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.
Julia Wolfe is an American composer and professor of music at New York University. According to The Wall Street Journal, Wolfe's music has "long inhabited a terrain of its own, a place where classical forms are recharged by the repetitive patterns of minimalism and the driving energy of rock". Her work Anthracite Fields, an oratorio for chorus and instruments, was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music. She has also received the Herb Alpert Award (2015) and was named a MacArthur Fellow (2016).
Truls Olaf Otterbech Mørk is a Norwegian cellist.
Kayhan Kalhor is an Iranian Kurdish kamancheh and setar player, and a vocal composer. He has received three Grammy Award for Best Traditional World Music Album nominations. Kalhor also has earned two nominations and won one Grammy Award for Best Global Music Album as a member of the Silk Road Ensemble.
David Lang is an American composer living in New York City. Co-founder of the musical collective Bang on a Can, he was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion, which went on to win a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices. Lang was nominated for an Academy Award for "Simple Song #3" from the film Youth.
Michael Gordon is an American composer and co-founder of the Bang on a Can music collective and festival. He grew up in Nicaragua.
Cantaloupe Music is a Brooklyn-based record label that produces and releases contemporary classical music and other forms of avant-garde music. The label was founded in 2001 by Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Kenny Savelson. Gordon, Lang, and Wolfe are composers who founded the Bang on a Can music festival in New York City, while Savelson has worked as the festival's music director. Cantaloupe Music is distributed by Naxos in North America and worldwide by Naxos Global Logistics.
Michael Harrison is an American contemporary classical music composer and pianist living in New York City. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 2018–2019.
Douglas J. Cuomo is an American composer of contemporary classical music and music for television.
Nina Kotova is an American cellist of Eastern European decent. As well as being a versatile artist and an established composer she is a recording artist who performs both as a soloist with major orchestras and as a chamber musician.
Alisa Weilerstein is an American classical cellist. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
Mark Stewart is a New York City-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer and instrument designer.
Yale Cellos is an ensemble at the Yale School of Music consisting of the School of Music's cello studio--roughly 15 cellists. The group was founded in 1983 by the famed cello teacher Aldo Parisot, the former professor of cello at the Yale School of Music. Currently, the cellists study with Paul Watkins. Since its formation, the group has produced several CDs, one of which earned a Grammy nomination.
Sol Gabetta is an Argentine cellist. The daughter of Andrés Gabetta and Irène Timacheff-Gabetta, she has French and Russian ancestry. Her brother Andrés is a baroque violinist.
David T. Little is a Grammy-nominated American composer, record producer, and drummer known for his operatic, orchestral, and chamber works, most notably his operas JFK,Soldier Songs, and Dog Days which was named a standout opera of recent decades by The New York Times. He is the artistic director of Newspeak, an eight-piece amplified ensemble that explores the boundaries between rock and classical music, and is the Chair of the composition faculty at Mannes School of Music.
Missy Mazzoli is an American composer and pianist who is a member of the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music. She has received critical acclaim for her chamber, orchestral and operatic work. In 2018 she became one of the first two women to receive a commission from the Metropolitan Opera House. She is the founder and keyboardist for Victoire, an electro-acoustic band dedicated to performing her music. From 2012-2015 she was composer-in-residence at Opera Philadelphia, in collaboration with Gotham Chamber Opera and Music-Theater Group. Her music is published by G. Schirmer. Mazzoli received a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a Fulbright Grant to the Netherlands, and in 2018 was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Classical Composition. In 2018, Mazzoli was named for a two-season term as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Mazzoli was named the Bragg Artist-in-Residence at Mount Allison University beginning in 2022.
Craig Hultgren is an American cellist and improvisor. Hultgren graduated from the University of Iowa and at Indiana University. He has taught at Birmingham-Southern College, the University of Alabama Birmingham and the Alabama School of Fine Arts, as well as teaching privately. Craig Hultgren is a cellist with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra and has been a member of several chamber groups such as the Chagall Trio, the Luna Nova Ensemble, and the Ensemble for contemporary chamber music Thamyris. He is an active performer and performs regularly as a soloist on the cello and e-cello. Hultgren also made a name for himself among improvisational musicians.
Blackstar is the 26th and final studio album by the English musician David Bowie. Released on 8 January 2016, Bowie's 69th birthday, the album was recorded in secret in New York City with his longtime co-producer Tony Visconti and a group of local jazz musicians: Donny McCaslin, Jason Lindner, Tim Lefebvre and Mark Guiliana. The album contains re-recorded versions of two songs, "Sue " and "'Tis a Pity She Was a Whore", both of which were originally released in 2014. More experimental than its predecessor The Next Day (2013), the music on Blackstar combines atmospheric art rock with various styles of jazz. Bowie took inspiration from artists including Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips, listening to them during the album's production. The cover art, designed by Jonathan Barnbrook, features a large black star with five star segments at the bottom that spell out the word "BOWIE".
Cello Counterpoint is a composition for cello and pre-recorded tape by the American composer Steve Reich. The work was jointly commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and Leiden University for the cellist Maya Beiser. It was given its world premiere by Beiser on October 18, 2003 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. The piece was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Emmanuel Feldman is an American classical cellist and teacher based in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the co-founder of the cello-double bass duo Cello e Basso, and a member of the Aurea Ensemble.
