Videos by:

Gene Gort

Noe Kidder

Devan Mulvaney

Elizabeth Stephens

Performances by:

Lief Ellis, electronics

Ryan Ford, bass

Ben Klein, tuba

Crystal Pascucci, cello

Anne Rhodes, voice

Bill Solomon, percussion

Matt Sargent, electronics

HARTFORD SOUND ALLIANCE

An except of ekmeles performing Martin Iddon’s Ἁμαδρυάδες (hamadryads) for five voices and glass harmonica, performed by ekmeles

Kirsten Volness’s Hints and Hauntings for double bass and electronics, performed here by Jeremy Baguyos

And finally, a version of JacobTV’s Grab It for electric guitar and boombox (on Friday, it will be performed by 12 saxophones!)

Christie Finn and Jeffrey Gavett of Ekmeles from the 2011 Avant Music Festival Photo: Tear-n Tan for Avant Media

The third concert of the Hartford New Music Festival presents works by local, regional and international composers, all written within the last five years. This final installation of the HNMF presents a varied cross-section of some of the most exciting voices in the current new music scene.

This program takes place on Friday April 15 at 7:30pm at The Studio at Billing’s Forge, 563 Broad St, Hartford, CT 06106. Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door.

Program:

Hints and Hauntings for double bass and electronics (2011) by Kirsten Volness

Ryan Ford, double bass

Go Down! You Blood Red Roses for percussion and electronics (2010) by Jacob Richman

Bill Solomon, percussion

Ἁμαδρυάδες (hamadryads) for five voices and glass harmonica (2010) by Martin Iddon

ekmeles: Christie Finn, soprano, Megan Schubert, soprano, Jeffrey Gavett, baritone, Michael Weyandt, baritone, Steven Hrycelak, bass

Metal for saxophone, trombone, viola and cello (2006) by David Macbride

ensemble 016: Sheri Brown, saxophone, Jordan Jacobson, trombone, Laura Krentzman, viola, Han-Wei Lu, cello

Corps Sonore for percussion and electronics (2011) by Christian Gentry

Bill Solomon, percussion

Premiere Performance

Akiko Hatakeyama and Aleksandra Miglowiec, flutes

Grab It! X12 for saxophone orchestra with soundtrack & videos (2007) by Jacob Ter Veldhuis

Composer and Performer Biographies

016 ensemble – for more info, visit: http://016ensemble.com/

Saxophonist Sheri Brown has earned recognition as both a soloist and chamber musician.  She has performed and competed at the Adolphe Sax International Competition, the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, the World Saxophone Congress, and numerous North American Saxophone Alliance regional and national conferences.  In 2006, Miss Brown was the winner of The Hartt School’s wind ensemble concerto competition and a finalist in the North American Saxophone Alliance national classical competition.  She holds a Master of Music in saxophone performance from the Hartt School where she studied with Carrie Koffman and Rob Wilkerson, and a Bachelor of Music Education from Michigan State University where she studied with Joe Lulloff, Eric Lau, and Andrew Speight.  Miss Brown is a founding member of the 016: New Music Ensemble.  She teaches privately in the greater Hartford area.

Ryan Ford holds a Bachelor of Music in Music Education from the University of Florida, a Master of Music from the Hartt School at the University of Hartford, and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts from the Hartt School. He has studied under Kevin Casseday at the University of Florida and Robert Black at the Hartt School of Music. He has also attended eight summer sessions with world renowned solo bassist Gary Karr.

During his first year at the Hartt School of Music, Ryan won the Miami String Quartet Competition in its first year of existence. In 2003, he had the privilege of performing at Carnegie Hall with the National Festival Orchestra under the baton of Lukas Foss.
Ryan lives in Manchester, CT with his wife Jennifer and their daughter Margeaux. He is a member of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, the Waterbury Symphony Orchestra, and is a founding member of the new music ensemble The Sophisticates.

Jeffrey Gavett, baritone, is dedicated to the creation and presentation of new music as composer, performer and improviser. He has performed with a broad range of collaborators, ranging from the indie rock group Clogs to new music groups Ensemble de Sade, ICE, SEM Ensemble, Signal, Talea Ensemble, and Wet Ink Ensemble. His own ensemble loadbang has premiered more than 15 new works in the past two years. He has worked with such composers as Nick Didkovsky, Reiko Füting, Liza Lim, Somei Satoh, Steven Takasugi, David Lang, and Terry Riley, performing the music of the latter two at the 2008 Bang on a Can Summer festival, where he was a fellow.Since his arrival in New York, Mr. Gavett has sung many premieres, including Somei Satoh’s The Passion and Matt Marks’s The Adventures of Albert Fish; US premieres of Liza Lim’s Chang-O, Philip Maintz’s Fluchtlinie, and Steven Takasugi’s Strange Autumn; and works by Nils Vigeland and Susan Botti in a performance at Zankel Hall. Recently he performed at Merkin Hall with Signal, under the direction of Brad Lubman. In this performance he sang the US premiere of Harrison Birwistle’s scena The Corridor and the premiere of Nico Muhly’s Stabat Mater, and was praised for his “attractive” voice by the New York Times.Mr. Gavett holds degrees from Westminster Choir College and Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Program, where he studied with Lucy Shelton.

