Joe Bates is a composer who makes strange chords sound like home, using tuning to transform the familiar into something new. His aesthetic combines hazy ambiguity with a genre-bending ethos that stems from his work as artistic director of music night Filthy Lucre and has been described by Tim Rutherford-Johnson as evoking ‘the court music of a short-lived empire’. His research considers how systematic approaches to tuning and electronics intersect with embodied and instinctive practices. His most recent practice-research project revolves around a custom free-pitch synthesiser, the Hyasynth, a name inspired by the composer Giacinto Scelsi.
Judith Bishop is the author of two award-winning poetry collections, Event (Salt, 2007) and Interval (UQP, 2018), and three limited edition chapbooks, including Here Hear (Life Before Man, 2022). A third collection, Circadia, is forthcoming in 2024 from UQP. Judith was awarded the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize for Interval, the Anne Elder Award for Event and the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011). Her poetry has been set by a number of composers, including Jane Stanley, Andrew Ford, Mastaneh Nazarian and Mansour Hosseini. Judith lives in Melbourne, Australia. She is the 2024 Tracey Banivanua Mar Fellow at La Trobe University. www.judithbishop.net
Ty Bouque writes about opera: its slippery histories, its sensual bodies and what to do with the genre if the genre might be dead. They sing as one fourth of the new-music quartet Loadbang and can be found making noise with other ensembles around the world. They live in Detroit with an accordion they do not know how to play but would very much like to. More writing can be found at VAN Magazine, and on Substack: @preposterousreading.
Christian Carey is Associate Professor of Music at Rider University, where he teaches in the Music Composition, History and Theory Department of Westminster Choir College. He has composed 80 works, and his research has been published in TEMPO, Perspectives of New Music, The Open Space and Intégral. His chapter on narrativity in Elliott Carter is published in a proceedings by Editions Delatour.
Edward Cooper is a composer and musicologist completing a Ph.D. at the University of Leeds, supervised by Scott McLaughlin and Martin Iddon and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities. His practice considers the listening body as simultaneously acting as both a boundary and transmitter to itself, exploring various musical liminalities. As such, his work is often very quiet and fragmentary.
Niamh Dell is an Australian oboist living in Berlin. She undertook her master's at the International Ensemble Modern Academy and completed her doctorate at the University of York, where she was supervised by Catherine Laws and funded by a YGRS Overseas Research Scholarship. In late-2024 she will begin a postdoctoral position at the University of Western Australia as a Forrest Foundation Creative Research Fellow. Her practice primarily focuses on contemporary solo repertoire that foregrounds and complexifies the interstices between performer, instrument and musical material.
Gavin Dixon is a writer, journalist and editor specialising in classical music. He is a member of the editorial team for the Alfred Schnittke Collected Works Edition, and his Routledge Handbook to the Music of Alfred Schnittke was published in 2022. He is also Reviews Editor of Gramophone.
Mark Fitzgerald is a senior lecturer at TU Dublin Conservatoire. Publications include Music and Identity in Ireland and Beyond (co-edited with John O'Flynn, Ashgate, 2014), James Wilson (Cork University Press, 2015) and articles on Gerald Barry (Irish Musical Studies, Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland and Grove Online Dictionary), Donnacha Dennehy (Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart), Frederick May (Journal of the Society for Musicology Ireland and Liverpool University Press) and Elena Norton (Liverpool University Press). Forthcoming work includes essays on W. B. Yeats (Yeats Annual 22 and Edinburgh University Press) and the symphony in Ireland (Cambridge University Press).
George K. Haggett graduated from Oxford University with a BA in music in 2017 and received his MMus in musicology from Royal Holloway in 2018. He will return to Oxford in October 2019 to begin Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded doctoral research on medievalism in contemporary opera, supervised by Laura Tunbridge and Elizabeth Eva Leach. He currently works as an assistant lay chaplain at King's College, London.
