Anthony Cheung

Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and affect, improvisational traditions, reimagined musical artifacts, and multiple layers of textual meaning. Described as “gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured” (San Francisco Chronicle) and praised for its “instrumental sensuality” (Chicago Tribune), his music reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and constantly shifting transformations of tuning and timbre.

His music has been commissioned by leading groups such as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the LA and New York Philharmonics, Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ICE, Yarn/Wire, Atlas Ensemble, and AMOC*, and performed by the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW, etc... From 2015-17, he was the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra. He is the recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2012 Rome Prize and received First Prize at the 2008 Dutilleux Competition. He has also worked closely with flutist Claire Chase, the Escher and Spektral Quartets, violinists Miranda Cuckson and Jennifer Koh, and pianists Gilles Vonsattel, David Kaplan, Shai Wosner, and Joel Fan. Premieres in Fall 2024 include works for the Parker Quartet with Fleur Barron, JACK Quartet, and BMOP.  His recordings include five portrait discs: All Roads (New Focus, 2022), Music for Film, Sculpture, and Captions (Kairos, 2022), Cycles and Arrows (New Focus, 2018), Dystemporal (Wergo, 2016), and Roundabouts (Ensemble Modern Medien 2014). His music and performances have also appeared on Warner Classics (performed by Bertrand Chamayou), Tzadik, and Mode. As a performer and advocate for new music, he was a co-founder, pianist, and artistic director of the Talea Ensemble.

Anthony received a BA in Music and History from Harvard and a doctorate from Columbia University, and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He previously taught at the University of Chicago and is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University, where he teaches courses on topics ranging from theory and composition to the jazz orchestra and Asian musical modernisms.

Daniel Callahan

Daniel Callahan is a musicologist and dance scholar who researches how music has moved people - dancers, musicians, orchestra conductors, and audiences - from the late nineteenth century to the present. His book The Dancer from the Music (Oxford University Press, under contract) explores how US modern dance developed out of, depended on, contributed to, and eventually distanced itself from canonical concert music. The American Musicological Society awarded him both the 2019 Alfred Einstein Award and the 2019 Philip Brett Award for his article, “The Gay Divorce of Music and Dance: Choreomusicality and the Early Works of Cage-Cunningham,” published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Callahan was in residence at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study as the 2019–2020 Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow, working on his second book, Conducting Oneself: Bodies, Identities, and Power on the Podium, which examines how orchestra conductors choreograph, legitimate, and limit their movements on the podium and off, from conservatories to coveted positions. His most recent publication is a chapter on Bernstein's conducting as choreography in Leonard Bernstein in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Callahan was a Visiting Associate Professor in Harvard's Department of Music in 2022–2023. Prior to joining the faculty at Boston College, he was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

Afa Sadykhly Dworkin

Afa Sadykhly Dworkin is a music industry thought leader and cross-sector strategist driving national programming that fosters excellence and innovation in classical music. 

Since 2015, she has served as President and Artistic Director of the Sphinx Organization, the nation’s leading organization transforming lives through the power of diversity in the arts. She has been named one of Musical America’s “Top 30 Influencers”, has received The Kennedy Center’s Human Spirit Award, Chamber Music America's Arts Advocate of the Year Award, and is a member of the Recording Academy®. She serves as a Trustee to the League of American Orchestra, CultureSource Detroit, VisionIntoArt, New Canon, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Global Music Society, and other non-profits. The strength of Afa’s leadership across sectors and national divides is informed by her musical training as a violinist, more than 30 years of experience in the classical music field, and her international corporate experience as a trilingual interpreter and Executive Assistant to the President of ARCO, The International Oil and Gas Company in Baku, Azerbaijan. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, Strings Magazine, and more.

In her Sphinx role, Afa oversees all strategic, fundraising, and artistic initiatives through which the organization expands access to classical music education and supports a national roster of distinguished musicians. Sphinx’s programs touch the lives of 100 million people through live and digital reach. As the Sphinx Organization’s first employee and formerly its Executive and Artistic Director, Afa has been responsible for creating and developing Sphinx’s programming since its inception. Under her leadership, Sphinx’s partner network has expanded to more than 300 organizations across the globe.

