The music of composer Judah Adashi, grounded in the classical tradition and imbued with soul and pop influences ranging from Nina Simone to Björk, has been described as “beguiling” (Alex Ross, New Yorker), “elegant” (Steve Smith, Boston Globe), and “impassioned” (Will Robin, Seated Ovation). He has been honored with awards, grants and commissions from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the ASCAP and BMI Foundations, the American Composers Forum, New Music USA and the Aspen Music Festival, as well as residencies at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

 

Among Dr. Adashi’s recent works is Rise, a collaboration with the poet Tameka Cage Conley. The forty-minute piece for double choir and chamber ensemble, which bears witness to America’s fraught civil rights journey from Selma to Ferguson and beyond, was praised for its “strong words [and] clear music” (Anne Midgette, Washington Post). The work’s opening movement was recorded and released in May 2015, with all proceeds going to the family of Freddie Gray, the young black man whose death while in police custody sparked the Baltimore Uprising.

 

As an organizer committed to creating meaningful contexts for 21st century classical music, Dr. Adashi is the founder and artistic director of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series, noted for having “elevated and enriched Baltimore’s new music scene enormously” (Tim Smith, Baltimore Sun). The series has made Baltimore a destination for extraordinary new music and musicians since 2005. In the words of the Washington Post’s Tim Page: "To live in Baltimore is to live in a perpetual state of surprise, and the marvelous and venturesome Evolution Series adds smart new music to the mix…for those of us who remember downtown New York in the 1970s, it is reassuring to find something very much like it happening in Baltimore now."

 

Passionate about introducing students to new music and empowering Baltimore’s youngest artists to make their own, Dr. Adashi has been a member of the composition and music theory faculty at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University since 2002. In addition to teaching composition lessons and courses in contemporary music, he also directs Junior Bach, a one-on-one mentoring program in composition for students in Baltimore City schools, culminating each semester in a concert of their original music. Junior Bach alumnus Tariq Al-Sabir calls the program “a catalyst for growth, not only in music but in life…it taught me how to connect the music in my head to the music on paper and in the concert hall.”

 

Dr. Adashi holds master’s and doctoral degrees from Peabody, and a bachelor’s degree from Yale University. He lives in Baltimore’s Federal Hill neighborhood with his fiancée and frequent collaborator, cellist Lavena Johanson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

Jason Eckardt played guitar in jazz and metal bands until, upon first hearing the music of Webern, he immediately devoted himself to composition. Since then, his music has been influenced by his interests in perceptual complexity, the physicality of performance, political activism, and self-organizing processes in the natural world. He has been recognized through commissions from Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, the Koussevitzky Foundation (2000, 2011), the Guggenheim Museum, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University (1996, 2008), Chamber Music America, the New York State Music Fund, Meet the Composer, the Oberlin Conservatory, and percussionist Evelyn Glennie; awards from the League of Composers/ISCM (National Prize), Deutschen Musikrat-Stadt Wesel (Symposium NRW Prize), the Aaron Copland Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts, ASCAP, the University of Illinois (Martirano Prize), the Alice M. Ditson Fund, and Columbia University (Rapoport Prize); and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Fondation Royaumont, the MacDowell and Millay Colonies, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, the Fritz Reiner Center for Contemporary Music, the Composers Conference at Wellesley, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music. His music is published by Carl Fischer.

 

Major festivals have programmed his works, including the Festival d'Automne a Paris, IRCAM-Resonances, ISCM World Music Days (1999, 2000), Darmstadt, Musica Strasbourg, Voix Nouvelles, Musik im 20. Jahrhundert, Musikhost, Currents in Musical Thought-Seoul, New Consortium, International Review of Contemporary Music, Festival of New American Music, and the International Bartok Festival. Performances of Mr. Eckardt's music have been broadcast by the BBC, Saarlandisches Rundfunk, Radio Socioculturelle, WKCR, the Australian Broadcasting Company, WBAI, and Cultura FM Espana.

