Joel Marangella is an American oboist who has performed in concert with many of the world's leading orchestras. A founding member of the Speculum Musicae, he was the principal oboist for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, and a founding member of the New Music Ensemble.
William Kraft is a composer, conductor, teacher, timpanist, and percussionist.
Charles Peter Wuorinen was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He performed his works and other 20th-century music as pianist and conductor.
Ars antiqua, also called ars veterum or ars vetus, is a term used by modern scholars to refer to the Medieval music of Europe during the High Middle Ages, between approximately 1170 and 1310. This covers the period of the Notre-Dame school of polyphony, and the subsequent years which saw the early development of the motet, a highly varied choral musical composition. Usually the term ars antiqua is restricted to sacred (church) or polyphonic music, excluding the secular (non-religious) monophonic songs of the troubadours, and trouvères. However, sometimes the term ars antiqua is used more loosely to mean all European music of the thirteenth century, and from slightly before. The term ars antiqua is used in opposition to ars nova, which refers to the period of musical activity between approximately 1310 and 1375.
Mario Davidovsky was an Argentine-American composer. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1960 to the United States, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He is best known for his series of compositions called Synchronisms, which in live performance incorporate both acoustic instruments and electroacoustic sounds played from a tape.
Ursula Oppens is an American classical concert pianist and educator. She has received five Grammy Award nominations.
Joshua Fineberg is an American composer of contemporary classical music.
Tobias Picker is an American composer and pianist noted for his orchestral works Old and Lost Rivers and The Encantadas, his operas Emmeline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Thérèse Raquin and Dolores Claiborne, and his ballet Awakenings, among many other works.
Dennis Smylie is an American bass clarinetist, known particularly for his performances of contemporary classical music.
Donald Palma is a prominent classical double bassist, conductor, bass instructor, and educator of ensemble performance. He is a native of New York City, and is a graduate of the Juilliard School. Palma studied with several noted bassists including Frederick Zimmermann, Robert Brennand, Orin O'Brien, and Homer Mensch.
The Group for Contemporary Music is an American chamber ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. It was founded in New York City in 1962 by Joel Krosnick, Harvey Sollberger and Charles Wuorinen and gave its first concert on October 22, 1962 in Columbia University's MacMillin Theatre. Krosnik left the ensemble in 1963. It was the first contemporary music ensemble based at a university and run by composers.
Jeffrey Milarsky is a conductor of contemporary music in New York City.
Stephen Jaffe is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, United States, and serves on the music faculty of Duke University, where he holds the post of Mary and James H. Semans Professor of Music Composition; his colleagues there include composers Scott Lindroth, John Supko, and Anthony Kelley. Jaffe graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977; he received a master's degree the following year from the same institution. During his time in Pennsylvania, he studied with George Crumb, George Rochberg, and Richard Wernick.
Richard Rood is an American violinist based in New York City.
Robert Carlisle Black was an American conductor, pianist and composer. He was most particularly associated with the promotion, performance and recording of contemporary classical music, but he also played and conducted the standard repertoire.
The Laurel Leaf Award recognizes the achievement of an individual or group in encouraging and fostering American music. The award has been presented annually by the American Composers Alliance since 1951. Past recipients of the award include the Juilliard String Quartet, the American Music Center, Leonard Slatkin, Minnesota Composers Forum, Harold Rosenbaum, and Speculum Musicae.
Michael Adelson is an American orchestral conductor. Adelson is a staff and cover conductor for the New York Philharmonic—where he also leads regular clinics and workshops for the orchestra's Department of Education—as well as conductor of the Auros Group for New Music in Boston.
Donald Young Sur was a Korean American composer and musicologist. Although he is best known for his large-scale oratorio, Slavery Documents, most of his works were composed for small chamber ensembles. Sur was born in Honolulu and moved with his family to Los Angeles after World War II. He studied at the University of California and Princeton before spending four years in Korea researching ancient Korean court music. After receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1972, he settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where many of his works were premiered and where he taught at several local universities, including Harvard, MIT, and Tufts.
David Schiff is an American composer, writer and conductor whose music draws on elements of jazz, rock, and klezmer styles, showing the influence of composers as diverse as Stravinsky, Mahler, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Terry Riley. His music has been performed by major orchestras and festivals around the United States and by soloists David Shifrin, Regina Carter, David Taylor, Marty Ehrlich, David Krakauer, Nadine Asin and Peter Kogan. He is the author of books on the music of Elliott Carter, George Gershwin and Duke Ellington. His work has been honored by the League-ISCM National Composers Competition award and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award for his book on Elliott Carter.