In addition to her work at Sphinx, Afa has helped to shape the national classical music landscape as a multi-year orchestra grant review panelist for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals, 3Arts Awards, Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the MetLife Awards administered by The League of American Orchestras. Beyond the orchestral community, she has aided grant review for the Surdna Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Charlotte Arts and Sciences Council, Independent Sector’s American Express NGen Awards, and numerous state councils nationwide.

Afa has delivered ongoing thought leadership through an extensive roster of speaking engagements, including those at the International Arts & Ideas Festival, Independent Sector, Classical NEXT, Grantmakers in the Arts, Young Audiences Norway, Esmeraldas Festival in Ecuador, Chamber Music America, National Association for Schools of Music, League of American Orchestras, ICSOM, and Association of Canadian Orchestras. Former faculty at Roosevelt University’s Master’s in Arts Administration program and Clarkston Conservatory in Michigan, Afa currently teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Music and University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance and has lectured at The Juilliard School, Bowling Green State University, Indiana University, University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Penn State, the University of Northern Texas, and Central Michigan University, among many others.

With parents of Azerbaijani, Persian, Muslim, and Jewish heritage raised in Baku, Azerbaijan, Afa has been dedicated to issues surrounding cultural identity since her youth and has been a life-long champion for transforming marginalized communities through the power of the arts. Afa's music training began at the prestigious Azerbaijan National Conservatory, where she honed her craft under the tutelage of the region’s leading artists and pedagogies. She subsequently joined the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra as an entering freshman at the University of Michigan School of Music while earning her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Violin Performance with High Honors. Her performing career has taken her to Russia, Switzerland, Austria, and throughout the United States. A multilingual individual, she is passionate about her family, culinary arts, and travel.

Reena Esmail

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. 

Esmail’s life and music was profiled on Season 3 of PBS Great Performances series Now Hear This, as well as Frame of Mind, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Esmail divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber and choral work. She has written commissions for ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Kronos Quartet, and her music has featured on multiple Grammy-nominated albums, including The Singing Guitar by Conspirare, BRUITS by Imani Winds, and Healing Modes by Brooklyn Rider. Many of her choral works are published by Oxford University Press.

Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2025 Swan Family Artist in Residence and was Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. She has been in residence with Tanglewood Music Center (co-Curator – 2023) and Spoleto Festival (Chamber Music Composer-in-Residence – 2024). She also holds awards/fellowships from United States Artists, the S&R Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Kennedy Center.

Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (BM’05) and the Yale School of Music (MM’11, MMA’14, DMA’18). Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Christopher Rouse and Samuel Adler. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazumdar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers. 

Esmail was Composer-in-Residence for Street Symphony (2016-18) and is currently an Artistic Director of Shastra, a non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting music traditions of India and the West.

She currently resides in her hometown of Los Angeles, California.

Jessie Montgomery

Jessie Montgomery, Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year, is a GRAMMY-winning, acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator whose music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of twenty-first century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post) and are performed regularly by leading orchestras and ensembles around the world. In July 2021, she began a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.

Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works, as well as collaborations with distinguished choreographers. Recent premieres include Hymn for Everyone (2021), her first commission for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Five Freedom Songs (2021), a song cycle for Soprano Julia Bullock; a set of concerti—DIVIDED (2022), Rounds (2021), and L.E.S. Characters (2020); and a site-specific collaboration for Bard SummerScape and Pam Tanowitz Dance (2021).

Highlights of her 2022-2023 season include the world premieres of orchestral works for violinist Joshua Bell, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a consortium led by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for New Music USA Amplifying Voices, a violin duo for CSO MusicNOW and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and new settings of various works by choreographer Donald Byrd for Nashville Ballet.

Future projects include Alisa Weilerstein’s FRAGMENTS, a work for the New York Philharmonic, and her final commissions as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.

Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation. She is currently visiting faculty at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music, Bard College, and The New School, and has been affiliated with the Sphinx Organization since 1999. Montgomery holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a doctoral candidate in music composition at Princeton University.

Eric Nathan

Eric Nathan’s (b. 1983) music has been called “as diverse as it is arresting” with a “constant vein of ingenuity and expressive depth” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “thoughtful and inventive” (The New Yorker). A 2013 Rome Prize Fellow and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, Nathan has garnered acclaim internationally through performances by Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, Dawn Upshaw, Jennifer Koh, Stefan Jackiw, and Gloria Cheng. His music has been featured at the New York Philharmonic’s 2014 and 2016 Biennials, Carnegie Hall, and the Aldeburgh, Tanglewood, and Aspen festivals.

Recent projects include three commissions from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Opening (2021), co-commissioned by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress, was premiered by the MSO and broadcast nationally on PBS. He has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Barlow Endowment, Fromm Music Foundation, Tanglewood Music Center, and Aspen Music Festival, and has been honored with a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Nathan has completed residencies at Yellow Barn, Copland House, and American Academy in Rome, and is a 2022 Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow.

Nathan’s most recent album, Some Favored Nook, was released in 2023 on New Focus Recordings. He serves as Associate Professor of Music at Brown University and is currently the Artistic Director of Collage New Music, a Boston’s oldest contemporary music ensemble, now in its 52nd season, as well as Composer-in-Residence with the New England Philharmonic. He received his doctorate from Cornell. www.ericnathanmusic.com.

Butch Rovan

Butch Rovan is a composer, performer, media artist, and instrument designer who has served on the faculty of the department of Music at Brown University since 2004. 

Rovan’s compositions have been performed all over the world, receiving early recognition in two of the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competitions as well as a first prize in the Berlin Transmediale Festival. His multipart installation "Let us imagine a straight line" was selected for the 14th WRO International Media Art Biennale in Poland. He has recorded on the Wergo, EMF, Circumvention, and SEAMUS labels.

The design of sensor hardware and wireless microcontroller systems for musical performance represents a central part of Rovan’s creative work, which has yielded two patents. Among his most recent projects are the TOSHI, a new conductor interface for orchestral synthesis, and a new accessible technology that allows non-sighted composers to program interactive computer music. His research has been featured in The Computer Music Journal, including in a special anthology presenting his custom GLOBE controller. A seminal essay written with Vincent Hayward was highly influential for the field of haptics, and a later piece on alternate controllers was included in Riley and Hunter’s “Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research,” published by Palgrave Macmillan. 

Earlier in his career, Rovan served as compositeur en recherche with the Real-Time Systems Team at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, and then as a faculty member at Florida State University and the University of North Texas, where he headed the Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia. At Brown, he directed the Brown Arts Initiative from 2016-19, where he was instrumental in the design and planning of the Lindemann Performing Arts Center.

Sebastian Ruth

Sebastian is a musician, educator, and organizer whose work explores roles for music making in society today. As CMW’s Founder & Artistic Director, Sebastian has worked alongside colleagues to create musical experiences and programs that are always evolving and responding to the needs of young people and the world around us.

As a violinist and violist, Sebastian is a member of the MusicWorks Collective. He was a founder member of the Providence String Quartet at CMW and has had the opportunity to collaborate with the Borromeo, Kronos, Muir, Miro, Orion, and Turtle Island String Quartets, and musicians Emanuel Ax, Jonathan Biss, Kim Kashkashian, Frank Rosenwein, and Johnny Gandelsman.

Among his mentors and inspiring teachers, Sebastian is grateful to have learned from Rolfe Sokol, Eric Rosenblith, Lois Finkel, Maxine Greene, Ted Sizer, and others.

In addition to his work at CMW, Sebastian serves as a Visiting Lecturer at the Yale School of Music, created an online course “Music and Social Action” on the Coursera platform for over 20,000 learners, and was a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. In 2019 Sebastian was honored to participate in the RISD Museum’s show “Raid the Icebox II,” curating exhibits with original musical content. Sebastian’s TedX talk “Music, Community, and Creating Space for Unexpected Possibilities” is available online.

