MUSIC
MUSIC
CompFest 2025 In Our Own House
February 7 – 8, 2025
Concerts at 8 p.m.
Pre-concert Creativity Conversations at 7 p.m.
Performing Arts Studio 1804 N. Decatur Rd., Atlanta, GA 30322
Welcome to the Performing Arts Studio in the Department of Music. 404.727.6445 | music.emory.edu | music@emory.edu
LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Emory University acknowledges the Muscogee (Creek) people who lived, worked, produced knowledge on, and nurtured the land where Emory’s Oxford and Atlanta campuses are now located. In 1821, fifteen years before Emory’s founding, the Muscogee were forced to relinquish this land. We recognize the sustained oppression, land dispossession, and involuntary removals of the Muscogee and Cherokee peoples from Georgia and the Southeast. Emory seeks to honor the Muscogee Nation and other Indigenous caretakers of this land by humbly seeking knowledge of their histories and committing to respectful stewardship of the land.
Cover Design: Lisa Baron | Cover Photo: Mark Teague
About
Each year, Emory CompFest brings innovative national and international musicians to Emory to engage with students and faculty and present their music. We seek artists who work in ways that expand traditional compositional frameworks and who can offer exciting and meaningful creative exchanges with the community.
CompFest 2025 “In Our Own House” explores building creative arts community within and around Emory. The Festival features Atlanta-based new music ensemble Bent Frequency and composer Alvin Singleton. Each of the compositions on the program were selected for the different ways they build community at Emory as an experimental art practice. Singleton’s chamber quartet In Our Own House, whose title inspired the Festival theme, opens the first night’s concert. It invites a question: What is “our” house?
This past fall, Bent Frequency worked with six Emory student composers during an extended residency to create a suite of miniatures, which will be presented on the first night’s concert. The Friday concert will also include works by Emory faculty Dwight Andrews and Adam Mirza.
The second night opens with Singleton’s Every Next Day, which was commissioned by Bent Frequency in 2022. Virtuoso flautist Lina Andonovska, who joins Emory’s faculty in fall 2025, performs a solo piece from Singleton’s Argoru series. Chicago-based guitarist Jesse Langen performs Sivan Cohen Elias’s Engine Room with Andonovska and joins Bent Frequency for Camilles, a chamber composition with electronics by Emory’s Katherine Young.
The concluding work on the Festival is Raven Chacon’s American Ledger No.1, which the composer describes as “a narrative score for performance, telling the creation story of the founding of the United States of America.” The graphic score for this performance takes the form of a large flag. This edition is being created by students and faculty under the direction of Dana Haugaard (Emory Director of Visual Arts), who received guidance from the composer. Bent Frequency will lead an ensemble made up of faculty, students and guest artists.
CompFest 2025 is sponsored by Emory Arts, Hightower Fund, Emory Friends of Music, Emory Visual Arts, Theater Studies, Dance, and Music departments.
Program: Friday, February 7, 2025
Pre-Concert Talk at 7 p.m.:
Creativity Conversation with Alvin Singleton
Moderator: Katherine Young (Emory Music)
Concert 8:00 - 9:30 p.m.
