Hailing from Medan, composer Ken Steven (b.1993) is known for his fusion of Indonesian colours and elements with modern techniques and harmonies. He received his undergraduate degree in church music from The Asian Institute for Liturgy and Music, Philippines, and completed his Master of Music degree from California Baptist University, USA.

Since returning to Indonesia, his creative activity and work have made important contributions to the development of choral music in Indonesia. His music is picking up and starting to make an impact on the international choral music scene.

Currently, he served as the Director of Studies at SMK Methodist Charles Wesley Music Vocational School in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia. He is also the conductor of Medan Community Male Choir, founded in 2015, and has led the choir to achieve many international awards in choral festivals and competitions.

The compositions of ANDREW MAXFIELD—hailed as “rhythmically vital … superbly judged … [and] tender” by Fanfare Magazine—have been performed throughout the U.S. and Europe. A recent winner of the King’s Singer’s New Music Prize (Jury Special Commendation), Andrew has been a Composer Fellow of the National Collegiate Choral Organization and Composer in Residence for Newburyport Choral Society, Southern Virginia University, and Sound of Ages.

Ensembles which have performed Andrew’s music recently include Utah Symphony, Utah Opera, The Choir of Royal Holloway, The Gesualdo Six, USC Thornton Chamber Singers, Emporia Symphony Orchestra, Carroll University Symphonic Band and Choir, Wingate University Singers, Salt Lake Symphony, Utah Philharmonic, The Piedmont Singers, University of Pennsylvania Chamber Choir, and Choral Arts Initiative.

Recent commissions include Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, Center for Latter-day Saint Arts in New York City, and a concert-length score for SALT Contemporary Dance, showcased at Lincoln Center. His album, Celebrating Wendell Berry in Music, was released by Tantara Records and his “well-crafted, approachable” works (George Case, The Boston Cecilia) are published by Walton, Santa Barbara, and Yalecrest.

Andrew learned his craft at BYU, the EAMA–Nadia Boulanger Institute in Paris, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and the University of Bristol (UK), via mentorship with Philip Lasser (Juilliard), John Pickard, Jonathan Bailey Holland, and Marti Epstein. He also holds an MBA in Arts Administration from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Andrew lives with his wife Liz Davis Maxfield—a professional cellist, expert in Irish traditional music, and rock climber—and their two handsome, high-octane boys (plus a hyper puppy) just downhill from Sundance in Provo, Utah.

Shara Nova is a composer, vocalist, musician, and an artist of many gifts currently creating from Detroit, Michigan. Most recently she starred in the Tony Award Winning musical “Illinoise” on Broadway, directed by Justin Peck, co-written by Jackie Sibblies Drury with music by Sufjan Stevens.  Shara has released five albums under the moniker My Brightest Diamond and has composed works for The Crossing, Conspirare, iSing Silicon Valley, yMusic, Brooklyn Rider, Nadia Sirota, Cantus Domus, Nordic Voices, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Roomful of Teeth, Aarhus Symfoni, Oregon Symphony, North Carolina Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, American Composers Orchestra and the BBC Concert Orchestra, among others.  She created a choral arrangement for the 2023 Oscars performance of Son Lux’s song “This Is A Life” from the movie “Everything Everywhere All At Once.”

Her baroque chamber p’opera “You Us We All” premiered in the US in October 2015 at BAM Next Wave Festival. In 2019, she composed for over 600 musicians along with the Cincinnati Symphony, a piece entitled "Look Around," with director Mark DeChiazza. With co-composer and performer Helga Davis, Nova created a four screen film entitled “Ocean Body,” along with director Mark DeChiazza, which premiered at The Momentary in August 2021, shortly followed by the premiere of “Infinite Movement,” her baroque masque for a 100 musicians, set to text by artist Matthew Ritchie, which premiered at The University of North Texas in November 2021.

Many artists have sought out Nova’s unique vocal work, including David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Suzanne Bocanegra, The Decemberists, Steve Mackey, David Lang, So Percussion, Justin Vernon, Sufjan Stevens, and Tunde Olaniran, as well as Matthew Barney with Jonathan Bepler.  Her singing and compositions are featured on “The Blue Hour” via Nonesuch Records with the string orchestra A Far Cry and co-composers Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Caroline Shaw.  

Nova is a 2023 Opera America Discovery Grant awardee, Kresge Arts fellow, a Carolina Performing Arts Creative Futures fellow, a Knights Grant recipient, a United States Artists fellow, and a New Music USA recipient.  Three of her projects were nominated for Grammy Awards in 2023.

