In music, a quartet is an ensemble of four singers or instrumental performers.
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.
George Rochberg was an American composer of contemporary classical music. Long a serial composer, Rochberg abandoned the practice following the death of his teenage son in 1964; he claimed this compositional technique had proved inadequate to express his grief and had found it empty of expressive intent. By the 1970s, Rochberg's use of tonal passages in his music had provoked controversy among critics and fellow composers. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania until 1983, Rochberg also served as chairman of its music department until 1968. He became the first Annenberg Professor of the Humanities in 1978.
Alfred Whitford (Fred) Lerdahl is an American music theorist and composer. Best known for his work on musical grammar, cognition, rhythmic theory and pitch space, he and the linguist Ray Jackendoff developed the Chomsky-inspired generative theory of tonal music.
Donnacha Dennehy is an Irish composer and leader of the Crash Ensemble specializing in contemporary classical music. According to musicologist Bob Gilmore, Dennehy's "high profile of his compositions internationally, together with his work as artistic director of Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, has distinguished him as one of the best-known voices of his generation of Irish composers".
Dominic Frasca is a guitarist, originally from Akron, Ohio, USA, but living in New York City since the early 1990s. He began playing hard rock guitar at age 13, but gravitated into classical after finding an ad for classical guitar lessons in a school trash can. Frasca originally entered the University of Arizona with the intent of studying classical guitar, but realized after a year that it was not his style. Leaving the university after his scholarship for classical guitar was canceled, he enrolled in colleges in Ohio, also trying Yale University, where he first met the composer Marc Mellits. The friendship and collaboration did not begin until Mellits and Frasca met once more, through a mutual friend at Cornell University.
Kevin R. Gallagher is a guitarist who plays both the electric guitar and the classical guitar. As a classical guitarist, he has received top honors at some of the most prestigious guitar competitions in the world, including the 1993 Guitar Foundation of America, the 1994 American String Teachers Association, the 1993 Artists International Competition, and 1997 Francisco Tárrega Guitar Competition in Spain. As an electric guitarist, he is known for transcribing violin music for electric guitar and for founding the avant-rock ensemble Electric Kompany. He has also produced, in cooperation with John Zorn, a music festival titled "Full Force: The New Rock Complexity" that showcases bands that have combined styles such as classical, rock, jazz, and metal. He has produced a CD for Naxos Records titled "Guitar Recital - Music from the Renaissance and Baroque," a duo CD with Antigoni Goni titled "Evocacion," and an EP featuring his work on solo electric guitar and with Electric Kompany.
Martin Boykan was an American composer known for his chamber music as well as music for larger ensembles.
Andrew Ford is an English-born Australian composer, writer, and radio presenter, known for The Music Show on ABC Radio National.
David Flynn is an Irish composer, musician, and the founder and artistic director of the Irish Memory Orchestra. Many of his works music merge the influence of traditional Irish music with contemporary classical music and jazz. He is also a multi-instrumentalist who works across many genres including classical, jazz, rock and traditional Irish music, with guitar being his main instrument.
James Harley is a Canadian composer, author, and professor of music born in Vernon, British Columbia. His creative output consists of orchestral, chamber, solo, electroacoustic, and vocal music.
Carolyn Yarnell is an American composer and visual artist. A recipient of the Rome Prize, Charles Ives Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is particularly noted for works which combine visual and musical depictions of landscape and light, many of which were inspired by the landscapes of her native California.
Lambertus Reiner "Reinbert" de Leeuw was a Dutch conductor, pianist and composer.
Richard David Carrick is an American composer, pianist and conductor. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition for 2015–16 while living in Kigali, Rwanda. His compositions are influenced by diverse sources including traditional Korean Gugak music, the flow concept of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Gnawa Music of Morocco, Jazz, experimental music, concepts of infinity, the works of Italo Calvino and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his work as improviser.
Curtis Curtis-Smith, better known as C. Curtis-Smith or C.C. Smith, was a modernist American composer and pianist.
Matthew Jonathan Greenbaum is an American musician, composer and author.
The Quatuor Bozzini is a string quartet that specializes in new and experimental music based in Montreal, Canada.
David Froom was an American composer and college professor. Froom taught at the University of Utah, the Peabody Institute, and the University of Maryland, College Park, and he was on the faculty at St. Mary's College of Maryland from 1989 until his death in 2022. He has received awards and honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters,, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Barlow Foundation, and was a five-time recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the State of Maryland.
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.
Ellis Joseph Ludwig-Leone is an American composer and songwriter based in Brooklyn, New York. Since 2012, he has led the chamber pop group San Fermin with whom he has released four studio albums, most recently 2020's The Cormorant. Outside of San Fermin, he has composed for a wide variety of contemporary classical ensembles and organizations, including New York City Ballet, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and often works with choreographer Troy Schumacher, harpist Lavinia Meijer, Attacca Quartet, and singer-songwriter Allen Tate.
