Tanya Tagaq

From Ikaluktutiak (Cambridge Bay, Nunavut), internationally-celebrated artist Tanya Tagaq is an improvisational singer, avant-garde composer and bestselling author. A member of the Order of Canada, Polaris Music Prize and JUNO Award winner and recipient of multiple honorary doctorates, Tagaq is an original disruptor, a world-changing figure at the forefront of seismic social, political, and environmental change.

Paola Prestini

Composer, Co-Founder & Artistic Director of National Sawdust and VisionIntoArt

Composer Paola Prestini has collaborated with poets, filmmakers, and scientists in large-scale multimedia works that chart her interest in themes ranging from the cosmos to the environment. She has created, written and produced projects such as the world's largest and first communal VR opera, The Hubble Cantata, and the eco-documentary The Colorado. Her opera Sensorium Ex  is a multi-sensory narrative woven together at the intersections of disability and artificial intelligence - bridging her love of collaboration with system building. Her work has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Opera, Los Angeles Opera, San Diego Opera, Bellas Artes, and at the Festival Dei Due Mondi in Italy. She has been a resident at MASS MoCA, the Park Avenue Armory, the American Academy in Rome, and at Sundance. Prestini is a Co-Founder of VisionIntoArt, a non-profit new music and interdisciplinary arts production company in New York City and is the Co-Founder/Artistic Director of the non-profit music organization and Brooklyn-based venue, National Sawdust.

Christine Duncan

Christine Duncan is a Canadian vocalist, thereminist and conductor, specializing in improvisation and improvising ensembles. She is a professor in the jazz programs at the University of Toronto and Humber College in Toronto, Canada.

Jean Martin

Jean Martin is a drummer, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and a key member of the field of creative music in Canada. Jean is based in Toronto but his network of collaborators extends throughout Canada and internationally. As a performer, some of his principal associations are with Christine Duncan Barnyard Drama, The Element Choir, Jesse Zubot,Tanya Tagaq, John Southworth, ZMF Trio, Bernard Falaise, and Justin Haynes. He has performed and recorded with notable artists: David Murray, Evan Parker, William Parker, Veryan Weston, Phil Minton, Craig Tayborn to name a few.

During the 1990s, he played in two legendary Canadian jazz groups: Chelsea Bridge and D.D. Jackson's Trio. He was nominated in 2004 as 'Best Drummer' at the National Jazz Awards and received the 2004 Freddy Stone Award for excellence in contemporary music in Canada.

As a producer, Jean is best known as the Artistic Director of Barnyard Records, one of the most vital labels for contemporary music in North America. Barnyard's 40-plus title catalogue features international figures like Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, and William Parker, but is dedicated primarily to Canada's diverse field of creative musicians and reflects both the eclecticism and excellence of its best artists, along with Jean's deft touch as a producer and recording engineer. In addition to his work with Barnyard, Jean has produced and/or engineered over 100 other recording projects in countless musical styles.

Nancy Mike

Nancy Mike is a throat singer, accordion player, visual artist and author originally from Pangnirtung, Nunavut. She is a mother of four beautiful children; a nurse; former member of the Iqaluit-based band, The Jerry Cans. Nancy has performed many of her songs in Inuktitut and is passionate about preserving her Inuktut language. Nancy is committed to representing Inuit and to challenging common misperceptions she encounters about life in the Arctic in all of her artistic projects.

Varna Marianne Nielsen

Varna Marianne Nielsen is a multi artist from Greenland, her focus is to compose music, in a fusion of electronic music, sounds of nature and improvised Greenlandic drum-singing. For 25 years, she has been engaged in performances as a singer-songwriter, vocalist and her Indigenous heritage. She has gained experience as an actress. Her interest in research within her ancestors' practice, has led her into filmmaking, which she is directing and composing music for.

