The music of composer Nina C. Young (b.1984) is characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy. Her musical voice mixes elements of the classical canon, modernism, spectralism, American experimentalism, minimalism, electronic music, and popular idioms. Her projects, ranging from concert pieces to interactive installations, strive to create unique sonic environments that explore aural architectures, resonance, and ephemera.

Young's works have been presented by Carnegie Hall, the National Gallery, the Whitney Museum, LA Phil's Next on Grand, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra's Liquid Music Series. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Aizuri Quartet, Either/Or, the JACK Quartet, wild Up, and Yarn/Wire. Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Young has also received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Commission, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Award, Aspen Music Festival's Jacob Druckman Prize, and honors from BMI, IAWM, and ASCAP/SEAMUS.

In 2019 Carnegie Hall commissioned Out of whose womb came the ice with the American Composers Orchestra: for baritone, orchestra, electronics, and generative video, commenting on the ill-fated Ernest Shackleton Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-17. Other recent projects include Tread softly that opened the NY Philharmonic's Project 19, a violin concerto Traces for Jennifer Koh commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, The Glow that Illuminates, The Glare that Obscures for the American Brass Quintet, and Nothing is not borrowed in song and shattered light - an immersive audio-visual installation version commissioned by EMPAC showcasing their wave field synthesis audio system.

A graduate of McGill University and MIT, Young completed her DMA at Columbia University. She is an Associate Professor of Composition as USC's Thornton School of Music. She serves as Co-Artistic Director of New York's Ensemble Échappé. Her music is published by Peermusic Classical.

Heart.throb
military marching bands,

drumcore parades,

sharp, staccato rudiments:

The obvious story

of the snare drum. 

delicate contrast,

precision and care,

passionate nuance:

A secret love story

of warm resonance cradled

by tension-coupled heads.

With simple technological mediation, the percussionist, our valiant heartthrob, pulses life into the membranes. The drummer reveals interior whispers - resuscitated, amplified, filtered. The drum reveals the drummer. 

Heart.throb was written for Mike Compitello’s “Unsnared Drum” project, and was premiered by him on February 14, 2019 in Lawrence, Kansas. 

Roger Zare has been praised for his “enviable grasp of orchestration” (New York Times) and for writing music with “formal clarity and an alluringly mercurial surface.” He was born in Sarasota, FL, and has written for a wide variety of ensembles, from solo instruments to full orchestra. Often inspired by science, mathematics, literature, and mythology, his colorfully descriptive and energetic works have been performed on six continents by such ensembles as the American Composers Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Sarasota Orchestra, the Australian-based Trio Anima Mundi, the Donald Sinta Quartet, and the New York Youth Symphony. An award winning composer, Zare has received the ASCAP Nissim Prize, three BMI Student Composer Awards, an ASCAP Morton Gould award, a New York Youth Symphony First Music Commission, the 2008 American Composers Orchestra Underwood Commission, a 2010 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Copland House Residency Award, Grand Prize in the inaugural China-US Emerging Composers Competition, and many other honors. An active pianist, Zare performed his chamber work, Geometries, with Cho-Liang Lin, Jian Wang, and Burt Hara at the 2014 Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival. He has been the 2023 FRA guest composer at Fermilab and composer-in-residence with the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival, the Salt Bay Chamber Music Festival, the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington and the SONAR new music ensemble. Zare's collections of concert etudes for solo clarinet and bass clarinet are paired with written masterclasses by clarinetist Andy Hudson in Elements of Contemporary Clarinet Technique and SPACE BASS, both published by Conway Publications and distributed around the world.

Zare holds a DMA ('12) from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Michael Daugherty, Paul Schoenfield, Bright Sheng, and Kristin Kuster. He holds degrees from the Peabody Conservatory (MM '09) and the University of Southern California (BM '07), and his previous teachers include Christopher Theofanidis, Derek Bermel, David Smooke, Donald Crockett, Tamar Diesendruck, Fredrick Lesemann, and Morten Lauridsen. Zare currently serves as assistant professor of music at Appalachian State University and previously taught composition at Illinois State University.

Seas of the Moon is a suite inspired by four imaginatively named regions on the moon. Early humans gazed at the brilliant moon and saw what appeared to be seas and oceans separating continents and islands. While we now know that the moon is desolate and completely devoid of bodies of water, these names of lunar regions stuck and are fantastically descriptive.

The first movement, Mare Vaporum, or Sea of Vapors, suggests an impressionist seascape, with foam and fog roiling about. With long lyrical lines and free rhapsodic rhythms, the bassoon imagines the changing shapes of water and clouds.

Mare Crisium, or Sea of Crises, is a fast and rhythmic piece with multiple layers of rhythm that dance about the whole range of the bassoon. This creates an illusion of multiple bassoons playing together as the activity builds to a rousing climax.

The third movement, Mare Frigoris, or Sea of Cold, explores lyricism again. Contrasting the first movement, the rhythms of this movement are wide open, abandoning a metrical impulse in order to create expansive arcs of expression.

The final movement, Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, is a rhythmic tour de force. A bit inspired by heavy metal music, the frenetic rhythms begin to slow down and get heavier while becoming grittier, with invasive flutter tonguing and timbre trills activating the texture. At the end, the music quickly accelerates back to its original speed and explodes with energy at the close.

Andrew Mead is professor of music theory at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

For the previous 30 years, he taught music theory at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance and was chair of the Music Theory Department from 1995 to 2004.