In Our Own House (1998)
Alvin Singleton
Jan Berry Baker (soprano sax), Yvonne Toll-Schneider trumpet, Stuart Gerber (snare drum), Erika Tazawa (piano)
Paresthesia (2025) Adam Mirza stereo fixed audio
Three Baldwin Poems (2005) Dwight Andrews Maria Clark (soprano) and Erika Tazawa (piano)
Argoru VII (1994)
Alvin Singleton Stuart Gerber (vibraphone)
Suite (2024) Emory Student Composers
Spatial Density Victor Attia Metallurgies Koan Roy-Meighoo OFFERINGS Jay Hammond
Praggression Katherine Mao
Three Big Squeaks James Pabon
Work #1 for Saxophone and Percussion Peiming Yang
Jan Berry Baker (saxophone) and Stuart Gerber (percussion)
Program Notes: Friday, February 8, 2025
Alvin Singleton, In Our Own House (1998)
In Our Own House was commissioned by pianist Karen Walwyn for her Dark Fires (Vol. 2) Albany Records CD recording with Rodney Mack, Branford Marsalis, and Jason Marsalis. The family ties between the musicians inspired Singleton’s title. In this volume, which features works by American composers of African descent, Walwyn requested a composition that would include her husband, trumpeter Rondey Mack, and his cousins, saxophonist Branford Marsalis and drummer Jason Marsalis. –Adam Mirza
Adam Mirza, Paresthesia (2025)
Paresthesia is a medical term for abnormal sensations like “pins and needles,”
tingling, numbness, prickling, also frisson and ASMR shivers. These sensations served as a point of departure into the microworld of tactile awareness, magnified in this work by contact and condenser microphones used as crude diagnostic probes on membranes of various types. Composed with the festival theme in mind, the piece is framed by a metaphor of body-as-house. –Adam Mirza
Dwight Andrews, Three Baldwin Poems (2005)
Three Baldwin Poems are miniature settings of three poems by James Baldwin that I discovered in the Special Collections Archive at Emory University. This piece was written and dedicated to noted tenor William Brown. Bill, who actively encouraged many African American composers to write for him, asked me to write a piece for him and the poems by Baldwin were a perfect choice. Sadly, he died before the songs were completed. Our mutual friend and colleague, soprano Louise Toppin, premiered the piece in his honor at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall in 2006. –Dwight Andrews
Three Baldwin Poems
Text by James Baldwin
I. When You Send the Rain Lord, when you send the rain, think about it, please, a little?
Do, not get carried away by the sound of falling water, the marvelous light on the falling water
I am beneath that water
It falls with great force and the light Blinds me to the light
II. The Hardest Thing of All
The hardest thing of all Is hearing silence fallOr, to see it, Touch it, Watch silence take a form
Watch silence proudly stride
Between connecting rooms
Hear silence ride
Between, you and others
And You, Oh, brother say: I couldn’t hear nobody pray
Alvin Singleton, Argoru VII (1994)
III. For a Yes or For a No I started to leave And couldn’t go
For a Yes or for a No.
Watch the silver track’s turn black As my lover’s back Stood there through the night watched the black turn white
I started to leave and couldn’t go
For a Yes or for a No.
Argoru VII is the seventh in an ongoing series of solo works for different instruments. “Argoru” is a word from the Ghanaian Twi language meaning “to
play” (itself a pun). It is an exercise in Alvin Singleton’s methods of extreme contrasts. Fast, ascending grace-note scales are followed by soft, memory evocative long tones. The contrasts of the quick and the long passages become miniature call-and-response dramas while pedal tremolandi suggest a certain mystery. Singleton’s fondness for drama, economy of means, unpredictability, and contrast are on display in this elegant sounding piece for vibraphone. This work was commissioned by the Music Teachers National Association and the Georgia Music Teachers Association. –Schott Music
Emory Student Composers’ Suite (2024)
Spatial Density takes inspiration from the fluctuation between sound and silent space. The piece consists of three sections: Part A is melodic and unsettling, Part B minimalistic and sparse, and Part C is improvisational, crescendoing to a thunderous finale. –Victor Attia (‘25C) Music Composition major
Metallurgies is an attempt to explore the sonic quality of becoming-metal. Both instruments are primarily made of metal, yet often are asked to create or emulate sounds that are “natural” (e.g., “woody” saxophone tone). The premise of this piece is to challenge the association of metal and the un-natural through the creation of tones and techniques that demonstrate the movement between the becomingnatural and becoming-metal of sound. –Koan Roy-Meighoo (‘25C) Music Composition and Philosophy double major
OFFERINGS provides a space where performers can reflect on their relationship with music and performance. The piece is designed to foster communication between performers and intense collaboration in the spirit of musical embodiment. –Jay Hammond (‘25C) Music Performance major
Praggression is a term that combines “progression” and “aggression.” In this piece, I show a contrast between these two musical inclinations by using the calm backdrop of the vibraphone, the chaotic beats of the percussion, and a soothing and turbulent mix of the alto saxophone. –Katherine Mao (‘25C) Psychology major and Music minor
Three Big Squeaks seeks to evoke the feeling of an electronic music performance, such as a DJ set. There are several different sections that are designed to sound like samples that are shifted and chopped. The main goal of the piece is to be danceable and fun–and to make a lot of noise. –James Pabon (‘25C) Music Composition and History double major
Work #1 for Saxophone and Percussion is meant to portray a scene between two characters who possess contrary states of emotions at the start and unification at the end. The musical sentences are composed in the format of a script where melodies act as dialogues and percussions as narratives. –Peiming Yang (‘25C) Music Composition and Psychology double major
Program: Saturday, February 8, 2025
Pre-Concert Talk at 7 p.m.:
Creativity Conversation on Community Building as Experimental Art Practice
Moderator: Lori Teague (Emory Dance); Panelists: Jan Berry Baker (Bent Frequency), Dana Haugaard (Emory Visual Arts), Lydia Fort (Emory Theater Studies)
Concert 8:00 - 9:30 p.m.