Christian A. Gentry, an Arizona native, received his BM at the University of Utah and MM at the University of Louisville, where he was a Bomhard Fellow. He is now a Mildred and Herbert Lee Graduate Fellow at Brandeis University where he is pursuing a PhD in Music Theory and Composition. He has written music for a variety of instrumentation and genres including, orchestra, choir, art song, chamber music, film, theater and electroacoustic music. Some of his works have been played and/or recorded by Canyonlands New Music Ensemble, Arsenal Trio, Emily Hindrichs (soprano), East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, Juventas, White Rabbit, the Lydian String Quartet, New York Virtuoso Singers, VERGE Ensemble and the International Contemporary Ensemble.  He has been a composer fellow at June in Buffalo, Wellesley Composers Conference and the Norfolk New Music Workshop. He received a Barlow Endowment Composition Commission to write Flux Flummoxed for Jihye Chang (piano) and Benjamin Sung (violin) which premiered in the spring of 2010 and will appear in a recording summer 2011. His current projects include Corps Sonore for percussionist Bill Solomon and riff(s) and/or transfiguration(s)for trombonist Ben Herrington, with pianist Geoffrey Burleson and percussionist John Ferrari. His teachers include Morris Rosenzweig, Miguel Chuaqui, Steve Rouse, John Gibson, Martin Boykan, Eric Chasalow and David Rakowski. He resides in the Boston area with his wife Laci, son Berkeley and dog McDuff. http://christiangentry.com/

Akiko Hatakeyama is a singer, song writer, a flutist, a composer, and a video artist who is a native of Yokohama, Japan. She is interested in crossing boundaries between traditionally written music, electronics, improvisation, and visual components. Now, she incorporates real-time elements into her multimedia works, and working on computer based interactive pieces. Akiko most often finds beauty in simplicity. She has been involved in festivals such as the International Women’s Electroacoustic Listening Room Project in California, Chicago Calling Arts Festival, the Musica Viva Festival 2009 – Sound Walk in Lisbon, Portugal, and Death Jewel Film and Video at Anthology Film Archives in NY. She received the Bachelor’s degree in Arts in Music at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she received numerous scholarships and the Maurthea Friedberger Cup, which was given to the most outstanding senior music major of class 2008. She is pursuing her MA in Experimental Music/Composition at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she studies with Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, and Ronald Kuivila. http://akikohatakeyama.com/

Martin Iddon is a musicologist and composer. He studied musicology and composition at the Universities of Durham and Cambridge with John Butt and Ian Cross (musicology) as well as Robin Holloway and Fabrice Fitch (composition), and has studied composition privately with Chaya Czernowin, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Ole Lützow-Holm, and Steve Martland. His articles have been published in journals such Musical Quarterly, Twentieth-century Music, and Contemporary Music Review. His music has been performed in Great Britain, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy and the USA, and has been shortlisted by the Sound & Music. He currently lectures at the University of Leeds.

Jordan Jacobson recently completed coursework for  his DMA degree at CCM, studying trombone with Tim Anderson. He graduated from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor of Music degree in 2003 where he studied with Daniel Bachelder. In Utah, he also studied with Russel McKinney, James Nova, both of the Utah Symphony. He received his masters degree from the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts where he studied with Darren Acosta and Boston Symphony trombonist Norman Bolter. As an undergraduate, Jordan performed with BYU’s jazz ensemble, touring Russia, Finland, and England, and also played at the Pori Jazz Festival and at the IAJE convention in Long Beach, California. He also was a member of the Salt Lake City area salsa band, Son del Callao. In Boston, he was a member of the Peter Cassino Quintet. Jordan was a member of the Orchestra at Temple Square from 2001-2005, performing, recording, and touring regularly with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He has also performed with the Utah Symphony, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Kentucky Orchestra, Lexington Philharmonic, and the Dayton Philharmonic.

Violist Laura Krentzman completed her undergraduate studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and graduate studies at the University of North Texas,where she studied with Carol Rodland and Susan Dubois. While at the Universityof North Texas, Laura studied Baroque viola performance with Cynthia Roberts and was principal viola of the Collegium Musicum. She has participated in many summer festivals, including the Henry Mancini Institute, Mimir Chamber Music Festival,Bowdoin International Music Festival, Killington Music Festival, and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. Laura has performed in masterclasses with Kim Kashkashian, Helen Callus and Michelle LaCourse and has worked with Lawrence Dutton of the Emerson Quartet as well as Danny Seidenberg of the Turtle Island Quartet. In 2004, she was a soloist with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and in 2008 with the University of North Texas Collegium Musicum. Since 2005, Laura has premiered and recorded numerous works by Boston-based composer Alla Elana Cohen. Currently Lauraplays with the New Haven Symphony, Hartford Symphony, Waterbury Symphony, and the Glens Falls Symphony and is attending the Hartt School where she studies with Rita Porfiris and is a member of the Performance 20/20 program.

