.

PROMPTUS

PROMPTUS

PROMPTUS is a transdisciplinary collective of performers and performance-makers committed to curating community-focused happenings. Founded by Robert Fleitz and Tyler Cunningham in 2018, each event poses an instigating question which is interpreted by a curator through performance, pedagogy, composition, or a combination of all three. By asking artists to work in modalities other than their own rigorously trained discipline, a space of vulnerability is created that allows for an audience to engage with complex forms in new and equitable ways.

Ben Murphy

Ben Murphy

Ben Murphy is a composer, arranger, engraver, bassist, electronic musician, just-intonation person, sometimes recording and mixing engineer, and even less times other-instrumentalist. These days, he’s been spending most of his time programming just-intonation music in Pure Data (a fantastic open-source visual coding language that he highly recommends), practicing the Shakuhachi (new hobby) and the Bass every day, and staying at home not getting sick.

Cleek Schrey

Cleek Schrey

Cleek Schrey is fiddler, improviser, and composer from Virginia, now based in NYC. Frequent collaborators include David Behrman, the viol da gamba player Liam Byrne, traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and the avant-pop collective Exo-Tech. He is currently a Sound Artist-in-Residence on Governor’s Island and pursuing doctoral studies in Music Composition at Princeton University.

Erica Dicker

Erica Dicker

Erica Dicker is a New York-based violinist and improvisor making music reflecting her interest in experiencing eidetic memories as aural phenomena, a sensibility she brings to the Brandon Seabrook Trio, Carl Testa’s SWAY, Anna Webber’s Idiom, her electro-acoustic trio Vaster than Empires and Blood Luxury with Dennis Sullivan.

Sergio Tabanico

Sergio Tabanico

Sergio Tabanico is a tenor saxophonist based in New York City. Originally from Tucson, Arizona, he made way to New York in 2015 to study at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Discovering his passion for saxophone at the age of 10, Sergio’s playing style has been deeply rooted in traditional jazz music and modern era jazz.

Kevin Oliver, Jr

Kevin Oliver, Jr

Born in Atlanta, Kevin Oliver, Jr, is just a kid with a horn and something to say. He is a saxophonist and stand-up comedian currently pursuing an undergraduate degree at The Juilliard School. Kevin started performing at the age of 11. He started off busking in downtown Atlanta at sporting events, parks and street corners eager to share his gift with the world. He was inspired to keep playing by the happiness that he saw on the faces of people who stopped to listen and meet him.

Immanuel Wilkins

Immanuel Wilkins

Immanuel Wilkins is a saxophonist, composer, educator, and bandleader from the greater Philadelphia area. While growing up, Wilkins honed his skills in the church and studied in programs dedicated to teaching jazz music like the Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts…

Aaron Wolff

Aaron Wolff

Aaron Wolff is a New York City-based cellist and performer active in solo, collaborative, and cross-disciplinary capacities. Recent performances include a solo program of music by Philip Glass and Arthur Russell at the New York City Reliquary, Debussy’s Cello Sonata on CNN’s Quest Means Business, collaboration with the Argus Quartet and American Modern Opera Company, and a fourth summer at Yellow Barn music festival in Putney, Vermont.

Lauren Siess

Lauren Siess

Lauren Siess is an NYC-based composer, violist, and improviser. Mass, chaos, and irrationality are integral to her work. By combining and manipulating found objects, she enjoys discovering the nuance and life inside of physical materials. 2021 projects included works for National Sawdust Ensemble, SICPP Festival, and and Line Upon Line Percussion…

Alice Ivy-Pemberton

Alice Ivy-Pemberton

Praised by the New York Times for her “sweet-toned playing,” violinist Alice Ivy-Pemberton studied with Nurit Pacht at the Kaufman Music Center in New York for ten years before continuing her studies at The Juilliard School under the tutelage of Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho. Alice received her Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School in May of 2019 as a recipient of both a Kovner Fellowship and a Benzaquen Career Advancement Grant, in recognition of “tremendous talent, promise, creativity, and potential to make a significant impact in the performing arts."

Lucie Vítková

Lucie Vítková

Lucie Vítková is a composer, improviser and performer (accordion, hichiriki, synthesizer, harmonica, voice and tap dance) from the Czech Republic, living in New York. Their compositions focus on sonification (compositions based on abstract models derived from physical objects) while in their improvisation practice Lucie works with characteristics of discrete spaces through the interaction between sound and movement. In Lucie’s recent work, they are interested in the social-political aspects of music in relation to everyday life and in reusing trash to build sonic costumes.

Jules Biber

Jules Biber

Jules Biber is a cellist, educator and musical curator based in Brooklyn, NY. An accomplished chamber musician and soloist, Jules’ versatility in early, standard and modern repertoire, as well as non-classical styles, makes her sought-after for a variety of high-profile concerts and recording projects, and her deep commitment to inclusive community has made her one of the city’s progressive curators of classical music spaces.

Jonah Rosenberg

Jonah Rosenberg

Jonah Rosenberg is a Sunset Park, Brooklyn based musician and composer who is interested in facilitating human communication via decorated cakes.

Kallie Sugatski

Kallie Sugatski

Violist Kallie Sugatski performs regularly with Pittsburgh Symphony, New York City Ballet, International Contemporary Ensemble, New Jersey Symphony, and on Broadway. In response to the pandemic, Kallie is organizing/curating outdoor distanced concerts centered around queer and composers of color for her newest project Vigorous Tenderness. A catalyst for radical change in the arts, Vigorous Tenderness presents relevant, powerful concert experiences that respond to immediate social, political, and environmental circumstances. These experimental performances resemble an art museum experience, with chamber music ensembles spread across the landscape while the audience forges a self-curated path through the installation. She will spend her 2021-2022 season as a section violist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

Carlos Aguilar

Carlos Aguilar

Carlos Aguilar is a flutist and interdisciplinary artist who believes in creating work that pushes the tradition of performance by creating surreal spectacles with the aid of electronic sound processing and visual technology. His classical playing has been described as having “expressed the release of the soul” and his "burnished sound poured forth in unbroken arcs of molten seduction” (Boston Musical Intelligencer).

Pablo O’Connell

Pablo O’Connell

Pablo O’Connell (he/him) is an NYC-based oboist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer. Pablo’s varied musical life includes composing and interpreting contemporary concert music, improvising, performing music of the European Baroque on period instruments, writing and recording indie folk songs, studying traditional Andean music, and more…

Philip Sheegog

Philip Sheegog

Philip Sheegog forges new possibilities for what the cello can be — with an artistic versatility and fearless commitment that have made him sought out on all ends of the musical spectrum. A champion for musical innovation, Mr. Sheegog has crafted a unique technical vocabulary influenced by a myriad of musical styles, premiered over eighty new works by living composers, and collaborated with such disparate groups as the legendary 1970’s Steve Miller Band, members of the GRAMMY-award winning Turtle Island String Quartet, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the hip-hop/classical collective ShoutHouse.