Every Next Day (2022)
Alvin Singleton Jan Berry Baker (soprano sax) and Stuart Gerber (percussion)
Engine Room, from another angle (2008/2005)
Sivan Cohen Elias Lina Andonovska (flute) and Jesse Langen (electric guitar)
Argoru III (1971)
Camilles (2019)
Alvin Singleton Lina Andonovska (flute)
Katherine Young Jan Berry Baker (saxophone), Jesse Langen (electric guitar), Erika Tazawa (piano), Stuart Gerber (percussion), and electronics
American Ledger No. 1 (2019) Raven Chacon Bent Frequency, guest artists including members of the Atlanta Improvisers Orchestra, Emory faculty and students open instrumentation
Program Notes: Saturday, February 8, 2025
Alvin Singleton, Every Next Day (2022)
Different figures emerge in melodic interplay, at times spritely and buoyant, and other times insistent, pensive, cautious, or somber. An elusive idea takes many forms. Like waking in the morning or going to sleep, bells like memories are heard, imagined. About their performance, the composer says Jan Berry Baker and Stuart Gerber, who commissioned the piece with Eleanor Eisenmenger, play the piece as if they wrote it. –Adam Mirza
Sivan Cohen Elias, Engine Room, from another angle (2008/2005)
Engine Room, from another angle, for flute and electric guitar, is an extracted duo version of an older piece, Engine Room, originally composed for 12 musicians for ensemble Mosaik and Ensemble Nikel in their project “The Joint”, which was premiered during Ultraschall Festival 2009, Berlin. While composing “Engine Room”, I imagined myself holding a massive
brush, painting the rough concrete walls of a large space. This huge, partly built room gradually reveals itself as containing various machines – some old and rusty, some new, some broken – and floating in the middle of the ocean. The piece takes us on a tour of a simultaneously constructing and destructing world; a fusion of its history, present and future all at once. As the piece progresses, materials are perceived from various angles and ultimately evaporate, leaving us with movement replacing sound. Violin bows convert to imaginary swords. The musicians become samurai-like characters, as if displayed on a computer game taking us into a quasivirtual reality.
In the duo version I aimed to preserve as much of the original energy as possible, yet creating a new perspective as a focus on the idea of representing particles that are a small part from a bigger force. I wrote the duo version especially for Jesse Langen and Lina Andonovska, to be premiered at CompFest 2025. –Sivan Cohen Elias
Alvin Singleton, Argoru III (1971)
Argoru III for flute is the third in a series of nine solo works for various instruments, the term “argoru” being a word from the Ghanaian Twi language meaning “to play” (itself a pun). The work is in one short movement. Quicksilver runs and leaps alternate with cantabile moments like light falling through trees in a forest. The work at times seems to sound as if the flutist herself were creating the piece in a moment of inspired improvisation. The composer in fact says his intention was to “create a virtuosic tribute to a great flutist, allowing the piece to sound like her own personal statement.” To play “Argoru” with proper joy and abandon requires a flutist of great virtuosity. Such a player is Sara Vargas-Barritt for whom Mr. Singleton composed “Argoru III” and who premiered it on 24 May 1971 in Sprague Memorial Hall, New Haven, Connecticut, where the two were fellow Yale graduates. –Carman Moore
Katherine Young, Camilles (2019)
Camilles is a speculative sonification invoked by multispecies feminist Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: “We...live in disturbing times, mixed-up times....Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places....[S]taying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or savlic futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
Haraway suggests that one way to do this is to increase our capacity to experience the world as nonhuman critters do. In the book’s final chapter, Haraway explores radical ways this capacity is biologically enhanced in future generations of humans. Scientific research suggests that some butterflies, although virtually silent to human ears, have remarkably expansive hearing. So, I wondered, what do monarchs sound like to one another? What would monarchs sound like to humans who are able and willing to listen to them?
