Pamela Z

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and wireless MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound with physical gestures. In addition to her solo work, she has been commissioned to compose scores for dance, theatre, film, and chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, the Bang on a Can All Stars, Ethel, and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Her interdisciplinary performance works have been presented at venues including The Kitchen (NY), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), REDCAT (LA), and MCA (Chicago), and her installations have been presented at such exhibition spaces as the Whitney (NY), the Diözesanmuseum (Cologne), and the Krannert (IL). Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. She has performed in numerous festivals including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center (New York), Interlink (Japan), Other Minds (San Francisco), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Dak’Art (Sénégal) and Pina Bausch Tanztheater Festival (Wuppertal, Germany). She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Rome Prize, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder. www.pamelaz.com

And and And

My work on this piece started with a sonic armature that I constructed from samples of the voice of Ashley Hahn.

And and And explores a kind of distilled, stripped-down truth that rings through the nuance of human speech sounds and disassociated language fragments. It guides the ear along a path forged by the abstraction of language absent its original context and steeped in the oddly emotional music of an earnest woman’s speaking voice. Weaving and dancing in conversation with the human-sounding voice of Amanda’s cello, it’s asking more than answering – leaving us to fill in our own blanks, form our own conclusions, construct our own truths, and insert our own clauses between a surplus of conjunctions.

inti figgis-vizueta

inti figgis-vizueta (b. 1993) is a Brooklyn-based composer whose music focuses on combinations of various notational schemata, disparate and overlaid sonic plans, and collaborative unlearning of dominant vernaculars. She/they often write magically real musics through the lens of personal identities, braiding a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom schools—in Chocolate City (DC)—with Andean heritage and a deep connection to land(s). Reviewers say her music constantly toes the line between "all turbulence" and "quietly focused" (National Sawdust Log).

inti has most recently been named one of JACK Quartet's inaugural JACK Studio artists; won the 2019 Hildegard Competition from National Sawdust, which culminated in the commission and premiere of Openwork, Knotted object // Trellis in bloom // lightning ache; been featured in the 2019 Underwood New Music Readings, which included the American Composer's Orchestra reading Symphony for the Body; and participated in the 2019 Mizzou International Composer's Festival, which featured Alarm Will Sound premiering Primavera Crown.

inti loves reading poetry, particularly Danez Smith and Joy Harjo. She also curates for score follower, an online archive championing universal access to contemporary musics. inti honors her Quechua grandmother, who was the only woman butcher on the whole plaza central and used to fight men with a machete.​

Seong Ae Kim

Seong Ae Kim is a Korean-born composer based in New York City. Her recent works spanning the past 5 years have been acutely focused on amplifying self-truth and voicing social justice concerns. As a passionate advocate for social justice, Kim has collaborated with fellow artists and ensembles to address and confront the practitioners of social injustice in our society, particularly those who oppress others through acts of racial discrimination and immigrant scapegoating.

She has been recognized with awards from Jerome Foundation, New Music USA and the Composers Now/Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Her recent commissions include Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Tinguely Museum in Basel, Amanda Gookin of Forward Music Project, Parhelion trio, Ensemble Ipse, Hypercube, Ensemble mise-en and Popebama among others. Kim’s works were presented at June in Buffalo, Composer’s conference, International Alliance of Women in Music, International double reed society (Japan, Thailand and U.S.), and Audio Trading Manual Festival (Korea) to name a few.

Break Free

A recurring theme in my compositions is the concept of laboring and striving. With "Break Free," I aim to explore the inner struggle that we often conceal from others. Despite grappling with significant inner turmoil, we may appear outwardly composed. Only when we acknowledge our internal challenges can we hear the deafening roar of the inner storm and take the necessary steps to break free.

Camila Agosto

An avid collaborator, Camila Agosto is an electroacoustic composer and interdisciplinary artist currently based in New York City. Camila seeks to discover intersections of her work with additional artistic fields through partnerships with other musicians, visual artists, choreographers, instrument builders, and creators. Her projects range from acoustic and electroacoustic concert works and orchestral scores to interdisciplinary projects incorporating visual media and dance, and from solo instruments and larger ensembles to fixed media works. Her music is both fully notated and improvisational and often employs extended instrumental techniques, exhibiting a particular emphasis on the exploration of different timbral and textural elements. Within her works, Camila is interested in uncovering the sonic potentialities of acoustic instruments through highlighting and exposing the human element of live performance.