Sebastian is married to violinist Minna Choi and is a father to two awesome children.

Wang Lu

Composer Wang Lu writes music that reflects influences from urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music, and freely improvised traditions, through the prism of contemporary instrumental techniques and new sonic possibilities. Her works have been performed internationally. She received the Berlin Prize in Music Composition, Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award in Music from American Academy of Arts and Letters, commissions from Koussevitzky Foundation and The Library of Congress and the Fromm Foundation at Harvard among others. Wang Lu was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. Wang Lu’s portrait albums Urban Inventory (2018), and An Atlas of Time (2020) were released to critical acclaim.

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.

In addition to his role as conductor, Rose is leading the charge for the preservation and advancement of underperformed works through recordings. BMOP/sound, the independent record label Rose founded in 2008, has released over 86 recordings of contemporary music by today’s most innovative composers, including world premieres by John Cage, Lukas Foss, Chen Yi, Anthony Davis, Lisa Bielawa, Steven Mackey, Eric Nathan, and many others. With Rose as executive producer, the label has secured five GRAMMY® nominations and a win in 2020 for Tobias Picker’s opera Fantastic Mr. Fox. Odyssey Opera’s in-house label has released five CDs, most recently a complete version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII.

Beyond Boston, Gil Rose enjoys a busy schedule as a guest conductor and educator. Equally at home on the podium in both symphonic and operatic repertoire, Rose has led performances by the Tanglewood Opera Orchestra, the Netherlands Radio Symphony, the American Composers Orchestra, the National Symphony of Ukraine, the Matsumoto Festival of Japan, the New York City Opera, and the Juilliard Symphony among others. In addition to being former faculty at Tufts University and Northeastern University, Rose has worked with students across the U.S. at institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, New England Conservatory, and the University of California at San Diego. He is a visionary curator of music, inaugurating the Ditson Festival of Music at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and programming three seasons for the Fromm Concerts at Harvard series.

In the coming seasons, Gil Rose leads Odyssey Opera in a concert performance of three one-act operas by Rachmaninoff and brings John Corigliano and Mark Adamo’s new opera The Lord of Cries to Boston audiences. In addition, he and BMOP will travel to Carnegie Hall for the orchestra’s debut performance and culmination of their 25th season, and BMOP and Odyssey will co-produce Harriet Tubman: When I Crossed That Line to Freedom, the second opera in As Told By: History, Race, and Justice on the Opera Stage, a five-year initiative highlighting Black composers and vital figures of Black liberation and thought.

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. Each season, Rose brings BMOP’s award-winning orchestra, renowned soloists, and influential composers to the city’s most prestigious halls in a series that offers orchestral programming of unrivaled eclecticism. 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.”

In its extended quarter-century season celebration, which kicked off in February 2022 at Boston’s Symphony Hall, BMOP will inaugurate As Told By; visit Carnegie Hall for its debut performance; and release its 100th recording on BMOP/sound.

MusicWorks Collective

MusicWorks Collective (MWC), the ensemble in residence of Community MusicWorks, is the manifestation of the organization’s commitment to transformative experiences through musical performance. MWC programs music that represents individual and collective passions — ranging from Bach to the most recently-composed music of today to musical collaborations that honor the traditions of Community MusicWorks families. The MusicWorks Collective makes programming choices conscious of representing voices from everyone in our community, especially the historically marginalized voices of women composers and composers of color– with the belief that musical experiences are richest when everyone is heard.

MWC performs in venues ranging from concert halls to corner taquerias, and seeks to animate performances with a sense of community-building and celebration of the human spirit. Further afield, they have performed in Boston, New York City, and at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

In addition to performances, CMW’s resident musicians provide free after-school programming to youth in Providence’s West End neighborhood.