 

Subject, a new CD featuring the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, and soloists Tony Arnold, Jay Campbell, Jordan Dodson, Eric Lamb, and Marilyn Nonken was recently released by Tzadik. Two additional portrait CDs, Undersong, featuring Fred Sherry, Claire Chase, Tony Arnold, and ICE conducted by Steven Schick, and Out of Chaos, featuring Ensemble 21, are available on Mode. Other recordings include Strömkarl by violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen on Urlicht, Echoes' White Veil by pianist Marilyn Nonken on CRI, Transience by marimbist Makoto Nakura on Helicon, Sweet Creature by percussionist Michael Lipsey on Capstone, 16 by ICE on New Focus, Multiplicities by flutist Nancy Ruffer on Metier, Tangled Loops by saxophonist Nathan Nabb on Amp, Tango Clandestino by pianist Amy Briggs on Revello, A Fractured Silence by the Prism Saxophone Quartet on Innova, and Rendition by clarinetist Jean Kopperud on Albany.

 

Mr. Eckardt has written on subjects ranging from cognitive research informing composition to Richard Serra's use of process from a musical perspective. His work has appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Autour de la Set Theory in IRCAM's Musique-Sciences series, L'etincelle, Dansk Musik Tidsskrift, Current Musicology, and a chapter in Arcana II, edited by John Zorn.

 

Also active as a promoter of new music, Mr. Eckardt co-founded and served as the Executive Director of Ensemble 21, the contemporary music performance group in New York City. Under his leadership, the critically acclaimed Ensemble earned a reputation for innovative programming and top-caliber performances, premiered over thirty works, and recorded for the CRI and Mode labels. In 1999, Ensemble 21 was the first American ensemble to collaborate in concert with IRCAM.

 

Mr. Eckardt received a doctorate in composition from Columbia University as a Presidential Fellow. In 1992, Mr. Eckardt graduated cum laude from Berklee College of Music where he was awarded the Richard Levy Scholarship. He has attended masterclasses with Milton Babbitt, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has taught at Columbia University, the Oberlin Conservatory, New York University, the University of Illinois, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University and is currently on the faculties of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In the 2015-16 academic year, he will be a member of the composition faculty at the Peabody Conservatory.

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

“Michael Hersch writes music of astounding, even thrilling, complexity; music that can be hard to grasp, yet impossible to let go of; and music of stark, unsettling, seemingly implausible beauty.”

Tim Smith, The Baltimore Sun

 

Widely considered “one of the most fertile musical minds to emerge in the U.S. over the past generation,” (The Financial Times of London), Michael Hersch continues to compose music of tremendous power and invention. His work has been conducted in the U.S. and abroad by conductors including Mariss Jansons, Alan Gilbert, Yuri Temirkanov, Robert Spano, Marin Alsop, Giancarlo Guerrero, Carlos Kalmar, and James DePriest, and has been performed by the major orchestras of Cleveland, Saint Louis, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Seattle, Baltimore, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Oregon; domestic and international festivals including the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Chicago’s Grant Park, Germany’s Schloss Neuhardenberg and Italy’s Romaeuropa Festivals; and ensembles including the String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, The Network for New Music, and the Blair String Quartet, among others.

 

He has written for such soloists as Garrick Ohlsson, Thomas Hampson, Midori, Boris Pergamenschikow, Shai Wosner, Walter Boeykens, Gary Louie, Michael Sachs, Daniel Gaisford and Miranda Cuckson. His solo and chamber works have appeared on programs throughout the world - from the Chamber Society of Lincoln Center in the U.S. and the Dartington New Music Festival in the U.K., to the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. Upcoming projects include a new work for Holland’s Ensemble Klang, and his evening-length monodrama, On the Threshold of Winter, scored for soprano and mixed ensemble. The opera will be presented by the organization Nunc, and is scheduled for a 2013/14 premiere.

 

Also regarded among today's most formidable pianists, Mr. Hersch has appeared on the Van Cliburn Foundation’s Modern at the Modern Series, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., Cleveland’s Reinberger Hall at Severance Hall, the Festival of Contemporary Music Nuova Consonanza, the Warhol Museum, and in New York City’s 92nd St. Y - Tisch Center for the Performing Arts, Merkin Concert Hall, and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, among others. Alongside a live recording of his first NY performance in over a decade, a documentary film about Mr. Hersch’s life and work on the instrument, The Sudden Pianist, directed by Richard Anderson, will be released in 2013.