​Her music has been featured at venues and festivals in the United States and abroad, and has been performed by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Quartet 121, the Semiosis Quartet, Berrow Duo, Ensemble Échappé. It has been featured at the Miller Theatre Pop-Up Series at Columbia University, National Sawdust, Symphony Space Bar Thalia Series, 2018 New Latin Wave Festival, the FETA FM Festival, Sala Neumann, and the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. Camila often works with visual artists, choreographers, and film directors on a variety of multimedia projects. Past collaborations include imprint, an electroacoustic installation piece commissioned by Berrow Duo, featuring projected visual media and artwork created by artists from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

In the summer of 2020, Camila became a certified yoga instructor and created the Meristem Artist Retreat, a virtual space for artists of marginalized genders including women, trans individuals, femme-identifying, and nonbinary folks, to meet a variety of artists across different disciplines while learning holistic and balanced practices to help them sustain a healthy artistic life. Since then, Camila has founded Meristem Artists, an arts community continuing the work of the retreat to support artists of marginalized genders and create a welcoming, supportive, and trustworthy atmosphere in which to connect, learn, share and work. Through her work with Meristem Artists, she has directed a series of artist retreats and community events including open discussions surrounding topics central to creating arts today, artist talks with invited guests across the contemporary music community, yoga and meditation sessions, and additional holistic activities to stimulate healthy and positive creative practices. Camila has led various wellness workshop series through the Columbia University Computer Music Center and was an invited guest presenter at the Ensemble Evolution 2022 summer sessions led by the International Contemporary Ensemble.

In recent projects, Camila has designed and constructed various instruments and performative installation pieces to use in her compositional work. Upcoming projects include Paracusia IV; a continuation of a multi-movement, concert-length program scored for solo saxophone and live electronics co-commissioned with Justin Massey, with a grant awarded from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Memory of Water Vol. 1; a multi-piece project created in collaboration with violist and poet, Martine Thomas, exploring the integration of text, live composition, improvisation, electronics and custom instruments, as well as I gather them all; a new work for small ensemble commissioned by the Bar Harbor Music Festival. ​

Camila is currently a doctoral candidate at Columbia University. She holds a Master’s degree from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelors in Music from Montclair State University. Her teachers include Zosha Di Castri, Seth Cluett, Brad Garton, George Lewis, Oscar Bettison, Marcos Balter and Du Yun. She has also worked with Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Sabrina Schroeder, Amy Williams, and Juraj Kojs. Camila was a composition fellow at the New Music on the Point Festival, the Cortona Sessions for New Music, and the Summer Music programs at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. A recipient of the Randolph S. Rothschild Scholarship, Camila has also received awards and scholarships from the Marshall M. Williams Endowment and Sorel Organization.

The Thinness Of

With special thanks to Martine Thomas for her beautiful text which influenced this work, your words have always been a source of inspiration and I am honored to have been able to include them in this piece:

light through distance. now focus in, up close. nothing but light, overcome, overpowering, overwhelming, thermonuclear fusion happening right now in the

plasmic spheroid, coming through clear from how far.

the dark whittles down to clarity. what holds together. what is inner. what is real, what distorts the message, what do you concede, & what will not translate? shed it.

forget the loss, keep clear & ask to be understood. against the star-thin edge between you & darkness & how can meaning come through. through the body of darkness

above. through the body at hand, the body at a glance, the body submerged within cloud or water or space, membranes, equilibrium, & what can be exchanged

between or across tell me what can come through?

fusion, luminous, coming clear from thousands of miles. through distance the thinness. the plasmic spheroid. from unknown miles, unknown distance. dark whittling

down to clarity. whittling down to the interior. it will not translate.

Provided with permission from the author, Martine Thomas (www.martinethomas.com)

Sarah Hennies

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art. She presents her work internationally as both a composer and percussionist with notable performances at MoMA PS1 (NYC), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Le Guess Who (Utrecht), Festival Cable (Nantes), send + receive (Winnipeg), O’ Art Space (Milan), Cafe Oto (London), ALICE (Copenhagen), and the Edition Festival (Stockholm). As a composer, she has worked with a wide array of performers and ensembles including Bearthoven, Bent Duo, Claire Chase, ensemble 0, Judith Hamann, R. Andrew Lee, The Living Earth Show, Talea Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Two-Way Street, Nate Wooley, and Yarn/Wire.

Her ground breaking audio-visual work Contralto (2017) explores transfeminine identity through the elements of “voice feminization” therapy, featuring a cast of transgender women accompanied by a dense and varied musical score for string quartet and three percussionists. The work has been in high demand since its premiere, with numerous performances taking place around North America, Europe, and Australia and was one of four finalists for the 2019 Queer|Art Prize.

She is the recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a 2016 fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received additional support from the Fromm Foundation, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, New Music USA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Creative Work Fund.

Sarah is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.

Jessie Montgomery

Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).

Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Banner (2014)—written to mark the 200th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—for The Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation, which was presented in its UK premiere at the BBC Proms on 7 August 2021.

Summer 2021 brought a varied slate of premiere performances, including Five Freedom Songs, a song cycle conceived with and written for Soprano Julia Bullock, for Sun Valley and Grand Teton Music Festivals, San Francisco and Kansas City Symphonies, Boston and New Haven Symphony Orchestras, and the Virginia Arts Festival (7 August); a site-specific collaboration with Bard SummerScape Festival and Pam Tanowitz Dance, I was waiting for the echo of a better day (8 July); and Passacaglia, a flute quartet for The National Flute Association’s 49th annual convention (13 August).

Since 1999, Jessie has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players and has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the Organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble.

A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and a former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Jessie holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. She is Professor of violin and composition at The New School. In May 2021, she began her three-year appointment as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.