Taiwanese-born cellist Han-Wei Lu has concertized in recitals and music festivals in North, South America, Austria and Taiwan. Ms. Lu has collaborated with such renowned musicians as Katy Lansdale, Marcy Rosen and Bright Sheng. A founding member of the Sylvanus Ensemble and the 016 New Music Ensemble, she recently completed a concert tour in Taiwan and several performances in Connecticut. Ms. Lu has also participated in master classes with Timothy Eddy, Slovatcri Serghvsky and the Miami String Quartet. Ms. Lu received her Master’s Degree at The Hartt School, University of Hartford, where she was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to be a member of the chamber music program, Performance 20/20. She is currently pursuing an Artist Diploma at The Hartt School, under the tutelage of Mihai Tetel.

David Macbride has written numrerous works, ranging from solo, chamber and orchestral music to music for film, TV, dance and theatre, with particularemphasis on music for percussion. His compositions have been performed extensively in the United States and abroad: performances include the Hartford Symphony, the Arditti String Quartet, League ISCM, Percussive Arts Society International Convention, World Saxophone Congress, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His Percussion Park, a full-length percussion ensemble installation was recently premiered outdoors at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke,and will be performed here at Hartt in April, 2011 by the Hartt Percussion Ensemble.

Tim Page of Newsday wrote: “In David Macbride’s music, one finds technical skills of a high order, a direct lyricism that informs the most complex passages, and a personal aesthetic that combines Western chromaticism with a fascination for the music of China.” Awards include the Georges Enesco International Composition Prize, two Leo Snyder Memorial Composition Prizes sponsored by League ISCM Boston, and the Composers Inc. Prize.

Recent commissions include The Roberts Foundation New Works Initiative,Chamber Music America, Concert Artists Guild, and the Hartt School Community Division. Macbride’s compositions are recorded on Concora, Hartt/Next Exit, Opus One,Owl, and True Media Recordings. A solo CD of his works on Composers Recordings Inc. (CRI).was reviewed by Alex Ross of the New York Times: “…Macbride achieves a remarkable balance of technical rigor and free spirited invention…Composers Recordings has donejustice to a distinctive voice in American music.” Solo CDs entitled Conundrum: The Percussion Music of David Macbride featuring Benjamin Toth and In Common: Duets by David Macbride are available on Innova Recordings. David Macbride: A Composer’s Journey with the Poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca is available on Albany Records, as well as In Passing: Solo Piano Music composed and performed by the composer. Macbride’s string quartet, A Muse, has recently been recorded by the Avalon String Quartet and released by Albany Records.

Macbride has been extremely active in bringing diverse musics to the Greater Hartford community, having produced numerous outdoor events in Elizabeth Parkand other venues over the past twenty years. He regularly performs in schools and senior citizen homes, and received a University of Hartford Community Service Award in recognition of his contributions.
As a pianist, Macbride was invited to give a recital tour of Peru by theInstituto Cultural Peruano Norte Americano, and has performed recitals in Spain (sponsored by the Centro de la Difusion de la Musica Contemporanea) and in Mexico at the Universidad Nacional Autonomo de Mexico in Mexico City. Macbride is Professorof Composition and Music Theory at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. Seewww.dljamacbride.com for more information.

In the last decade JacobTV’s boombox music, for live instruments with a grooving sound track based on speech melody, became internationally popular. Although JacobTV is one of the most performed European composers, he is still an outlaw in the established modern classical music scene, and was recently accused of ‘musical terrorism’ after a premiere at the World Harp Congress in Amsterdam. According to the Wall Street Journal his newest work ‘makes many a hip-hop artist look sedate’.
In 2007 the ‘box set trilogy, an anthology of his work with 12 hours of audio and video, was released by Basta and presented at a 3 day JacobTV mini festival at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

JacobTV lives in the Dutch country side. Momentarily he is composing a video opera called ’The News’ about the credit crunch and other world events, while touring with his JacobTV Band and the multi media show ‘Cities Change The Songs Of Birds’.

Main works: The Rainbow-, Tallahatchie- and Goldrush- concertos, the video oratorio Paradiso, Mountain Top, the 2nd Pianoconcerto ‘Sky Falling’, ‘NOW’, String Quartets 1,2 & 3, Drei Stille Lieder, Diverso il Tempo, Laws of Science, Grab it!, Heartbreakers, Buku, Jesus is coming, May this Bliss never end, the Body of your Dreams, Les Soupirs de Rameau, Cities change the Songs of Birds, the Postnuclear Winterscenarios, piano trio Nivea Hair Care Styling Mousse, Cheese Cake, Lipstick.