Jennifer Lucy Cook is a composer and lyricist based in Los Angeles. Jen specializes in music for the stage and screen, choral work, and pop songwriting. Recent choral commissions include Phoenix Chorale, Cantorum Chamber Choir, and Choral Arts Ensemble in Minnesota. She is the recipient of the Chorus Austin Composition Prize, the Cantus Emerging Composer Award, the HerVoice Female Composer Prize, and the Edwin Fissinger Composition Prize. She is an alumnus of the Johnny Mercer Foundation Writer’s Grove with Goodspeed Musicals, and her theater commissions include Full House Theatre Co., British Youth Musical Theatre, and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. Her musical recaps of the Bachelor recently went viral on TikTok. She earned a Master’s degree in Musical Theater Writing from Goldsmiths University in London and a Bachelor’s in Media Music from Brigham Young University.

Despite writing music in such a wide range of genres, Jen’s music is united by a keen love for storytelling with song. She prioritizes specific, highly emotional lyrics, melodic earworms, and infectious rhythmic grooves, and conceives every piece fra dramatic, narrative-driven perspective.

Recognized with The American Prizes in both Choral Composition (2014) and Choral Performance (2019, with NOTUS), Dominick DiOrio is an imaginative, enthusiastic, and energetic conductor and composer who has won widespread acclaim for his contributions to American music. He is professor of music and chair of the department in choral conducting at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he joined the faculty in 2012, and where he serves as director of NOTUS, Indiana University’s storied contemporary vocal ensemble.

DiOrio also serves as the fourteenth artistic director and conductor of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia, one of the most historic choral organizations in the United States. As part of those duties, he regularly prepares the chorus to sing with The Philadelphia Orchestra, including a "near ideal" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) performance of Carmina burana in March 2024 with conductor Fabio Luisi. His artistic vision for the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia has been regularly supported with multiple grants from the William Penn Foundation, the Presser Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

DiOrio’s combined role as a composer-conductor has led to many unique opportunities and collaborations. In April 2024, he had the honor of writing original music for William Shatner, part of a spoken-word performance at IU’s Memorial Stadium moments before the total solar eclipse. DiOrio conducted the collaboration, which featured Mr. Shatner, NOTUS and twenty instrumentalists from the IU Jacobs School of Music. DiOrio’s guest conducting appearances regularly feature his original compositions, including with civic and professional ensembles such as the Choral Arts Society of Washington (SOLARIS), Houston Chamber Choir (I Am), Choral Arts Initiative (All Is), and the Young Naperville Singers (Young Today).

DiOrio’s original music has been hailed for its keenly intelligent, evocative style, which shows “a tour de force of inventive thinking and unique colour” (Gramophone). His over 60 published works have appeared at major venues around the world including the Sydney Opera House, Lincoln Center, and Carnegie Hall—as well as internationally in Austria, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Italy, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K.

He composes for musicians of all ages and experiences and maintains an active writing schedule—completing over 70 commissions in the last decade. Some of his recent commissioning partners include the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus and the San Francisco Symphony, the Children’s Chorus of Washington, the Cincinnati Vocal Arts Ensemble & Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, The Choral Arts Society of Washington, “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band, and many academic institutions, including Macalester, Oberlin, Princeton, Smith, and the Universities of Michigan, Oregon, and Illinois.

DiOrio’s love for contemporary music is reflected in his conducted repertoire, including such path-breaking works from the 20th and 21st centuries as James MacMillan Seven Last Words, Steve Reich The Desert Music, Alfred Schnittke Requiem, Sarah Kirkland Snider Mass for the Endangered, Joel Thompson Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, and Krzysztof Penderecki St. Luke Passion, which he prepared for the composer in November 2017. Equally at home with music of earlier eras, he has also conducted choral-orchestral performances of Bach Magnificat, Haydn Mass in Time of War, Mozart "Great" C Minor Mass, Vaughan Williams Five Mystical Songs, and Leonard Bernstein Chichester Psalms, among others.

DiOrio is deeply committed to strengthening the profession by empowering others, and he recently completed a four-year term as president and president-elect of the National Collegiate Choral Organization (2018-22). For his leadership during the pandemic, he was honored with NCCO's inaugural Distinguished Service Award. DiOrio also previously served as chair of ACDA’s Composition Initiatives Standing Committee and as a member of the Board of Directors for Chorus America.

He earned the Doctor of Musical Arts in Choral Conducting from the Yale School of Music, as well as an M.M.A. and an M.M. in Conducting from Yale and a B.M. in Composition summa cum laude from Ithaca College. He proudly credits his mentors Janet Galván, Simon Carrington, and Marguerite Brooks for serving as model leaders and for making him the person he is today.

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.

HINDSIGHT is a project from pianist Lara Downes, celebrating the Centennial of the passing of the 19th Amendment.

Featuring a new piano concerto composed for Downes by Paola Prestini, paired with the Piano Concerto in D Minor by pioneering composer Florence Price, HINDSIGHT looks back — with the 20-20 vision of hindsight — at women’s journeys through an American century.

This project is co-commissioned by the Ravinia Festival, the Louisville Orchestra, and the Oregon Bach Festival.