 

His music increasingly recorded, Vanguard Classics is in the midst of an acclaimed survey of Mr. Hersch’s complete music for solo strings. This project comes several years after the landmark 2007 boxed-set release of Mr. Hersch’s, The Vanishing Pavilions, with the composer at the keyboard. Mr. Hersch’s second disc for the label, featuring the composer performing his own works in addition to those of Feldman, Rihm and Josquin, was selected by The Washington Post and New York Newsday as among the most important recordings of 2004-05. That disc followed-up his debut recording, which features Mr. Hersch performing his Two Pieces for Piano and Recordatio, with additional performances of Mr. Hersch's chamber works for strings by the String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic. In 2006, a recording of Mr. Hersch’s early orchestral works, including his Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2, was released on the Naxos American Classics series with Marin Alsop conducting the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

 

Michael Hersch first came to international attention at age twenty-five, when he was awarded First Prize in the Concordia American Composers Awards. The award resulted in a performance of his Elegy, conducted by Marin Alsop in New York's Alice Tully Hall in early 1997. Later that year he became one of the youngest recipients ever of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition. Mr. Hersch has also been the recipient of the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, and both the Charles Ives Scholarship and Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

 

 

 

   

 

 

Amy Beth Kirsten’s music combines popular idioms with fierce expressionism and theatre and often requires musicians to play, vocalize, act, and move simultaneously. Her work is distinguished by an intense physicality that pushes players to extremes by making their bodies and voices instruments of artistic expression.

 

A composer, librettist, and vocalist, Dr. Kirsten begins the 2015-16 season in residence at Montclair State University (NJ) with her ensemble, HOWL, to develop Quixote – an evening-length theatrical work inspired by Cervantes and performed by three female vocalists and vocalizing percussion quartet. This two-year extended residency includes six weeklong workshops and culminates in a week of world premiere performances directed by Mark DeChiazza in March 2017.

 

Her most recent staged work, Colombine’s Paradise Theatre, opened the 2014-15 seasons of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and New York’s Miller Theatre selling out both venues. The Washington Post called it a “tour de force” and said it has “a beguiling element of the grotesque throughout, and the music is complex and multilayered, rich in allusions, and often extraordinarily beautiful.” Anthony Tommasini at The New York Times found it “dark, wild and engrossing” with a “wondrously eclectic score, which combines spiky modernism, breezy pop, hints of Indian music, percussion wildness and more.” The work was commissioned and produced by the multi-Grammy-winning eighth blackbird and directed by Mark DeChiazza.

 

Last season Dr. Kirsten made her Carnegie Hall debut with strange pilgrims, a concert work for chorus, orchestra, and film commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra. She was also the inaugural composer-in-residence for London’s Riot Ensemble which gave the world premiere of she is a myth as well as the U.K. premieres of several of her solo and chamber works.

 

She has been recognized with artist fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Most recently she received the Leonard Bernstein Award from ASCAP. In 2014 the College of DuPage (where she was a student from 1990-92) appointed her to the inaugural class of Distinguished Alumni.

 

Educated at Roosevelt University (MM) and the Peabody Conservatory (DMA), Dr. Kirsten is co-founder and director of HOWL – a modular new music ensemble that specializes in instrumental and vocal theatre. In 2014, HOWL's record label, Bad Wolf Music, released its first recording, If this world could stop. Upcoming releases include she is a myth, the first CD of Dr. Kirsten's solo and chamber works. Her music is also recorded on the Parlour Tapes+ label.

 

Dr. Kirsten lives and works in New Haven, Conn., and teaches music composition privately and at the HighSCORE summer festival in Pavia, Italy. She was recently appointed adjunct faculty of music composition at the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University for 2015-16 academic year.