Cat Hope's research interests include digital animated notation, networked music, gender and music, low frequency sound, Australian music, digital archiving, music composition and performance. She is co-editor of Contemporary Musical Virtuosities (Routledge, 2024) and co-author of Digital Arts – an Introduction to New Media (Bloomsbury, 2014). Her first opera, Speechless, was awarded the APRA AMCOS Art Music Award for Best Dramatic Work, and her album Ephemeral Rivers on Hat[Hut] Art won the German Critics Award. She is currently Professor of Music at Monash University in Melbourne.
Alex Huddleston is a composer, graphic designer and artist currently living in Buffalo, New York. His music occupies a liminal space in which serendipitous relationships emerge and collapse in a play of familiarity and otherness. Centred on themes of alienation, sorrow, anxiety, schizophrenia and fear, his work embodies a singular affect: there is too much and too little, it is too fast and too slow, it is elegant and awkward, it makes too much sense and makes no sense.
Martin Iddon is a composer and musicologist. His research concentrates on post-war music in West Germany and North America. His books John Cage and David Tudor, John Cage and Peter Yates, New Music at Darmstadt and the Cambridge Companion to Serialism are published by Cambridge University Press, while John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra (with Philip Thomas) is published by Oxford University Press. His music appears on pneuma, Sapindales and Naiads (Another Timbre). He is Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds.
Marat Ingeldeev is a London-based writer, researcher and performer. He also co-hosts the Violet Snow podcast. In August 2023 he participated in the Words on Music programme, run by Kate Molleson and Peter Meanwell at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. Marat gave lectures and presentations at the Gnesin Contemporary Music Week between 2020 and 2023 and also at the ZIL Culture Centre. His research interests encompass a range of topics such as metamodernism in music and culture, music aesthetics, interdisciplinary experimental performance and new music in Russia. Marat is one of the founding members of the New Maker Ensemble.
Evan Johnson is an American composer whose music focuses on extremes of density and of reticence, of difficulty and of sparsity, and on hiding itself. His work has been performed by leading ensembles and soloists throughout North America, Europe and beyond, at American and international festivals of contemporary music and at venues such as Miller Theatre and Wigmore Hall. The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships in composition, he is also active as a writer on music for both specialist and general audiences. www.evanjohnson.info.
Andrés Gutiérrez Martínez is a Mexican composer and electronic music performer. He began his studies in his hometown and subsequently moved to Austria to study composition, music theory and computer music. He is a founding member of and collaborator with Schallfeld Ensemble, based in Graz, devoted to the promotion of contemporary music and sound art. He holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from UCSD and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in music perception at McGill University in Montreal.
Kate Milligan is a Western Australian composer, designer and musicologist currently based in London. With a background in feminist musicology, her work critically examines the entanglement of social and natural phenomena. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and an MMus and BA(Hons) from the University of Western Australia. Kate has been commissioned by electroacoustic ensembles internationally, and her writing is published in both academic and popular contexts.
Solomiya Moroz is a Canadian-Ukrainian musician, composer and researcher based in the UK. She has a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Huddersfield and a master's in Live Electronics from Amsterdam Conservatoire. Currently she is working as a research fellow in embodied music cognition on the Digital Score project at the University of Nottingham. Her compositions have recently been premiered by Ensemble Apparat, accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti, Quasar saxophone quartet, Quatuor Bozzini and accordion duo XAMP. Her work has been supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et Culture.
Caroline Potter is Visiting Reader in French Music at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. She has published books on Pierre Boulez, Erik Satie, the Boulanger sisters and Henri Dutilleux and has given guest lectures and pre-concert talks worldwide. Her Erik Satie, a Parisian Composer and His World (Boydell Press, 2016) was named Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year.
Jaslyn Robertson is a composer and researcher undertaking a Ph.D. in Music at Monash University. Her practice-based research centres on queer censorship and experimental opera. Driven by the excitement of learning new artistic skills, Jaslyn works with video, technology, spatialised audio and experimental forms of notation to realise her creative concepts. Her work aims to form multisensory performances that raise questions and unfold into discussion on complex social issues. Her music has been composed for renowned performers including Ossicle Duo, Argonaut String Quartet, Kyla Matsuura-Miller, Tristram Williams and Decibel New Music Ensemble and performed at festivals across Australia and internationally.