JacobTV was performed by The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Tokyo City Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Russian State Academy, the Düsseldorf Symfoniker, the Metropole Orchestra, and by soloists such as Branford Marsalis, James Galway, Evelyn Glennie, Ronald Brautigam, Arno Bornkamp, Kevin Gallagher, Margaret Lancaster, Andrew Russo and ensembles like Het Nederlands Kamerkoor, Electra, Electric Kompany, Ethel, Fulcrumpoint, Quasar, E.A.R. Unit, Real Quiet, Onyx-, Ruysdael-, Aurelia-, Prism- and New Century Quartet, Safri Duo, Calefax, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, De Volharding, Fireworks, Gending, Combustion Chamber, Glass Farm & Fifh House Ensemble and several others. Choreographers Hans van Manen, Nanine Linning, Annabel Lopez-Ochoa, Dominique Dumais, Johan Inger and others have created ballets on his music in productions for the Nederlands Danstheater, Het Nationaal Ballet, Introdans, Scapino Ballet Rotterdam  http://www.jacobtv.net/

Kirsten Volness grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota — a place that fostered in her a keen interest in the outdoors and the wonders of nature.  The magic to be found in the natural world informs and inspires her creative work as do Earth-based spiritual traditions.

She received her DMA in Composition from the University of Michigan(from which she also holds an MM) where she worked with Bright Sheng, William Bolcom, Betsy Jolas, Michael Daugherty, Karen Tanakaand studied electronic music with Evan Chambers and Erik Santos.  She received a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, from the University of Minnesota where she studied with Judith Lang Zaimont.  Recipient of the 2010 Fellowship in Music Composition from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, Kirsten was also named winner of the 2007 BMI Women’s Music Commission and a 2007 ASCAP/SEAMUS student commission.

Her electronic work has been performed at numerous festivals including Bourges, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, Electronic Music Midwest, and Third Practice. Her acoustic work has been performed by the NOW Ensemble, Colorado Quartet, Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, featured at Midwest Composers’ Symposia, the Montreal and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals, and presented at various concerts throughout North America, Europe, and Australia.

She currently resides and teaches privately in Providence, RI, is a member of Awesome Collective, and produces new music/multimedia concerts in New York and New England. She is on the board of directors for the Boston New Music Initiative and serves as Director of Publicity and Marketing. http://www.kirstenvolness.com/

Noted for his beautiful tone, meticulous musicianship, and charismatic stage presence, baritone Michael Weyandt recently appeared as Junius in The Rape of Lucretia with Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Festival Opera, under the direction of Maestro Maazel. He has also performed Lockit in Britten’s arrangement of The Beggar’s Opera and Marco in Gianni Schicchi at the Castleton Festival, and been seen as Guglielmo and Masetto at the Tanglewood Music Center, under the direction of James Levine. Other roles include Belcore, Mercutio, and Lescaut. An advocate of contemporary music, he has previously appeared in New York City at the Miller Theater, as Pete Dayton in the U.S. premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s opera Lost Highway, based on the David Lynch film, and at Merkin Hall as the soloist in a staged performance of Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King. He was a New England Regional Finalist in the 2010 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, as well as the First Place winner in the New York Singing Teachers Association David Adams Art Song Competition and a prizewinner in the Liederkranz Competition (General Opera division). During a leave of absence from his Master’s degree studies, he spent two years living and teaching in rural China, Shanxi province

Thought it would be appropriate to publish some reviews of our last show in February.

Here’s one by critic Eric R. Danton on his Soundcheck blog for the Hartford Courant.

And here’s one by our friend Anne Rhodes in New Haven on her blog SoundRat.

Here’s a preview of one of the works that will be heard on the March 18 concert. Composer and performer Levy Lorenzo says the following about his work:

As a musician and engineer, I seek to use technology to build true musical instruments that will allow new forms of human musical expression in live performance.

This piece is solo improvisation with an instrument that I built which uses 2 Teacups, Light and Electronics. The Left Teacup controls volume and envelope, the Right Teacup controls pitch, and the orientation of the Teacup Platform with respect to the front facing light controls rhythm. Data is produced by light sensors located under the upside-down Teacups, as well at the sides of the Teacup Platform. This data then passes through a hardware interface (MakeController) to software (MAX/MSP) where the audio parameters are digitally manipulated.

I have extensively practiced this instrument and performed improvisations in both solo and chamber concert settings. As one of many experiments to come in the philosophical and technical research of new musical instrument design, it has been successful in that I feel a strong connection between the teacup technique and sounds that I want to create.

photo: Michael Shane

The second concert of the Hartford New Music Festival includes works concerned with light and darkness, as well as the exploration of sound through electronics and extended instrumental and vocal techniques.

