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.
John Luther Adams is an American composer whose music is inspired by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska, where he lived from 1978 to 2014. His orchestral work Become Ocean was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Colin Matthews, OBE is an English composer of contemporary classical music. Noted for his large-scale orchestral compositions, Matthews is also a prolific arranger of other composer's music, including works by Berlioz, Britten, Dowland, Mahler, Purcell and Schubert. Other arrangements include orchestrations of all Debussy's 24 Préludes, both books of Debussy's Images, and two movements—Oiseaux tristes and La vallée des cloches—from Ravel's Miroirs. Having received a doctorate from University of Sussex on the works of Mahler, from 1964–1975 Matthews worked with his brother David Matthews and musicologist Deryck Cooke on completing a performance version of Mahler's Tenth Symphony.
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.
Catherine B. Brazelton is a New York-based American composer, bandleader, improviser, singer/songwriter, and instrumentalist. She has released albums and fronted bands across varied genres, including contemporary classical, electronic music, pop, art rock, punk, and avant-garde jazz. She was awarded the 2012 Carl von Ossietsky Composition Prize for Storm, a choral setting of Psalm 104 featuring Brazelton's own retranslation. Her opera Art of Memory was awarded the 2015 Grant for Female Composers from Opera America.
Michael Gordon is an American composer and co-founder of the Bang on a Can music collective and festival. He grew up in Nicaragua.
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.
Bernard Rands is a British-American contemporary classical composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has since taught at the University of California, San Diego, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Boston University. From 1988 to 2005 he taught at Harvard University, where he is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Emeritus.
Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
Ethel is a New York based string quartet that was co-founded in 1998 by Ralph Farris, viola; Dorothy Lawson, cello; Todd Reynolds, violin; and Mary Rowell, violin. Unlike most string quartets, Ethel plays with amplification and integrates improvisation into its performances. The group's current membership includes violinists Kip Jones and Corin Lee.
Theatre of Voices is a vocal ensemble founded by baritone Paul Hillier in 1990; it focuses on early music and new music.
Donald Nally is an American conductor, chorus master, and professor of conducting, specializing in chamber choirs, opera, and new music. He is conductor of the professional new-music choir, The Crossing, based in Philadelphia. He is the director of both the Westminster Choir and Westminster Symphonic Choir at Westminster Choir College in New Jersey.
New York Polyphony is a male classical vocal quartet based in New York City.
NOTUS, formerly the Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, is the only university-based vocal group in the United States exclusively dedicated to the study and performance of vocal and choral repertoire written after 1900. It includes singers, composers, young scholars and instrumentalists chosen for their special interest in the music of our time. Depending on the repertoire, the ensemble adjusts its size to perform solo vocal, chamber choral and large oratorio-like compositions.
Bryce David Dessner is an American composer and guitarist based in Paris, and a member of the rock band the National. Dessner's twin brother, Aaron is also a member of the group. Together, they write the music in collaboration with lead singer and lyricist Matt Berninger.
Volti is a 16- to 24-person professional vocal ensemble based in San Francisco, focused on the commissioning and performance of new music. In 2018, Volti became the first vocal group ever to have been awarded the Chorus America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming seven times. Volti has released four CDs on the innova label: "Turn the Page," "House of Voices," "This is what happened," and "the color of there seen from here," released April 26, 2019. Volti also appears with the Kronos Quartet on their Grammy Award winning recording of Sun Rings by American minimalist composer Terry Riley.
Carol Edith Barnett is an American composer. She was born in Dubuque, Iowa, and studied at the University of Minnesota with Dominick Argento and Paul Fetler (composition), Bernard Weiser (piano) and Emil J. Niosi (flute). She graduated with a bachelor's degree in music theory and composition in 1972 and a masters in theory and composition in 1976.
Ars Nova Copenhagen is a Danish vocal ensemble based in Copenhagen. The ensemble specialises in the interpretation of the polyphonic choral music of the Renaissance and new vocal music.
Kirsten Soriano was born April 19, 1979. She is an American composer from White Bear Lake, Minnesota. Her music has been performed by the Kronos Quartet string quartet, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW Ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, The Crossing choral ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente and the Jack Quartet string quartet. In 2013, she was appointed assistant professor at the University of North Texas and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2020. She has served as director of undergraduate studies in the college of music at the University of North Texas since 2018.
Kile Smith is an American composer of choral, vocal, orchestral, and chamber music. The Arc in the Sky with The Crossing received a 2020 Grammy nomination for Best Choral Performance, and the Canticle CD by Cincinnati's Vocal Arts Ensemble helped win the 2020 Classical Producer of the Year Grammy for Blanton Alspaugh. A Black Birch in Winter, which includes Smith's Where Flames a Word, won the 2020 Estonian Recording of the Year for Voces Musicales.
