John Zorn is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category". His avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, Jewish music, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music. Rolling Stone noted that "[alt]hough Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
Annie Gosfield is a New-York-based composer who works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. She composes for others and performs with her own group, taking her music to festivals, factories, clubs, art spaces and concert halls. Much of her work combines acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, incorporating unusual sources such as satellite sounds, machine sounds, detuned or out-of-tune samples and industrial noises. Her work often contains improvisation and frequently uses extended techniques and/or altered musical instruments. She won a 2012 Berlin Prize.
The Schreck Ensemble is a Dutch new music ensemble founded in 1989 by composers Arie van Schutterhoef and Hans van Eck. The name of the ensemble is a combination of the founders surnames and a reference to the actor Max Schreck. The Schreck Ensemble performs and commissions electroacoustic music. They also program their own software with the SuperCollider programming language, and develop their own hardware for the production and performance of electroacoustic music.
Oscar Ignatius Joannes van Dillen is a Dutch composer, conductor, and instrumentalist.
The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival is a new music festival held annually in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. Since its foundation in 1978, it has featured major international figures of experimental and avant garde music, including guest composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Louis Andriessen, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, John Cage, Steve Reich, Jonathan Harvey, Helmut Lachenmann and Sir Harrison Birtwistle. Its programme also includes improvisation, installation, sound sculptures, happenings, new technology and free jazz.
Kayhan Kalhor is an Iranian 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.
Martijn Padding is a Dutch composer and educator.
Marco Blaauw is a Dutch trumpet soloist known for his work in the field of new music and with Cologne-based contemporary music group Ensemble Musikfabrik. He plays a double bell trumpet, an invention that has allowed for numerous new compositions for trumpet, including those by Ernst von Siemens Music Prize winner, Rebecca Saunders. Blaauw is a consistent faculty member at the Darmstadt Summer Course, the Stockhausen Courses Kürten, the Lucerne Festival, and the Chosen Vale International Trumpet Seminar.
Simon Bookish is the stage name of Leo Chadburn, a British musician and composer known for his work in experimental, electronic, pop, and classical music. His music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 6 Music, and Resonance FM. Originally from Coalville, Leicestershire, he moved to London and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 1997 to 2001.
Richard Elliot Haynes is an Australian clarinettist residing in Switzerland. He performs music spanning the 16th to 21st centuries worldwide, but predominantly music by living composers, in a multitude of contexts.
Rebecca Saunders is a London-born composer who lives and works freelance in Berlin. In a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, Saunders' compositions received the third highest total number of votes (30), surpassed only by the works of Georg Friedrich Haas (49) and Simon Steen-Andersen (35). In 2019, writers of The Guardian ranked Skin (2016) the 16th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Tom Service writing that "Saunders burrows into the interior world of the instruments, and inside the grain of Fraser's voice [...] and finds a revelatory world of heightened feeling."
Kate Moore is an Australian composer currently based in the Netherlands. Moore was born in Oxfordshire, England, and has studied with Australian composers Larry Sitsky, Jim Cotter, and Michael Smetanin; Dutch composers Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Diderik Wagenaar and Gilius van Bergeijk; and attended summer schools including Bang on a Can hosted by David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon and Tanglewood hosted by John Harbison, Michael Gandolfi and Helen Grime.
Wang Ying is a Chinese-born composer based in Berlin.
Eric Jacobsen is an American conductor and cellist. He is currently a member of The Knights, and the Silk Road Project, and is the Music Director of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra and Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Principal Conductor of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony, and when was an artistic partner of the Northwest Sinfonietta from 2015-2018
Arshia Samsaminia is an Iranian composer.
Tony Overwater is a Dutch jazz bassist and composer of jazz and improvisational music. In 2002 he received the Boy Edgar Award, the most important jazz award in The Netherlands. Presently, Overwater is mainly active in a crossover of jazz, Arab and early music.
Oscar Bettison is a British-American composer known for large-scale chamber and large ensemble works. He has been described as possessing "a unique voice". His work has been described as having "an unconventional lyricism and a menacing beauty" and "pulsating with an irrepressible energy and vitality, as well as brilliant craftsmanship." He is a member of the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. Bettison was named a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Herman Vogt is a Norwegian contemporary composer.
Cassandra Miller is a Canadian experimental composer currently based in London, UK. Her work is known for frequently utilising the process of transcription of a variety of pre-existing pieces of music.
Juliet Fraser is a British soprano, based in London and specialising in contemporary classical music. She has commissioned more than 20 solo vocal works and premiered several hundred new works, many written for her. Fraser is the artistic director of eavesdropping, an experimental music festival in East London, and co-director of all that dust, the record label she founded in 2018 with Mark Knoop and Newton Armstrong. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Music by the University of Southampton in 2023.