This program takes place on March 18 at 7:30pm at The Studio@Billing’s Forge, 563 Broad St, Hartford, CT 06106. Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door:

PROGRAM —

Paramecium III (2010) for solo tuba and electronics by Benjamin J. Mansavage Klein

performed by composer

torsion (2003/5) for solo bassoon and tape by Olga Neuwirth

Jon Stehney, bassoon

59 ½” for a string player (1953) by John Cage

Robert Black, double bass

Paint It Black (1988) for solo double bass by Michael Gordon

Robert Black, double bass

Improvisation for Teacups and Light (2009) for solo live electronics by Levy Lorenzo

performed by the composer

Where/When (2010) for FM Koala and bassoon by Levy Lorenzo and Jon Stehney

performed by composers

For Andie Springer Showing the Form of a Melody, “Standing in the Shadows” by Robert Ashley (2010) for violin and guitar by Robert Ashley

Andie Springer, violin and James Moore, guitar

Scenes from Nek Chand (2001/2) for just intonation national steel string guitar by Lou Harrison

James Moore, guitar

Jabberwocky (1990) for voice and percussion by Susan Botti, poem by Lewis Carroll

Lauretta Pope, vocal/actor and Bill Solomon, percussion

Artist & Composer Biographies

Robert Ashley, a distinguished figure in American contemporary music, holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting. He pioneered opera-for-television.The operatic works of Robert Ashley are distinctly original in style, and distinctly American in their subject matter and in their use of American language. Fanfare Magazine calls Ashley’s Perfect Lives “nothing less than the first American opera…”, and The Village Voice comments, “When the 21st Century glances back to see where the future of opera came from, Ashley, like Monteverdi before him, is going to look like a radical new beginning.” A prolific composer and writer, Ashley’s operas are “so vast in their vision that they are comparable only to Wagner’s Ring cycle or Stockhausen’s seven-evening Licht cycle. In form and content, in musical, vocal, literary and media technique, they are, however, comparable to nothing else.” (The Los Angeles Times).

Robert Black: Growing up in suburban America during the 1960′s and 70′s, my main musical experiences came from the radio, records, and the Music Program in the public school system (a program that not only existed, but was substantial). The radio connected me to millions of other people and together we listened to an explosion of music that was new, exciting, and ground breaking. Music was never going to be the same again. This communal sharing of such daring music was a revelation. It was mind blowing. I didn’ tknow it at the time, but I was developing a taste for the ‘new’, for the ‘other’ – for all of those peoples, cultures, and musics that I didn’t know. I was forever hooked on ‘the possibilities’ and ‘the unknown.’ The public school system changed my life in other ways. My Junior High School music teacher suggested I try the double bass. Mr. Gillian showme how to play my first two notes on the instrument and the next minute I was in the jazz band playing ‘Eleanor Rigby’. I came home from school that afternoon and told my parents that I wanted to play the bass for the rest of my life. And what a life. The sense of exploration and discovery that I experienced from the radio and on my first day with the bass have never stopped. As a result, I’ve focused my performing energies on New Music. New Music – an unending source of challenges and discoveries. New Music -never sits still, never runs out of ideas, never ceases to thrill, amaze, and engage. New Music – it has taken me throughout the world, involved me in technology, improvisation,world musics, pop music, and all things traditional and experimental, It has allowed me to collaborate with actors, dancers, painters and musicians of all sorts. This same passion for exploration and discovery has led me deeper into the history of the double bass and its repertoire, which has led me deeper into the performance of the Classical Literature and the world of Teaching. Teaching – another passion. I’ve had many mentors, people who have reached back and grabbed my outstretched hand, pulled me along and propelled meforward, showing me everything along the way. And now, with my outstretched hand still being pulled, I can reach back and grab the outstretched hands of others, helping them along, propelling them forward, showing them. So the circle’s complete. The Helped becomes the Helper becomes the Helped. Performing becomes Teaching becomes Performing. The New becomes the Old becomes the New. www.robertblack.org

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist,printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage’s romantic partner for most of their lives. Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. The content of the composition is meant to be perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and the piece became one of the most controversial compositions of the twentieth century. Another famous creation of Cage’s is the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces, the best known of which is Sonatas and Interludes(1946–48). His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage’s major influences lay in various Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of aleatoric or chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage’s standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”.

Michael Gordon‘s music merges subtle rhythmic invention with incredible power embodying, in the words of The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, “the fury of punk rock, the nervous brilliance of free jazz and the intransigence of classical modernism.” Over the past 25 years, Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio. Transcending categorization, this music represents the collision of mysterious introspection and brutal directness. Deeply passionate about the sonic potential of the traditional orchestra, Gordon’s orchestral works include Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, a radical reworking of the original, commissioned by the 2006 Beethoven Festival in Bonn and premiered by Jonathon Nott and the Bamberger Symphony; and Sunshine of your Love, written for over 100 instruments divided into four microtonally tuned groups. Under the baton of composer/conductor John Adams, The Ensemble Modern Orchestra toured Sunshine of your Love to seven European capitals in 1999. Gordon’s string orchestra pieceWeather was commissioned by the Siemens Foundation Kultur Program, and after its tour was recorded and released on Nonesuch to great critical and popular success. His interest in exploring various sound textures has led him to create chamber works that distort traditional classical instruments with electronic effects and guitar pedals, including Potassium for the Kronos Quartet and Industry for cellist Maya Beiser. Also for Kronos,The Sad Park, written in 2006, uses the voices of child witnesses to September 11^th as its subject. Gordon’s monumental, 52-minute Trance, originally written for the UK-based group Icebreaker, was debuted in 1997 and recently performed twice in New York City by the ensemble Signal.

Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo (formerly called K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat, informally called Pak Cokro). Harrison is particularly noted for incorporating elements of the music of non-Western cultures into his work, with a number of pieces written forJavanese style gamelan instruments, including ensembles constructed and tuned by Harrison and his partner William Colvig. The majority of his works are written in just intonation rather than the more widespread equal temperament. Harrison is one of the most prominent composers to have worked with microtones.

Benjamin J Mansavage Klein prods at the definition of the tuba, using electronics as a means to stretch the perception of what a tuba can sound like.  Benjamin has worked as a solo player, with dance and theatre groups, and with ensembles incorporating his tuba and electronics combination.  Benjamin grew up in Wisconsin, and worked there in various manufacturing industries.  He attended Lawrence University where he studied tuba with Martin Erickson and Charles Guy, and composition with Philip Bodin, Matt Turner, and Joanne Metcalf.  In August 2005, Benjamin was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, allowing him to undertake projects in Amsterdam, London, Sydney, New Zealand, and Tokyo.  He completed graduate studies at Wesleyan University where he studied with Ron Kuivila, Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, and Neely Bruce. Benjamin currently lives, works, and teaches in Hartford, Connecticut.    You can listen to his work at: www.bjmklein.comv

Levy Lorenzo is a percussionist and electronics engineer based in New York.  He performs contemporary percussion music in solo and chamber settings across the US and Europe. He also specializes in designing new electronic musical instruments for performance on the concert stage. His electronics design work has been featured at the 2007 Geneva Auto Show, BBC Ecuador and the G4 network.  An advocate for interdisciplinary arts, he has collaborated with dancers, video artists, sculptors, mathematicians and dramaturgs. He performs live electronics with the International Contemporary Ensemble in New York City, and was a featured marimba soloist with the International Ensemble Modern Academy in the Klangspuren Schwaz Festival (AT).

holds B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University.  He also earned a M.M. degree from SUNY Stony Brook, where he is a D.M.A. candidate. Levy has studied percussion with Eduardo Leandro and Nathan Davis, and has studied electronic music with Margaret Schedel and Daria Semegen. www.levylorenzo.com

James Moore is a versatile guitarist with many musical personalities. Performing on a wide variety of acoustic and electric guitars, banjos, and home-made instruments, James combines the sensitivity and lyricism from his classical training with a healthy dose of improvisation, theatrics, and experimentation. Both as a soloist and ensemble player, he aims for all of his music to be unique and personal. Places where you may have found James Moore include: at the Wulf in downtown LA performing amplified banjo compositions; at the Bang on a Can Marathon directing an orchestra of hearing deprived guitarists; at the Fringe Theater in Hong Kong presenting apocalyptic multimedia theatrical works; at the Performa Festival playing Fred Frith’s music for multiple table-top guitars; at the Kitchen performing alongside rock musicians Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens and Glenn Kotche; at the Barbican Center in London playing the music of Michael Gordon with Alarm Will Sound; at the Whitney Museum performing the music of Christian Marclay with Elliott Sharp; at the World Financial Center performing on ukulele with the pop/chamber group Clogs; at Northwestern University performing on a prepared classical guitar; in Astoria, Queens, premiering a concerto for the Greek Bouzouki. James is a member and co-director of the electric guitar quartet Dither, a group that has been gaining international recognition for precision playing and creative programming. Other projects include the folk-noise group Oliphant, the experimental band Passenger Fish, and the conceptually extreme chamber music project Ensemble de Sade.

 James is the guitarist for William Brittelle’s lip-synched pop collage Mohair Time Warp, for Matt Marks’s Christian nihilist musical The Little Death, and for Jacob Cooper’s electronic pop-tragedy Timberbrit. Additionally, James performs with Object Collection, the resident experimental ensemble at playwright Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater. James grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, received his undergraduate degree in guitar performance and electronic music from The University of California, Santa Cruz, and his MM in guitar performance from the Yale School of Music. His primary teachers have been Mesut Özgen and Benjamin Verdery. He currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. http://www.jamesmooreguitar.com/

Bill Solomon

Andie Springer is a classically-trained, modern-minded violinist. She enjoys performing music from a wide range of genres- from baroque to amplified, romantic to minimalist, Broadway to improvised. She is passionate about promoting the music of her generation and as a result has co-founded new music ensembles TRANSIT and Redshift. Andie also frequently performs with Redhooker and Anti-Social Music- all of which are groups whose members blur the line between composer and performer. While living in New York, Andie has performed at venues such as The Blue Note, The Stone, Monkeytown, Galapagos, Le Poisson Rouge, Merkin Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, and the Tribeca Film Festival. Her music has also taken her across the globe- from touring Alaska and Canada with the Arctic Chamber Orchestra to performing Sarasate’s “Navarra” with the Neue Philharmonie in Westfalen, Germany, to playing with rock stars in Lima, Peru. Andie earned her BFA at Carnegie Mellon University with Professor Andres Cardenes, and her MFA at New York University with Professor Arturo Delmoni. She has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra, and her playing has been broadcast on stations WQED FM, KUAC FM, WBGO FM, and WFMU FM. She enjoys teaching and is currently on the faculty the Larchmont Music Academy. http://www.andiespringer.com