Special thanks to Ryan Packard, Mabel Kwan, Brandon Quarles, and Daniel Wyche for your instrumental expertise and generous creativity. This piece was written for and with Ensemble Nikel as a commission from the Budenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, as curated by Clara Iannota. –Katherine Young
Raven Chacon, American Ledger No. 1 (2019)
In the score instructions to American Ledger No. 1, Raven Chacon writes: American Ledger No. 1 is a narrative score for performance, telling the creation story of the founding of the United States of America. In chronological descending order, moments of contact, enactment of laws, events of violence, the building of cities, and erasure of land and worldview are mediated through graphic notation, and realized by sustaining and percussive instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a match.
The graphic score used for this performance was hand-painted, tracing the composer’s original digital image by Emory students and faculty under the direction of Dana Haugaard (Emory Director of Visual Arts), who received guidance from the composer. Unique to this version is an adaptation suggested by the composer of including the Atlanta skyline in the “building of cities” score line. The view selected by Haugaard presents a line from downtown to midtown, as seen from the tall buildings on Emory’s campus. Bent Frequency leads a performing ensemble of students, faculty, and guests, including members of the Atlanta Improvisers Orchestra.
Emory students who painted this version of the composer’s graphic score:
Amisha Agrawal (‘26B) Business Administration
Ishaan Jain (‘27C) Music Piano Performance and Applied Math
Tamiia Quinn (‘25C) Interdisciplinary Studies and Integrated Visual Arts co- major
Olivia Sung (‘25C) Psychology and Integrated Visual Arts co-major
Jack Timmons (‘25C) Chemistry
Alex Vigder (‘25) Interdisciplinary Studies and Integrated Visual Arts co-major
Biographies
Bent Frequency
Founded in 2003, Atlanta-based Bent Frequency brings the avant-garde to life through adventurous and socially conscious programming, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and impactful community engagement. Committed to being inclusive of the diverse and dynamic community they are a part of, one of BF’s primary goals is championing the work of historically marginalized composers –music by women, composers of color, and LGBTQIA+. Hailed as “one of the brightest new music ensembles on the scene today” by Gramophone magazine, BF engages an eclectic mix of the most bold and impassioned players in Atlanta, ushering the contemporary music experience from the strict formality of the concert hall into the fresh air of artistic expression and experimentation.
BF has partnered with internationally acclaimed ensembles, dance groups, and visual artists in creating unique productions ranging from traditional concerts to fully staged operatic works, to concerts on the Atlanta streetcar, to a band of 111 bicycle-mounted, community performers. Recipient of numerous prestigious governmental and foundation grants, BF has been able to fund the creation and promotion of ground-breaking music in Atlanta and abroad for over 20 years.
As Co-Artistic Directors of Bent Frequency, percussionist Stuart Gerber and saxophonist Jan Berry Baker are The BF Duo Project. To date, the BF Duo has commissioned over 50 new works from today’s most innovative composers and have given countless performances across the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. They have been guest ensemble in residence at the MATA Festival in Oaxaca, Mexico, Sam Houston State University in Texas, Tage aktueller musik festival in Nuremberg, Germany, Charlotte New Music Festival, The University of Georgia, SICPP (Boston/Colorado Springs) and New Music on the Point. Their debut recording, Diamorpha, is available on the Centaur Label.
