Jay Cloidt (born October 5, 1949) is an American composer, performer, sound designer, and audio engineer.
Cloidt received his BA in piano performance from the University of Nebraska and his MFA in Electronic Music and the Recording Media from Mills College Center for Contemporary Music in 1981, studying with Robert Ashley and David Behrman.
As a sound designer, he has worked with many groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Kronos Quartet and the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Cloidt's work on the Paul Dresher Ensemble's production of Slow Fire won a Bay Area Critics Circle Award, and he received an Isadora Duncan Award in 1989 with Rinde Eckert for the sound design of Eckert's Dry Land Divine.
As a composer, Cloidt has been commissioned by such organizations as the Gary Palmer Dance Company, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, and the Kronos Quartet, for whom he has written three pieces. His music typically uses electronics, is technically sophisticated, and often contains humor. The San Francisco Chronicle has called Cloidt "The Spike Jones of the Bay Area new music scene." His music has been performed at the Venice Biennale, New Music America, and Lincoln Center.
His solo CD Kole Kat Krush was released by Starkland. All-Music Guide awarded the CD four stars and wrote that the CD is “a wonderful, accessible, and yet challenging album from one of new music's brightest lights.” Stereophile also awarded the CD four stars, describing Cloidt as "one of the few composers in the post-sampler era to fully develop that tool's fascinating and witty potential." Other recordings appear on the MinMax label. In 1999, he also composed music for Leapfrog until 2009 ish.
On October 20, 2017, a retrospective concert and celebration of Cloidt's works - "The Music of Jay Cloidt" - was performed at UC Berkeley's Hertz Concert Hall. Featuring Bay-area musicians and performing artists, the concert included works for the Sather Tower carillon, the Eco Ensemble String Quartet, solo piano, a “duet for pianist and piano” with interactive electronics, and music from the music theater work Darc: Woman on fire for singer and cellist.
Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, improvisation, and delay systems. His best known works are the 1964 composition In C and the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental music, rock, and contemporary electronic music. Subsequent works such as Shri Camel (1980) explored just intonation.
Meredith Jane Monk is an American composer, performer, director, vocalist, filmmaker, and choreographer. From the 1960s onwards, Monk has created multi-disciplinary works which combine music, theatre, and dance, recording extensively for ECM Records. In 1991, Monk composed Atlas, an opera, commissioned and produced by the Houston Opera and the American Music Theater Festival. Her music has been used in films by the Coen Brothers and Jean-Luc Godard. Trip hop musician DJ Shadow sampled Monk's "Dolmen Music" on the song "Midnight in a Perfect World". In 2015, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by Barack Obama.
Evan Ziporyn is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira.
Eleanor Hovda was a composer and dancer from the United States of America. She was born in Duluth, Minnesota and died in Springdale, Arkansas.
Paul Joseph Dresher is an American composer. Dresher received his B.A. in music from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.A. in composition from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, and Bernard Rands.
Carl Stone is an American composer, primarily working in the field of live electronic music. His works have been performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and the Near East.
Starkland is an independent record label based in Boulder, Colorado that specializes in alternative classical music. It was founded in 1991 by Thomas Steenland.
Stephen Rowley Montague is an American composer, pianist and conductor who grew up in Idaho, New Mexico, West Virginia and Florida.
Pamela Z is an American composer, performer, and media artist best known for her solo works for voice with electronic processing. In performance, she combines various vocal sounds including operatic bel canto, experimental extended techniques and spoken word, with samples and sounds generated by manipulating found objects. Z's musical aesthetic is one of sonic accretion, and she typically processes her voice in real time through the software program Max on a MacBook Pro as a means of layering, looping, and altering her live vocal sound. Her performance work often includes video projections and special controllers with sensors that allow her to use physical gestures to manipulate the sound and projected media.
Timothy Wesley John Brady is a Canadian composer, electric guitarist, improvising musician, concert producer, record producer and cultural activist. Working in the field of contemporary classical music, experimental music, and musique actuelle, his compositions utilize a variety of styles from serialism to minimalism and often incorporate modern instruments such as electric guitars and other electroacoustic instruments. His music is marked by a synthesis of musical languages, having developed an ability to use elements of many musical styles while retaining a strong sense of personal expression. Some of his early recognized works are the 1982 orchestral pieces Variants and Visions, his Chamber Concerto (1985), the chamber trio ...in the Wake..., and his song cycle Revolutionary Songs (1994).
Mary Ellen Childs is an American composer and multimedia artist and founder of the ensemble Crash. She grew up as a dancer and writes music often influenced by dance rhythms. She currently administers the McKnight Artist Fellowships for Dance.
Mark Grey is an American classical music composer, sound designer and sound engineer.
Margaret Jenkins is a postmodern choreographer based in San Francisco, California. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1980 and in 2003, San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown, declared April 24 to be Margaret Jenkins Day.
Gordon Fitzell is a composer, concert organizer, and professor of music. His catalog consists of solo, chamber, and electroacoustic music, including open and improvisatory works.
David Felder is an American composer and academic who was a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo until his retirement in 2022. He was also the director of both the June in Buffalo Festival and the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music.
Christine Southworth is an American composer of postminimal music and works with combinations of Western ensembles, electronics, and world music ensembles including Balinese gamelan and bagpipes. She performs Balinese gamelan and gender wayang with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Gamelan Galak Tika, as well as Galician Gaita and Great Highland Bagpipes. She co-founded Ensemble Robot, a cooperative of engineers, artists and musicians working together to invent robotic musical instruments. She was also the general manager of Gamelan Galak Tika from 2004 through 2013. Her own music incorporates her work with Balinese gamelan and with technology and electronics, as well as reaching beyond these influences with an expanded palette of contemporary classical, jazz and rock, and world music from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.
Aviya Kopelman is an Israeli composer and pianist.
Nicole Lizée is a Canadian composer of contemporary music. She was born in Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan and received a MMus from McGill University. She lives in Montreal, Quebec. At one time, she was a member of The Besnard Lakes, an indie rock band from Montreal.
Lawrence Irving Wilde, is a composer, educator, violinist, and nyckelharpa player. Wilde has been commissioned by and collaborated with ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, JACK Quartet, ÆON Music Ensemble, Sō Percussion, Tesla Quartet, Aspen Music Festival Orchestra, Moscow String Quartet, Ensemble Mise-En, Juilliard Orchestra, and others.
Themes & Improvisations on the Blues is a live album by violinist / composer Leroy Jenkins. It was recorded in April 1992 at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City, and was released by Composers Recordings, Inc. in 1994. The album documents performances of four of Jenkins's compositions for ensembles of varying size. The violinist appears on two of the tracks.