Jon Stehney is pursuing his D.M.A. at SUNY Stony Brook under the direction of Frank Morelli.  He has had the opportunity to spend three years at the Lucerne Festival Academy studying with Pascal Gallois and Paul Riveaux.  During his time at CalArts and San Francisco Conservatory of Music he has done several premieres as well as teaching classes for composers on how to write for the bassoon.  His newest projects include working on prepared bassoon and transcribing Stockhausen’s clarinet piece “Harlequin” for bassoon.

"Waver" by Carl Testa and Rachel Bernsen / photo: Taylor Ho Bynum

unruhe for six eBowed electric guitars by Adrian Knight

Restless Guitar Sextet: Scott Comanzo, Adrian Knight, Matt Sargent, Jesse Stanford, Thomas Schuttenhelm and Joel Weik

crossing/rising for cello, percussion, oboe and saxophone by Matt Sargent

HSA Ensemble: Sheri Brown, saxophone, Charles Huang, oboe, Katie Kennedy, cello, Bill Solomon, percussion

waver for dancer, electronics and lights by Carl Testa and Rachel Bernsen

Les guetters des sons for three percussionists by Georges Aperghis

Ludovico Ensemble: Jeffrey Means, Bill Solomon, Nick Tolle, percussion

Arpeggios for

"Waver" by Carl Testa and Rachel Bernsen / photo: Taylor Ho Bynum

The first concert in the Hartford New Music Festival includes music about resonance, space, and physicality. This program takes place on February 18 at 7:30pm at The Studio@Billing’s Forge, 563 Broad St, Hartford, CT 06106. Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door:

• unruhe for six eBowed electrics guitars by Adrian Knight

Restless Guitar Sextet: Scott Comanzo, Adrian Knight, Matt Sargent, Thomas Schuttenhelm, Jesse Stanford and Joel Weik

• crossing/rising for cello, percussion, oboe and saxophone by Matt Sargent

HSA Ensemble: Sheri Brown, saxophone, Charles Huang, oboe, Katie Kennedy, cello, Bill Solomon, percussion

• Arpeggios for solo guitar by Tom Johnson

Thomas Schuttenhelm, guitar

• Waver for dancer, electronics and lights by Carl Testa and Rachel Bernsen

Rachel Bernsen, dancer

• Les sons des guetters for three percussionists by Georges Aperghis

Ludovico Ensemble: Jeffrey Means, Bill Solomon and Nick Tolle, percussion

Artist & Composer Biographies

Georges Aperghis was born in Athens, Greece, on December 23, 1945. His father Achilles, a sculptor, and his mother Irene, a painter, gave him a rich artistic background in post-war Greece and allowed him great freedom, providing the basis for what has become a highly original, independent career as a composer. Mainly self-taught, Aperghis divided his interest between painting and music, which he discovered through radio and the occasional piano lesson from a family friend. In Athens, he knew little about the European avant-garde but he read scores from the repertoire and heard some Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky. The first experiments in musique concrete by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry came as a revelation. By 1963, he had decided to give up painting and settled in Paris to continue studying music. There, he discovered the world of new music through the Domaine Musical and concerts at the Maison de la Radio. His earliest works; Antistixis, for three string quartets, Anakroussis for seven instruments (1967) and Bis for two orchestras (1968) show the influence both of serialism and of Xenakis’s research. He himself described these pieces as studies; pursuing a need to develop a freer, more personal language, he gravitated towards the work of John Cage and Mauricio Kagel and towards the theatre, which he discovered through his wife, the actress Edith Scob. In 1971, Aperghis composed La tragique histoire du nécromancien Hieronimo et de son miroir, for two women’s voices, speaking and singing, lute and cello. It was his first attempt at music theatre, demonstrating a fascination with the relationship between music, words and the stage, which he continues to explore today. For the Avignon Festival, he composed La tragique histoire… (1971), Vesper (1972),Pandaemonium (1973), and his opera Histoire de loups (1976). Since 1976, he has divided his time between three central passions. After founding the Atelier Théâtre et Musique (ATEM), based in Bagnolet for 15 years, now in Nanterre, he completely changed his approach to composition. He began creating performances that used both actors and musicians; he based works; created gradually in the rehearsal process; on everyday events transported to a poetic, often absurd and satirical world. He treated voice, instrument, movement, text and staging equally, eschewing standard theatrical and orchestral hierarchies. Between La bouteille à la mer, in 1976, and 1990, he worked with the ATEM on some 20 productions, the most recent being Conversations (1985), Enumerations (1988), Jojo (1990) and H, litanie musicale et égalitaire (1992). His second passion lies in developing chamber and orchestral music, vocal and instrumental works, for a wide variety of combinations. He has made an extensive series of pieces for solo instrument, composed for particular performers and often containing theatrical aspects, sometimes simply in the form of movement. His taste for experiment and provocation; for example, in Die Wände haben Ohren for large orchestra (1972); is always apparent but, unlike his music theatre, this work is not specifically theatrical. Everything is determined by the writing. It is rhythmically complex and always full of a vigorous energy that springs from extreme registers, dynamics and virtuosity, and from combinations such as voice and instrument, strings and percussion, sound and noise. His third love, opera, brings together all these concerns, where the words are the vital unifying element and the voice the principal means of expression. Apherghis has written six operas, based on Jules Verne (Pandaemonium, 1973) Diderot (Jacques le fataliste, 1974), Freud (Histoire de loups, 1976), Edgar Allan Poe (Je vous dis que je suis mort, 1978), a letter from Bettina Brentano to Goethe (Liebestod, 1981) and Alain Badiou (L’Echarpe rouge, 1984). He is currently writing his seventh, a version of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques. A prolific and unfailingly inventive composer, Aperghis has produced over 100 works, highly personal and unclassifiable, serious but not lacking in humour, following tradition but free of institutional constraints. For interpreters of Aperghis, the composer allows vast horizons of vitality and ease; for audiences, he skillfully reconciles musical experience for the ear and the eye. webpage

