Claire Dickson is a vocalist, composer, and producer from Medford, Massachusetts, currently based in Brooklyn. Much of her work is self-contained: using her voice, field recordings, synthesizers, and samples she builds instruments and sound worlds that investigate dream states and sensation…
Quartet121 is Julia Jung Un Suh (violin), Molly Germer (violin), Lena Vidulich (viola), and Thea Mesirow (cello). Described as “a magnet for world premieres” (New York Music Daily), Quartet121 is passionate about working with emerging composers, promoting equity, and expanding its stylistic range to reach wider audiences. They have performed at venues throughout NYC such as Tenri Cultural Institute, Manhattan School of Music, Central Park Summerstage, and Brooklyn Steel, among others. Recently, they visited Columbia University and Manhattan School of Music to workshop music with young composers, and traveled to Alberta, Canada as part of the Banff Centre’s Evolution of the String Quartet summer festival. In 2020 they held their first Call for Scores and received submissions from countries around the world. The three pieces chosen as winners were recorded and released as an EP with accompanying video in summer ‘21. Quartet121 is supported by the Alice M. Ditson Fund and Chamber Music America’s Ensemble Forward Grant. As part of New Music on the Point’s alumni grant program, they were selected to curate a concert in NYC in spring ‘22.
Exceptet is a seven-piece ensemble that commissions new works from emerging composers. Called “eclectic” and “quirky” (The New Yorker) with "vast emotional range and onomatopoetic charm" (I Care If You Listen), Exceptet has been featured on numerous new music series, including the Johnstone Foundation for New Music in Columbus, OH, Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn, the Ecstatic Music Festival, the MATA Interval Series in New York, and has been showcased on WQXR. The septet is currently working with 2020-2021 Rome Prize-winning composer Katherine Balch to record and perform her new piece, Tree Lines, funded by the Barlow Endowment.
Founded by Bang On A Can Summer Festival alumni, members of the group have performed at Radio City Music Hall, Lincoln Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hollywood Bowl, and more. Recent commissions include Scott Wollschleger, Brendon Randall-Myers, Fay Kueen Wang, and Alex Weiser. Exceptet is a 501(c)3 nonprofit.
Doori Na, a San Francisco native, took up violin at the age of four and began his studies with Li Lin at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In the fall of 2018, he made his debut with The San Francisco Symphony performing Bach’s Double Violin Concerto with Itzhak Perlman and Michael Tilson Thomas.
Currently living in New York City, Mr. Na plays with numerous ensembles around the city. He has played with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra with tours in the US, Japan, and Europe performing in venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York and the Musiverien in Vienna. Mr. Na is also a member of Argento Chamber Ensemble performing works of living composers such as Georg Friedrich Haas, Beat Furrer, Tristan Murail, and many more. New Chamber Ballet is where you can find Mr. Na regularly performing solo works for dance and he has been a part of the company since 2013. Recent tours include performing in Lake Tahoe, Germany, and Guatemala.
Award-winning Jamaican-American violist Jordan Bak is building an exciting international career as a trailblazing artist, praised for his radiant stage presence, dynamic interpretations, and fearless power. He is frequently in demand as a concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber musician and educator. The 2021 YCAT Robey Artist and a top laureate of the 2020 Sphinx Competition, Bak is also a Grand Prize winner and Audience Prize recipient of the 2019 Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition, the recipient of the 2019 Samuel Sanders Tel Aviv Museum Prize and the 2019 John White Special Prize from the Tertis International Viola Competition. In addition, Jordan Bak is a member of the celebrated New York Classical Players and is a featured artist for WQXR’s Artist Propulsion Lab.
A native of Austin, Texas, cellist Laura Andrade is a prizewinner of the 2019 Sphinx Competition and has appeared as a soloist with the San Antonio Symphony and the Austin Civic Orchestra. Festival appearances include IMS Prussia Cove, Verbier Festival Orchestra, Taos School of Music, Sarasota Music Festival, Music Academy of the West and Moritzburg Festival in Germany. Laura holds a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School with Natasha Brofsky. She also holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music, where she was awarded a Performer’s Certificate studying with Steven Doane and Rosemary Elliott.
Passionate young violinist Jennifer Liu has performed extensively throughout the United States as a soloist and chamber musician, including at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Born in Los Angeles, California, Jennifer moved to New York at age 15 to study with Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho at the Juilliard School. Currently, Ms. Liu is a proud recipient of a Kovner Fellowship at the Juilliard School under the tutelage of Sylvia Rosenberg and Donald Weilerstein.
Hailed by the New York Times as “ravishing and engulfing,” Gity Razaz’s music ranges from concert solo pieces to large symphonic works. With intense melodies and inventive harmonic languages, Gity’s compositions are often dramatically charged. As described by John Corigliano: “…her Middle Eastern roots have merged with her Western sensibilities to produce music that is both original and startling. She is on her way to becoming a major force in contemporary music.” Gity is an active collaborator involved in projects across disciplines from opera and modern ballet to electro-acoustic sonic landscapes.
Hailed by The New York Times for her "inexhaustible virtuosity", clarinetist Yoonah Kim is rapidly earning recognition as a young artist of uncommon musical depth and versatility. Yoonah is a winner of the 2016 Concert Artists Guild International Competition. The first solo clarinetist to win CAG in nearly 30 years, this Korean-Canadian artist joins the ranks of prominent solo clarinetists discovered by CAG, including David Shifrin, Michael Collins, and David Krakauer.
Harpist-composer Hannah Lash enjoys a varied and active career as a soloist. She has been presented and featured by such venues and organizations as Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre, Jordan Hall, NYPhilharmonic Biennial, Chamber Music Northwest, and the Morton Arboretum in Chicago. She has been a concerto soloist with the American Composers Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Colorado Music Festival, and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. She frequently appears with the JACK Quartet and Loadbang, and collaborates with such artists as Jeremy Denk, Samuel Suggs, and David Shifrin. She is a tireless proponent of new music, old music, and everything in between. She also enjoys crossing genres as a performer and improviser.
Called “a powerful success,” “arresting,” and “amazingly lush,” (the Boston Musical Intelligencer), “an attractive mix of the familiar and exotic” (Boston Classical Review), and “invigorating” with a “persistent melodic urge” (American Academy of Arts and Letters), composer Adam Roberts’ music has been performed internationally by the JACK and Arditti Quartets, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, New York New Music Ensemble, Guerilla Opera, Transient Canvas, andPlay, and at festivals such as Wien Modern (Vienna), Tanglewood, the Biennale Musique en Scene (Lyons), and the 2009 ISCM World Music Days (Göteborg). Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fromm Commission, the Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Leonard Bernstein Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center. A dedicated educator, Roberts has taught at Harvard University, Northeastern University, Istanbul Technical University, the University of Georgia, and is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at Kent State University. In addition to this album, other music by Roberts can be heard on Tzadik, New Focus Recordings, and Lila Müzik.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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.