Alvin Singleton (composer)
Alvin Singleton was born in Brooklyn, New York and completed his studies at New York University and Yale. As a Fulbright Scholar, he studied with Goffredo Petrassi at Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, Italy. After living and working in Europe for 14 years, Singleton returned to the United States to become Composer-in-Residence with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (198588). He subsequently served as UNISYS Composer-in-Residence with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (1996-97) and Composer-in-Residence with the Ritz Chamber Players of Jacksonville, Florida.
Singleton’s music is notable for its rare union of influences, “from Mahler to Monk, Bird to Bernstein, James Baldwin to Bach, Santana to Prince,” (Philadelphia Inquirer) as well as for its signature moments of theatricality and surprise. He has worked extensively with major orchestras worldwide and has written significant works for chamber and vocal ensembles, as well as works for the theater. His set
of Argoru pieces for solo instruments span a compositional period from 19682002 and have been championed by soloists across the world. His 1987 orchestral work, Shadows, was hailed by The Boston Globe as “fresh, original and entirely Singleton’s own.” Singleton’s choral ballet TRUTH, based on the life of Sojourner Truth, was praised as “edgy and eclectic ... thought-provoking and affecting” by the Star Tribune following its premiere with VocalEssence in 2006. Recent works have been presented by the Atlanta Symphony, the New World Symphony (featuring Awadagin Pratt as piano soloist), Youth Symphonic Orchestra of Russia, the Momenta Quartet, and Bent Frequency duo Project.
Singleton has amassed numerous awards throughout his compositional life. He is the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and was commissioned by The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation and American Composers Orchestra for the orchestral work When Given a Choice, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in April 2004. His other awards include the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis by the City of Darmstadt, Germany, twice the Musikprotokoll Kompositionpreis by the Austrian Radio, the Mayor’s Fellowship in the Arts Award by the City of Atlanta, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2014, Singleton was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music is recorded on the Albany Records, Elektra/Nonesuch, First Edition, Tzadik, and Innova labels. Singleton’s latest CD “Sweet Chariot” was released in July 2014 on Albany Records and is the third album in the label’s series devoted to his music.
Stuart Gerber (Bent Frequency Co-Director, percussion)
Lauded as having “consummate virtuosity” by The New York Times, percussionist Stuart Gerber has worked with many important composers including George Lewis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kaija Saariaho, and Steve Reich, and has recorded for Innova and Mode records, among others. Recent appearances include: KLEX Fest (Kuala Lumpur), the Montreal New Music Festival, Electronic Music Malta, the Cervantino Festival (Guanajuato, Mexico), the Now Festival (Tallinn, Estonia), he Spoleto Festival (Charleston), and the Savannah Music Festival. Stuart is Professor of Percussion at Georgia State University and is the CoArtistic Director of the contemporary ensemble Bent Frequency in Atlanta.
Jan Berry Baker (Bent Frequency Co-Director, saxophone)
Canadian American saxophonist, Jan Berry Baker, has performed as a soloist, chamber and orchestral musician on many of the world’s great stages. An advocate of cross-disciplinary collaborations, socially conscious programming, and community engagement, she is Co-Artistic Director of contemporary chamber ensemble, Bent Frequency. Jan regularly performs with the LA Philharmonic, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Grant Park Festival Orchestra, Chicago Philharmonic, Atlanta Ballet, and Atlanta Opera and has appeared with the Chicago and Atlanta Symphony Orchestras. She has recorded on the Centaur, Cedille, and Albany labels. As an educator, she is Professor of Saxophone, Woodwind Area
Head, and Vice Chair of the Department of Music at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. Jan is a founding member of the Committee on the Status of Gender Equity in the North American Saxophone Alliance and was the inaugural leader of the CGE Mentoring Program. She earned a Doctor of Music degree from Northwestern University and is a Selmer Paris and Vandoren performing artist.