Isaac Barzso

Isaac Barzso is a composer, improviser, and sound artist who creates acoustic and electronic music and multimedia. Isaac’s work is grounded in complex, detailed sound, driven by the search for interaction between materiality and intangibility of sonic material, with his practice focused on continual exploration of the relationship between acoustic and electronic sound sources and alternate methods of auditory transduction.

Isaac’s work has been performed across North America and Europe in collaboration with artists such as JACK Quartet, Longleash, Ensemble Dal Niente, Mivos Quartet, Sandbox Percussion, and line upon line, and featured at events such as the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Opera Forward Festival (Dutch National Opera), SEAMUS, Yarn/Wire Festival, NYCEMF, ICMC, SICPP, and the Loretto Project. Upcoming projects include a new work for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, a solo laptop set at NYU, and a long-form work with line upon line percussion.

Isaac is a Ph.D. fellow in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University studying with Anthony Cheung. In 2023 he graduated with distinction from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, studying composition with Yannis Kyriakides, Mayke Nas, Richard Barrett, and Peter Adriaansz. Former mentors include Krzysztof Wołek and Ladislav Kubík.

Nick Bentz

Nick Bentz (b. 1994 - Charleston, SC) is a composer, violinist, and multimedia artist whose work is drawn to remote fringes and recesses of experience. In his work he seeks to render intimately personal spaces imbued with an individual sense of storytelling and narrative. His art centers around the blurring, juxtaposition, and amalgamation of stylistic idioms into singular sonic statements.

​Nick's music has been performed by leading artists including the Philadelphia Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, yMusic, Ensemble Dal Niente, Hub New Music, HOCKET, LIGAMENT, Charleston Symphony, Suzhou Symphony Orchestra, and Jacksonville Symphony, and featured at Lincoln Center, Kimmel Center, Copland House CULTIVATE, the Modern Art Museum of Shanghai, Chengdu Museum, Bowdoin Music Festival, Ethan Cohen Galleries, Sounding Now Festival, and Piccolo Spoleto Festival. His first opera, Having Guests for Dinner was commissioned by /kor/ productions and has been performed by Hillman Opera, Hartford Opera Theater, and New Opera West. 

Current projects include commissions for Ensemble Intercontemporain and Wigmore Hall, and works for Sandbox Percussion, Thornton EDGE, and percussionist David Moliner to be premiered at the Musikverein. His work has received honors from the Tribeca New Music Festival, the American Prize, the iSING International Young Artists Festival, Boston New Music Initiative, and American Composer’s Orchestra's EarShot Program. Nick has held residencies at Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Suncoast Composer Fellowship, and Atlantic Center for the Arts.

As a violinist, Nick has soloed with the Charleston Symphony, Thornton EDGE, and the Pacific Philharmonic. He has also performed with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. An avid interpreter of new music, Nick has commissioned and premiered a number of pieces ranging from chamber and solo pieces to concerti and multimedia works.

Nick is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University, pursuing a doctorate in Music and Multimedia Composition. He received a master’s degree in composition from the University of Southern California. Nick also earned a master's in violin from the Peabody Conservatory, receiving bachelor's degrees in violin and composition from Peabody under the tutelage of Herbert Greenberg and Kevin Puts. Nick's mentors include Anthony Cheung, Wang Lu, Eric Nathan, Butch Rovan, Nina Young, Donald Crockett, Ted Hearne, Andrew Norman, Felipe Lara, and Yiorgos Vassilandonakis; his violin teachers include Lina Bahn, Yuriy Bekker, Espen Lilleslåtten, and Diana Cohen.

Inga Chinilina

Inga Chinilina is a composer, improviser, and pianist based in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work includes music for acoustic instruments from solo to orchestra, electronic music, and a mix of both. In addition to stand-alone music pieces, Inga also makes installations, music for dance and film.

Ensembles that have performed Inga C’s music include Either/Or, The Empyrean, Dal Niente, Jack Quartet, ICE Ensemble, line upon line percussion trio, Loadbang, Longleash Trio, Lydian String Quartet, Neave Trio, No Exit, Sound Icon, Russia State Academic Russian Folk Ensemble, Splice, Talea, and Yarn/Wire.