HINDSIGHT recognizes the frailty of progress, and the inevitable balance of struggle and triumph along the way. The 19th Amendment was a decisive step in an ongoing march towards equality, a struggle that secured voting rights for African American women nearly half a century later, and still pursues full economic and social equity for all women in our own time.

Downes performs Florence Price’s soaring and exuberant Piano Concerto in D Minor in tribute to the voices of women of color, whose fight for freedom and equity has been a constant of the American condition - the pioneers whose courage reaches ahead of their own time to lift up future generations in the ongoing struggle for equal rights.

Paola Prestini’s new concerto Hindsight: Let Me See the Sun is about the human impulse to remain hopeful, and what it means to struggle towards clarity and light. Prestini’s own identity informs the language, as an immigrant artist who balances the various impulses and needs within her own spirit. The work is structured as a dialogue between piano and orchestra, at times contentious and at times unified, coalescing at the end into a single whistling line. The simplicity of the last sung line “Let Me See the Sun” represents the optimism and fragility contained in the voices calling out every day in pursuit of multiple forms of equity. Folk music, virtuosity, harsh dissonance and vocal simplicity are infused in the work.

Avner Dorman (he/him/his) writes music of intricate craftsmanship and rigorous technique, expressed with a soulful and singular voice. A native of Israel now living in the United States, Dorman draws on a variety of cultural and historical influences in composing, resulting in music that affects an emotional impact while exploring new territories. His music utilizes an exciting and complex rhythmic vocabulary, as well as unique timbres and colors in orchestral, chamber, and solo settings; many of his compositions have become contemporary staples in the repertoire. Dorman's music is championed by conductors including Zubin Mehta, Christoph Eschenbach, Ricardo Chailly, and Andris Nelsons, and by soloists such as Pinchas Zukerman, Gil Shaham, Martin Grubinger, and Hilary Hahn. 

His music has been championed and commissioned by orchestras such as the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and opera houses such as Badsisches Staastoper Karlsruhe, Theater Dortmund, Theater Bonn, and Deutsche Oper Am Rhein.

Dorman's music has garnered numerous awards and prizes. Most recently, he won the 2018 Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music, and his debut opera, Wahnfried, was named a finalist in the category of World Premiere at the International Opera Awards. At the age of 25, Dorman became the youngest composer to win Israel's prestigious Prime Minister's Award for his Ellef Symphony. He has earned several international awards from ASCAP, ACUM, and the Asian Composers League. Dorman studied composition with John Corigliano and Josef Bardanashvili, and he holds a doctorate in composition from the Juilliard School.  Dorman currently serves as Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College.

The Fifth Element
When Michaela Barchevitchova suggested that I write a piece exploring the idea of “The Fifth Element” I was intrigued by the notion of an aethereal, intangible element in addition to the accepted four physical elements. Reading about the history of this idea, I found commonalities from around the world, aether in ancient Greece, void in Japanese Buddhism, and references to the human soul and love in other traditions. In Vedantic Hinduism, akasha means the basis and essence of all things in the material world and according to the Samkhya school, akasha is one of the five grand physical elements having the specific property of sound. I particularly connected with the idea of finding a void, a quietness, that enables us to truly listen to the world and truly perceive the world through love and through our soul. Moreover, that sound is the access point to the other elements that seemed particularly real to me, being a composer.

Celebrated as an “...eloquent, poetic voice in contemporary music...” [American Record Guide], Melinda Wagner’s esteemed catalog of works embodies music of exceptional beauty, power, and intelligence. Wagner received widespread attention when her colorful Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1999. Since then, major works have included Concerto for Trombone, for Joseph Alessi and the New York Philharmonic, a piano concerto, Extremity of Sky, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony for Emanuel Ax, and Little Moonhead, composed for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, as part of its popular “New Brandenburgs” project.

Noted for its “...prismatic colors and...lithe sense of mystery...” [Washington Post], Extremity of Sky has been performed by Emanuel Ax with the National Symphony (on tour), the Toronto and Kansas City Symphonies, and the Staatskapelle Berlin.

Championed early on by Daniel Barenboim, Wagner has received three commissions from the Chicago Symphony; the most recent of these, Proceed, Moon, was premiered under the baton of Susanna Mälkki in 2017. Other recent performances have come from the Philadelphia Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the United States Marine Band, BMOP, the American Brass Quintet, the Empyrean Ensemble, and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

Among honors Wagner has received is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and ASCAP. Wagner was given an honorary doctorate from Hamilton College, and a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Melinda Wagner was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017.

A passionate and inspiring teacher, Melinda Wagner has given master classes at many fine institutions across the United States, including Harvard, Yale, Eastman, Juilliard, and UC Davis. She has held faculty positions at Brandeis University and Smith College, and has served as a mentor at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Atlantic Music Festival, and Yellow Barn. Ms. Wagner currently serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School of Music.

57/7 DASH (2003)
Commissioned by Skitch Henderson and the New York Pops and dedicated to the memory of Philip Hampton, Chairman of the New York Pops Board of Directors.