Iran Sanadzadeh is a composer, performer and the designer of the terpsichora pressure-sensitive Floors. She is Convenor of Composition and Music Technology at Monash University. Her work focuses on new possibilities of expression that an extended relationship with newly designed instruments can offer. Iran performs primarily on her set of floors, developed initially from the study of the pioneering work of Australian dancer Philippa Cullen and continuing since 2015 in collaboration with composer Sebastian Collen. The Floors were a finalist in the 2023 Guthman Prize for Musical Instruments. Iran's debut solo album on the Floors, Ocean Again, was released on PEOPLE SOUND in June 2023.
Thomas Simaku's music has been reaching audiences across Europe, the US and further afield for more than three decades. Described by the British Composer Award judging panel as ‘visionary and entirely original’ and by Neue Zeitschrift für Musik as ‘breathtakingly original’, it has been awarded a host of accolades, including the Lutosławski Prize. His works have been selected by international juries in ten editions of ISCM, and his latest CDs with Diotima and Soloists of Ensemble Intercontemporain, released by BIS and NMC respectively, have received international critical acclaim. Published by UYMP, Simaku is a Professor at the University of York.
Chloë Sobek is a composer–performer based in Naarm, Australia. Her work is currently centred on the development of a post-anthropocentric sonic practice that encompasses a diversity of enquiry from acoustemology to noise music. She is invested in what creative practice can do to deconstruct and reshape the way we conceptualise our collective futures. Chloë's practice is built around the Renaissance precursor to the double bass, the violone. Her creative process couples maximalist and musique concrète sensibilities such as audio-montage and electronic processing, with a handling of sound as a sensate object, unlinked and undefined by its source.
Jane Stanley is a UK-based, Australian-born composer. Her music has featured at festivals including the ISCM World New Music Days, Gaudeamus Music Week, Asian Composers League, Wellesley Composers Conference and June in Buffalo. She has received commissions from Tanglewood, Musica Viva and the Glasgow School of Art Choir. Her Winter Song features on Robert Irvine's album Songs and Lullabies (Delphian Records), her Piano Sonata on Bernadette Harvey's Sonata Project (Tall Poppies) and Helix Reflection on Ensemble Offspring's Cycles and Circle (Bandcamp). Her first portrait album will be released by Delphian Records in July 2024; the Glasgow School of Art Choir release their recording of 14 Weeks in June 2024. https://janestanley.com
Helen Svoboda is a double bassist, vocalist and composer. Described as ‘a musician who absolutely defies categorisation’ by ABC's The Music Show, her work explores the melodic potential of the contemporary double bass, intricately weaving extended techniques and overtones with vocal tessiture amid abstract song writing. Her doctoral research focuses on developing a graphic notation system for overtones across a series of solo works for double bass. From 2018 to 2020 Helen studied in the Netherlands and Germany, before commencing the Associate Artist residency at the Australian Art Orchestra in Melbourne. She received the 2020 Freedman Jazz Fellowship and a 2023/24 Musica Viva Australia FutureMaker.
Craig Vear is Professor of Music and Computer Science at the University of Nottingham. His research is naturally hybrid and draws together the fields of music, digital performance, creative technologies, Artificial Intelligence, creativity, gaming, mixed reality and robotics. He has been engaged in practice-based research with emerging technologies for nearly three decades and was editor for The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research (2022) and author of The Digital Score: Creativity, Musicianship and Innovation (Routledge, 2019). He is Series Editor of Springer's Cultural Computing Series. In 2021 his Digital Score research was awarded a €2 million ERC Consolidator Grant.
Julie Zhu is a composer, artist and carillonist. She is the recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for her interdisciplinary work, visual and aural, that has since been exhibited and performed internationally. Zhu studied at Yale University (mathematics), the Royal Carillon School and Hunter College (MFA art), and she is currently pursuing a DMA in composition at Stanford University.