Inga is a PhD candidate in “Music and Multimedia Composition” at Brown University. Her research explores how composers represent sound entities that bare emotional meaning and posses complex timbre through the use of Western-European instruments. Inga holds a BM in Composition and Performance from Berklee College of Music and an MFA in Theory and Composition from Brandeis University.

Adeliia Faizullina

Adeliia (Adele) Faizullina (b.1988) is an Uzbekistan-born Tatar composer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and quray player. As a composer, she explores cutting-edge vocal colors and paints delicate and vibrant atmospheres inspired by the music and poetry of Tatar folklore. The Washington Post has praised her compositions as "vast and varied, encompassing memory and imagination." Her recent commissions include works for Longleash Ensemble, Jennifer Koh, the Tesla Quartet, Johnny Gandelsman, and the Metropolis Ensemble. Her works have also been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Albany Symphony, Kronos Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, the Del Sol Quartet, Brianna Matzke, Ashley Bathgate, Stephanie Lamprea, and Duo Cortona. Adeliia was one of seven composers to be selected for the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute in 2022. She was a guest artist at Play On Philly in 2021, and is a member of Composing Earth 2022-2023, by the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. 

Adeliia received her BM in Voice in Kazan, Russia, and BM in Music Composition at Gnessins Russian Academy of Music. She holds an MM in Music Composition from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently pursuing her PhD in Music & Multimedia Composition at Brown University. 

Currently Adeliia resides in Providence, RI. She also happens to be blind. She enjoys taking walks and being in nature.

Sofía Rocha

Sofía Rocha (b. 1996), an “inventive composer who suggests an ability to honor music’s past while exploring its future” (South Florida Classical Review), writes music of uncompromising emotional intensity while exploring cognition, randomness, movement, and counterpoint through an eclectic set of frameworks. Winner of the 2022 Hermitage Prize at the Aspen Music Festival and a 2022 Copland House Residency Award, recent and upcoming projects include newly commissioned works for the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with the New World Symphony, the Emory University Symphony Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony via their First Music Commissioning program, and a reading of Collage d’hommages with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra through the ACO/EarShot program. Sofía’s first orchestral work, Replier, was described as ‘unforgettable’ and evocative of ‘the feeling of being confronted with something unknowably vast’ (The Boston Globe) as well as ‘music at its most elemental’ (The Boston Classical Review). She has also received honors from ASCAP, the New England Philharmonic, Earplay New Music Ensemble, Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music Youth Orchestra, OM/NI Composition Competition and Tenebrae New Music Ensemble. She has worked with ensembles including the Arditti Quartet, JACK Quartet, Fifth House Ensemble, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, New York Youth Symphony, DeCoda, loadbang, Brentano String Quartet, Castle of our Skins, Transient Canvas, Hypercube, arx duo, and Duo Entre-Nous as well as numerous solo performers.

Sofía is currently a PhD student in the Music and Multimedia Composition program at Brown University. She received her master’s degree in composition from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory as a Chancellor’s Scholar and recipient of Elsberry & Gonder Family and Conservatory scholarships. While attending, she studied with Chen Yi, Yotam Haber, Paul Rudy and Zhou Long. Rocha was also the 2019 composer-in-residence for the Graduate Fellowship String Quartet at UMKC. She completed her undergraduate work at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College in 2019, receiving a BA in Music with Honors as a Wagnild Scholar and studying composition with Avner Dorman. She has attended the Aspen Music Festival, June in Buffalo, Fresh Inc. Festival, the Atlantic Music Festival, Divergent Studio, and the Hypercube Composition Lab as a composer, studying and taking master classes with composers such as Augusta Read Thomas, Hannah Lash, Hilda Paredes, Jeffrey Mumford, Alex Temple, Richard Danielpour, Aaron Helgeson, Amy Beth Kirsten, and David Serkin Ludwig, among others. Besides composing, Sofía is also an avid trombonist and conductor, having performed with numerous symphony orchestras, wind ensembles and jazz groups.