Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely performed Petroushskates.
Ariadne auf Naxos, Op. 60, is a 1912 opera by Richard Strauss with a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The opera's unusual combination of elements of low commedia dell'arte with those of high opera seria points up one of the work's principal themes: the competition between high and low art for the public's attention.
Arnold Atkinson Cooke was a British composer.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and professor.
Sean Osborn is a former clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and a regular substitute in the clarinet section of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. He has been a student of Stanley Hasty, Frank Kowalsky, and Eric Mandat.
Elizabeth Koch Tiscione is an oboist and principal oboe of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. She joined the ASO in the fall of 2007, and was granted tenure January 2009. She is a native of Buffalo, New York. Her teachers were Richard Woodhams and Daniel Stolper. She was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Interlochen Arts Academy.
Daniel John Stolper was an American oboist.
Imani Winds is an American wind quintet based in New York City, United States. The group was founded by flutist Valerie Coleman in 1997 and is known for its adventurous and diverse programming, which includes both established and newly composed works. The word Imani means "faith" in Swahili. They are also active commissioners of new music with the intent of introducing more diverse composers to the wind quintet repertoire.
The Blair School of Music, located in Nashville, Tennessee, provides a conservatory-caliber undergraduate education in music performance, composition, or integrated music studies within the context of a major research university, Vanderbilt University. Blair also provides music lessons, classes and ensembles to over 800 precollege and adult students each semester. Blair is the youngest and smallest of Vanderbilt's ten constituent schools and colleges.
Michael Alec Rose composes chamber and symphonic music. He is Professor of Composition at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. His awards and commissions include the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation’s chamber music commission, for which he composed his String Quartet No. 2, premiered by the Meliora Quartet at Lincoln Center and the Library of Congress; a commission from the International Spoleto Festival for a violin-cello duo; twenty-five consecutive annual awards in composition from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, 1986–2010; string quartet commissions from the Blair and Mendelssohn Quartets; and three commissioned performances by the Nashville Symphony, including Symphony No. 1—Paths of Peace (2000).
Gary Kulesha is a Canadian composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Since 1995, he has been Composer Advisor to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (1988–1992) and the Canadian Opera Company (1993–1995). He was awarded the National Arts Centre Orchestra Composer Award in 2002. He currently teaches on the music faculty at the University of Toronto.
Linda Strommen is an American oboist. She is Professor of Oboe at Indiana University and has been a regular visiting Oboe Instructor at the Juilliard School of Music for more than ten years. A former member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the Santa Fe Opera, she has held principal and assistant principal position with Milwaukee, Honolulu, New Heaven, Wichita, and Baton Rouge Symphonies and acting principal oboe positions with the Rochester Philharmonic and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. In addition to being a former member of the Timm and Lieurance Woodwind Quintets, she has been a regular participant in summer festivals such as the Marlboro, Bellingham, Bard and Masterworks Festivals. Ms. Strommen commissioned and premiered the oboe concerto for oboe and string orchestra “Down a River of Time” by Eric Ewazen. Her recording of this work with the International Sejong Soloists, “Sejong Plays Ewazen,” has been released by Albany records.
Dana Reason is a Canadian composer, recording artist, keyboardist, producer, arranger, and sound artist working at the intersections of contemporary musical genres and intermedia practices.
Graeme Peter Crump, known professionally as Peter Graeme and as 'Timmy' Crump to friends and family, was an English oboist and academic teacher. He was best known as the principal oboist of the Melos Ensemble.
Malcolm Lipkin was an English composer.
Valerie Coleman is an American composer and flutist as well as the creator of the wind quintet Imani Winds. Coleman is a distinguished artist of the century who was named Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the year and was listed as “one of the Top 35 Women Composers” in the Washington Post. In 2019, Coleman's orchestral work, Umoja, Anthem for Unity, was commissioned and premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Coleman's Umoja is the first classical work by a living African American woman that the Philadelphia Orchestra has performed.
Rory Boyle is a Scottish composer and currently Professor of Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland
Francis Poulenc's Sextuor (Sextet), FP 100, is a chamber music piece written for a standard wind quintet and piano. Estimates about the time of its composition range from between 1931 and 1932 and 1932 alone. It received its debut in 1933 but was later revised in 1939. Performed in its entirety, the three-movement piece lasts approximately 18 minutes.
Michael Kibbe is an American contemporary classical music composer born in San Diego, California. He has composed over 240 concert works and created numerous arrangements. His writing covers many musical styles, encompassing tonal, modal and non-diatonic languages. His style often incorporates modern structures but is still accessible to the popular classical listener. Some of his works come right of the Romantic Era yet his style in some writings has been compared to Prokofiev. There are influences of American composer Gershwin in the Serenade Number 2 for two clarinets that seem at once blues, jazz and classical. His music can often reflect themes that bring to mind different cultures.
Sean Shepherd is an American composer based in New York City and Chicago. His work has been performed by major orchestras, ensembles, and performers across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Performances include those with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and New World Symphony Orchestra, at festivals including the Aldeburgh Festival, Heidelberger Frühling, La Jolla Music Festival, Lucerne Festival, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and Tanglewood, and with leading European ensembles including Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.