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

"An exciting composer of the new American generation" (The New York Times), Sean Shepherd has quickly gained admiration and return engagements with major ensembles and performers across the U.S. and Europe. His works have been performed by the National, Chicago, BBC, and New World symphony orchestras; at festivals in Aldeburgh, Cabrillo, Heidelberg, La Jolla, Lucerne, Santa Fe, and Tanglewood; and with leading European ensembles including Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Conductor-champions include Christoph Eschenbach, Valery Gergiev, Alan Gilbert, and Franz Welser-Möst; distinguished composer-conductors Oliver Knussen and George Benjamin; and young stars James Gaffigan, Pablo Heras-Casado, Susanna Mälkki, and Matthias Pintscher.

 

The 2015-16 season includes the premieres of a new Violin Concerto for Leila Josefowicz, co-commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, and Holland’s ZaterdagMatinee; and a cello and piano work for Anssi Kartunnen and Nicolas Hodges, commissioned by Wigmore Hall. Recent works for the 2014-15 season included braided/ribboned/spun, a Carnegie Hall commission for virtuoso harpist Sivan Magen, and a large 35-minute Concerto pour ensemble for the Ensemble Intercontemporain with Mr. Pintscher. Works like These Particular Circumstances (commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the inaugural season of their new music series, CONTACT!, in 2010) and Wanderlust (premiered by the Cleveland Orchestra in 2009) continue to receive major performances this season, the latter on Radio France’s annual Festival Présences. In June 2014, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic premiered his Songs; in 2012 he was named as the orchestra’s first Kravis Emerging Composer. He completed his tenure as the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow of the Cleveland Orchestra, culminating with the premiere of his large-scale tribute to photographer Ansel Adams, Tuolumne, in April 2013 and written for Mr. Welser-Möst and the orchestra. And in summer 2013, his work Magiya, written for Carnegie Hall’s newly established National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, toured the U.S. and Europe in the orchestra’s first performances with Valery Gergiev.

 

In March 2013, the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble debuted his Quintet at various New York venues, and other recent premieres include Blue Blazes, a Hechinger Commission from Christoph Eschenbach and the National Symphony Orchestra, performed in Washington, D.C., and on a South American tour; Blur for Ensemble Intercontemporain and Susanna Mälkki, in Paris and Cologne in 2012; Quartet for Oboe and Strings, for New York Philharmonic oboist Liang Wang, at the Santa Fe and La Jolla summer festivals in 2011; and Trio for the Claremont Trio, in celebration of the opening of Calderwood Performance Hall, the Renzo Piano-designed addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, in January 2012. Dr. Shepherd served from 2010 to 2012 as the first composer-in-residence of his hometown orchestra, the Reno Philharmonic, where he composed two works: Silvery Rills and Desert Garden. Appointed by Music Director Laura Jackson, he engaged in a variety of community outreach and educational initiatives, including the orchestra’s Celebrate Strings after-school program at Title I at-risk elementary schools.

 

Winner of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, Dr. Shepherd was named as the 2011 USA Van Dusen Fellow by the United States Artists, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to investing in America's finest artists and to illuminating the value of artists to society. He won the 2009 triennial Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was the 2008 Deutsche Bank Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and a first-prize winner in the 2005 international Lutoslawski Award. He attended master classes at Tanglewood (2005) and Aspen (2006), the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme (2007), and a composer residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France (2007). He was a top prize winner in student competitions including the Robbins Family Prize at Cornell, the Palmer Dixon Prize at Juilliard, and the Indiana University Dean's Award; and earned awards and commissions from organizations such as the Sue Knussen Composers Fund, ASCAP, the National Society of Arts and Letters, Ensemble X, and the New York Youth Symphony.

 

Originally from Reno, Nevada, Dr. Shepherd (b.1979) holds degrees in composition and bassoon performance from Indiana University, where his teachers included Claude Baker and David Dzubay, composition, and Kim Walker, bassoon. Graduate studies include a master’s degree from The Juilliard School with composer Robert Beaser, and a Doctor of Musical Arts from Cornell University with Roberto Sierra and Steven Stucky. He joined the composition faculty of the Tanglewood Music Center in 2014. Also active as a writer on music, his commentary has appeared in Playbill, WQXR’s Q2 online blog, and on the American Music Center’s NewMusicBox.com. His music is published by Boosey and Hawkes. He lives in New York City.