He holds degrees from Yale and Princeton Universities and has published articles on a variety of topics, including the music of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern as well as on abstract 12-tone theory and rhythmic theory.

His works have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Perspectives of New Music, The Journal of Music Theory, Theory and Practice, and elsewhere. His book, An Introduction to the Music of Milton Babbitt, is published by Princeton University Press, and he helped edit The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt, also published by Princeton. He is a recipient of the Young Scholar Publications Award from the Society of Music Theory.

Mead is also active as a composer and has received the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Institute/Academy of Arts and Letters. Recent music includes saxophone quartets for PRISM and the Larry Teal Saxophone Quartet, a song cycle for Jennifer Goltz and Brave New Works on texts by Amy Clampitt, and works written for saxophonists Timothy McAllister and Brian Sacawa.

Schena
"I wrote 'Scena' in 1989 as a virtuoso solo work for oboist Harry Sargous. In 1996, saxophonist Kelland Thomas asked me if he could try it on the alto sax. I said, 'Sure!' and I have never regretted it. Thomas played the first performance of the work on saxophone in the Spring of 1997, and shortly thereafter Timothy McAllister took up the work. Both have reinvented the piece for me, not superceding the original version, but adding to it. I have since gone back and specified that it be for either oboe or saxophone. For all its use of a highly chromatic, twelve-tone compositional language, 'Scena' was conceived as a 19th century operatic scene, complete with a dramatic recitative, a large 'da capo' aria, and a virtuosic cabaletta. In composing the piece, I did not specify to myself the gender of the protagonist, nor was I concerned with the circumstances of the scene. I wanted to keep these open to interpretation, and broadening the work to a wider range of instruments has only increased the possibilities. What I did want to shape was an emotional progression, from the high dudgeon of the recitative through the initial sorrow and wistfulness of the opening of the aria, to a point of acceptance and transcendence in the highly varied 'da capo' followed by the resurgent cabaletta."

Composer Paola Prestini has cultivated a uniquely expansive and humanistic musical voice, through pieces that transcend genre and discipline, and projects whose global impact reverberates beyond the walls of the concert hall. Far more than just notes on a page, Prestini's works give voice to those whom society has silenced, and offer a platform for the causes that are most vital to us all. Prestini has been named one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music by the Washington Post, one of the top 100 Composers in the World by National Public Radio, and one of the Top 30 Professionals of the Year by Musical America. As Co-Founder of National Sawdust, she has collaborated with luminaries like poet Robin Coste Lewis, visual artists Julie Mehretu and Nick Cave, and musical legends David Byrne, Philip Glass and Renée Fleming, and her works have been performed throughout the world with leading institutions like the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Dallas Opera, London's Barbican Center, Mexico's Bellas Artes, and many more.

Timo Andres (b. 1985, Palo Alto, CA) is a composer and pianist who grew up in rural Connecticut and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Recent highlights have included a solo recital debut for Carnegie Hall and the world premiere of a piano concerto for Aaron Diehl at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led by John Adams. Andres’s orchestrations and arrangements for Justin Peck’s 2024 production of Sufjan Stevens’s Illinoise completed an acclaimed limited run on Broadway at the St. James Theater following sold-out runs at The Fisher Center at Bard, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and at New York City’s Park Avenue Armory. For his work on the production, Andres was nominated for 2024 Tony Award for Best Orchestrations.

In 24–25, Timo Andres performs at Stanford Live with Conor Hanick, and at the Phillips Collection with Aaron Diehl. He also reunites with the Calder Quartet to perform his new piano quintet The Great Span in New York City for the People’s Symphony.

Andres continues with performances of Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes internationally; he is a trusted collaborator of Philip Glass, serving as advisor and editor of a 2023 edition of the Etudes published by Artisan. Andres performed these works last season at Lincoln Center, the Chicago Humanities Festival, the Music Academy of the West, for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, and elsewhere.

Notable works include Everything Happens So Much for the Boston Symphony; Strong Language for the Takács Quartet, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and the Shriver Hall Concert Series; Steady Hand, a two-piano concerto commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia premiered at the Barbican by Andres and David Kaplan; and The Blind Banister, a concerto for Jonathan Biss, which was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

As a pianist, Timo Andres has appeared with the LA Phil, North Carolina Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the New World Symphony, the Metropolis Ensemble, among others. He has performed solo recitals for Lincoln Center, and Wigmore Hall. Timo’s collaborators include Becca Stevens, Jeffrey Kahane, Gabriel Kahane, Brad Mehldau, Nadia Sirota, and—of course—Philip Glass, who selected Andres as the recipient of the City of Toronto Glenn Gould Protégé Prize. He was nominated for a Grammy award for his performances on 2021’s The Arching Path, an album of music by Christopher Cerrone. Andres’s collaborations with Sufjan Stevens also include his May 2023 recording with Conor Hanick of Stevens’s latest album, Reflections; arrangements of ballets for New York City Ballet, and a solo piano album, The Decalogue.

A Nonesuch Records artist, Andres has multiple albums on the label, including 2024’s The Blind Banister with Metropolis Ensemble. A Yale School of Music graduate, he is a Yamaha/Bösendorfer Artist and is on the composition faculty at the Mannes School of Music at the New School.

Fiddlehead
Fomenting its gestural figures from spirals, springs, coils, vortices, loops-de-loop, and other calligraphic flourishes, Fiddlehead is an irrepressible stream of piano energy based on the intervals of a minor second and major third. A descending chromatic sequence recurs throughout, acting as a moderating influence.