Cynthia Pitsiulak

Cynthia Pitsiulak, a twice Juno nominee currently lives in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Pitsiulak is a multidisciplinary artist, specializing in throat singing, painting, acting, television and radio production. Originally from Kimmirut, Nunavut, Pitsiulak has traveled and performed around the world sharing her artistic talents. She is best known for her work with her duo Silla, and former trio Silla and Rise.

Charlotte Angugaattiaq Qamaniq

Charlotte Angugaattiaq Qamaniq is a North Baffin Inuk performance artist, actor, and contemporary and traditional throat singer hailing from Iglulik, Nunavut. She is best known for her work in the throat singing duo Silla, in twice Juno nominated band Silla and Rise, and Juno nominated Iva and Angu.

Gil Rose

Gil Rose is one of today’s most trailblazing conductors, praised as “amazingly versatile” (The Boston Globe) with “a sense of style and sophistication” (Opera News). Equally at home performing core repertoire, new music, and lesser-known historic symphonic and operatic works, “Gil Rose is not just a fine conductor, but a peerless curator, sniffing out—and commissioning—off-trend, unheralded, and otherwise underplayed repertoire that nevertheless holds to unfailingly high standards of quality. In doing so, he’s built an indefinable, but unmistakable, personal aesthetic” (WXQR).

A global leader in American contemporary music, Rose is the founder of the performing and recording ensemble the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), who “bring an endlessly curious and almost archaeological mind to programming… with each concert, each recording, an essential step in a better direction” (The New York Times), as well as the founder of Odyssey Opera, praised by The New York Times as “bold and intriguing” and “one of the East Coast’s most interesting opera companies.”

Since its founding in 1996, the “unique and invaluable” (The New York Times) BMOP has grown to become the premier orchestra in the world for commissioning, recording, and performing music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Under Rose’s leadership, BMOP has won seventeen ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, been selected as Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year in 2016, and in 2021was awarded a Gramophone Magazine Special Achievement Award in recognition of its extraordinary service to American music of the modern era. Under Rose’s baton, BMOP has been featured at numerous festivals including the Festival of New American Music (Sacramento, CA), Concerts at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and the MATA Festival in New York. This past fall Gil was named the Director of Opera and Sonic Exploration at Artpark in Lewiston NY. His tenure there was launched with a performance of a staged version of Carmina Burana.

In 2013, Gil Rose expanded his musical vision with the founding of Odyssey Opera, a company dedicated to eclectic and underperformed operatic repertoire from all eras. Working with an international roster of singers and directors, Odyssey has presented more than 35 operas in Boston, with innovative, thematically linked seasons. The company has also established itself as a leader of modern opera in the United States, having given three world premieres and numerous U.S. premieres.

Boston Modern Orchestra Project

A unique institution of crucial artistic importance to today’s musical world, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) is the premier orchestra in the United States dedicated exclusively to commissioning, performing, and recording music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded by Artistic Director Gil Rose in 1996, BMOP has championed composers whose careers span nine decades.  

BMOP’s history includes more than 180 performances and over 150 world premieres, including 75 commissioned works, in concerts of unrivaled eclecticism and ambition. Musical America’s 2016 Ensemble of the Year, BMOP was awarded the 2021 Special Achievement Award from Gramophone magazine as “an organization that has championed American music of the 20th and 21st century with passion and panache.”  

BMOP/sound, BMOP’s independent record label, was created in 2008 to provide a platform for BMOP’s extensive archive of music, as well as to provide widespread, top-quality, permanent access to both classics of the 20th century and the music of today’s most innovative composers. BMOP/sound has garnered praise from the national and international press and is the recipient of nine Grammy Award nominations. BMOP won the 2020 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. Its releases have appeared on the year-end “Best of” lists of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Time Out New York, American Record Guide, Downbeat Magazine, WBUR, NewMusicBox, and others. 

Highlights of BMOP’s extended quarter-century season celebration, which kicked off in February 2022, included a free concert of organ masterworks at Boston’s Symphony Hall, the orchestra’s debut at Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium, and the inauguration of As Told By, a multi-year performance and recording initiative dedicated to elevating Black creativity in opera.