Yvonne Toll-Schneider (Bent Frequency, trumpet)
Yvonne Toll-Schneider is one of Atlanta’s premier trumpet performers and instructors. Toll-Schneider is Principal Trumpet of the Atlanta Opera Orchestra, a member of The Atlanta Brassworks quintet, and Principal Trumpet in the Georgia Symphony Orchestra. She can also be heard performing regularly with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra. In addition to her performing schedule, she is on faculty at Georgia State University and maintains a private teaching studio. Toll-Schneider is also on faculty as a brass coach for the Atlanta Chamber Music Festival, held each summer at Emory University. Toll-Schneider has taught trumpet at Clayton State University, Emory University, Agnes Scott College, and Columbus State University.
Erika Tazawa (Bent Frequency, piano)
Erika Tazawa is a conductor and pianist based in Atlanta. Tazawa regularly performs with the Atlanta Symphony and the Atlanta Opera, and has been a member of Bent Frequency since 2017. Her solo album featuring 21st-century piano works has been praised by Gramophone as “such intelligent programmebuilding and committed performances warrant serious attention and exposure.” Tazawa holds degrees in piano from SUNY Potsdam and DMA in conducting from the University of Georgia, and currently on faculty at Georgia Tech.
Adam Mirza (Emory Music, composer)
Adam Mirza is a composer and sound artist who works with various media, including acoustic and electronic music as well as sound at the intersection of video, theater and installation. His compositional approach involves the re-configuration and abstraction of bodily gestures and politically-charged or otherwise culturally resonant sonic media. He experiments with microphones, live mixing, digital live processing and loudspeakers to resituate sounds in new spaces. Recent projects include a chamber music album Partial Knowledge, a sound installation Outside In for the Toronto Intersection Festival, and Ghost Quartet, a sound installation for a broken string quartet.
Dwight Andrews (Emory Music, composer)
Dwight Andrews, composer, musician, educator, and minister, joined the Emory faculty in 1987. A native of Detroit, Dr. Andrews is Professor of Music Theory and African American Music at Emory University and Senior Minister of First Congregational United Church of Christ in Atlanta. He has taught at Yale, Harvard, Rice, and Spelman College. In 1997, he was named the first Quincy Jones Visiting Professor of African American Music and delivered the 2004 Alain Locke Lectures at Harvard University.
Active as a composer for theater, Andrews served as music director for the Broadway productions of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Seven Guitars. His film credits include PBS Hollywood’s The Old Settler, Louis Massiah’s documentary films, W.E.B. DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices and Louise Alone Thompson: In Her Own Words, HBO’s Miss Evers’ Boys, and the theme for Sam Pollard’s PBS documentary I’ll Make Me a World. He has also served as a multi-instrumentalist sideman on over twenty-five jazz and “new music” albums with various artists including Geri Allen, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Davis, James Newton, Wadada Leo Smith, and Jay Hoggard.
Andrews is the recipient of numerous awards, including 2024 Composers Now Visionary Award, a 2023 Governors Award in the Arts and Humanities, a 2005 Lexus Leader of the Arts Award, a Pew Trust/TCG Artist Residency Fellowship, a Mellon Fellowship, Emory University’s Distinguished Teacher Award, and the Yale Tercentenary Medal from the Yale Club of Georgia. He is presently working on a manuscript on the relationship between spirituality and jazz in the works of John and Alice Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, Yusef Lateef, Sun Ra, and Dave Brubeck; and a new music theatre piece on W.E.B. Dubois.
Maria Clark (Emory Music, soprano)
Soprano Maria Clark has been acclaimed for her virtuosic skills of expressive singing across the idioms of Opera, Oratorio, and Art Song, and has been critiqued as possessing “The Voice of An Angel”. She has performed with opera companies such as Atlanta Opera, North Carolina Opera, Knoxville Opera, and L’Opera Comique, and has performed symphonic works with DeKalb Symphony, Ludwig Symphony, Georgia Philharmonic, and Fosbo - Fundación Orquesta Sinfónica de Bogotá. Maria was a first prize winner in the Barry Alexander International Competition and as a result was afforded a Carnegie Hall/Weill Recital Hall Debut in New York City. She is also an Oxnard Gold Medalist winner in the American Traditions Competition of the annual Savannah Music Festival. Maria has also released a CD of African American Spirituals on the Navona record label, entitled, “Soul Sanctuary”, which was a joint effort with composer and pianist, Maria Thompson Corley. Maria Clark completed her Bachelor’s Studies at Manhattan School of Music and Master’s Studies at GSU.
Sivan Cohen Elias (composer)
Sivan Cohen Elias is an electroacoustic composer and performer/improviser. She is currently a 2024/25 ACF McKnight Composer Fellow with the American Composers Forum. Her work is cross-disciplinary, combining modified and digitally extended musical instruments, sound objects, body gestures, and video, while exploring social themes of failure, entanglement, and illusion. As noted by The New York Times, Cohen Elias often “deconstructs the instruments themselves” to establish extended sonic environments consisting of multi-layered sonic textures and timbres, composed with puppetry-esque performance elements. Her works span the United States, Europe, and Asia, where she has received various prestigious international awards, including winner of the International Music-Theatre Competition Staatstheater Darmstadt, Fromm Foundation, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. Her pieces have been performed by ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Jack Quartet, Talea, Distractfold, soundinitiative, in festivals including Wien Modern, Impuls, Bang on a Can, TimeSpan, Klangspuren. She was a visiting professor at the University of Iowa between 2018-2021, taught at NYU in 2021-2022, and since fall 2022, she has been the Assistant Professor of Composition and Music Technology at the University of Minnesota, School of Music. Her scores can be found on Babelscores. Her new electronic trio album, Melting Planets, will be released through Innova Recordings Label in March 2025.
Lina Andonovska (flute)
With her performances noted as “re-defining the act of going solo” (The Age), curiosity, fearlessness and versatility carry Lina Andonovska’s artistry around the globe. She is flautist of Grammy Award-winning ensemble Eighth Blackbird. A sought-after soloist and collaborator, she has appeared as guest musician with Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Recherche, and stargaze. Equally at home with improvisation and the written page, she is critically acclaimed for her interpretation of new music with Rolling Stone Magazine hailing her performance at Bang On A Can Summer Festival as “superbly played...” Lina is a Powell Flutes artist.
Jesse Langen (guitar)
Jesse Langen is a guitarist who specializes in new music. He works with living composers and premieres dozens of pieces every season. Equally comfortable on classical and electric guitar, he pushes both the technical boundaries and the conceptual functions of the instrument. He can be heard regularly in Chicago, throughout the US, and abroad as a soloist, as the guitarist for Ensemble Dal Niente, as half of Hasco Duo with Amanda Deboer Bartlett, and in duo with harpist Ben Melsky. A passionate and committed teacher of high school musicians, his students populate the finest conservatories and programs throughout the world, and have won international competitions and commissions. Jesse and his brother Tim also grew up learning Canadian fiddle tunes from their grandfather Clarence, and he plays Irish music regularly in pubs and at sessions throughout Chicago.
Katherine Young (Emory Music, composer)
Katherine Young makes electroacoustic music and sonic art using expressive noises, curious timbres, and kinetic structures. Her work has been recognized by awards and fellowships including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Music Composition and a Fromm Foundation at Harvard University Commission. Relationship building and ecological thinking are central to her practice. She has worked closely with Yarn/Wire, Wet Ink, Ensemble Nikel, Linda Jankowska, and others. The LAPhil, Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Third Coast Percussion, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, and others have commissioned her music and installation work.
As a bassoonist and improviser, Katherine amplifies her instrument and employs a flexible electronics setup. She performs as a soloist, in ad hoc improvised groups, and with projects such as Beautifulish (with Sam Scranton). She has documented her work on numerous recordings, including a duo recording with Anthony Braxton. Katherine lives in Atlanta, where she teaches at Emory University.
Raven Chacon (composer)
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile-long land art installation, Repellent Fence.
A recording artist over the span of 24 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.
Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital Award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-inResidence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.
Music at Emory brings together students, faculty, and world-class artists to create an exciting and innovative season of performances, lectures, workshops, and master classes. With more than 150 events each year across multiple Emory venues, audiences experience a wide variety of musical offerings.
We hope you enjoy sampling an assortment of work from our student ensembles, community youth ensembles, artists in residence, professional faculty, up-and-coming prodigies, and virtuosos from around the world.
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