Saxophonist Sheri Brown has earned recognition as both a soloist and chamber musician.  She has performed and competed at the Adolphe Sax International Competition, the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, the World Saxophone Congress, and numerous North American Saxophone Alliance regional and national conferences.  In 2006, Miss Brown was the winner of The Hartt School’s wind ensemble concerto competition and a finalist in the North American Saxophone Alliance national classical competition.  She holds a Master of Music in saxophone performance from the Hartt School where she studied with Carrie Koffman and Rob Wilkerson, and a Bachelor of Music Education from Michigan State University where she studied with Joe Lulloff, Eric Lau, and Andrew Speight.  Miss Brown is a founding member of the 016: New Music Ensemble.  She teaches privately in the greater Hartford area.

Scott Comanzo is an unemployed New York projectionist and aspiring monologist who in attempting to travel to Winnipeg was told to stop in Hartford.He’s studied composition principally with Rocky Reuter, Michael Schelle and Robert Carl and is currently the Electronic Studio Fellow at the Hartt School.  He has also studied in New York with electronic composer Douglas Henderson and in Fort Collins, Colorado with IDM artist “Less than One”. Comanzo has won awards and commissions from the Percussive Arts Society and the American Pianists Association. Scott is immersed in modern jazz, electronic music, traditional concert music and the neo-experimental abstruse-garde. He currently has three self produced, self released albums available at CDbaby.com, itunes and other web locations as he is also a multi-instrumental/vocal recording artist and recording/mix engineer. Comanzo is interested in exposing the cracks between this variety of genres, exploring the margins in often unsettling ways.

Tom Johnson, born in Colorado in 1939, received B.A. and M.Mus. degrees from Yale University, and studied composition privately with Morton Feldman. After 15 years in New York, he moved to Paris, where he has lived since 1983. He is considered a minimalist, since he works with simple forms, limited scales, and generally reduced materials, but he proceeds in a more logical way than most minimalists, often using formulas, permutations, and predictable sequences.
Johnson is well known for his operas: The Four Note Opera (1972) continues to be presented in many countries. Riemannoper has been staged more than 20 times in German-speaking countries since its premier in Bremen in 1988. Often played non-operatic works include Bedtime Stories, Rational Melodies, Music and Questions, Counting Duets, Tango, Narayana’s Cows, and Failing: a very difficult piece for solo string bass.
His largest composition, the Bonhoeffer Oratorium, a two-hour work in German for orchestra, chorus, and soloists, with text by the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was premiered in Maastricht in 1996, and has since been presented in Berlin and New York.
Johnson has also written numerous radio pieces, such as J’entends un choeur (commissioned by Radio France for the Prix Italia, 1993), Music and Questions (also available on an Australian Broadcasting Company CD) and Die Melodiemaschinen, premiered by WDR Radio in Cologne in January 1996. The most recent radio piece is A Time to Listen, premiered by the Irish national radio in 2004.
The principal recordings currently available on CD are the Musique pour 88 (1988) (XI), An Hour for Piano (1971) (Lovely Music), The Chord Catalogue (1986) (XI), Organ and Silence (2000) (Ants), and Kientzy Plays Johnson (2004) (Pogus).
The Voice of New Music, a collection of articles written 1971-1982 for the Village Voice, published by Apollohuis in 1989, is now in the public domain and can be downloaded at www.tom.johnson.org. Self-Similar Melodies, a theoretical book in English, was published by Editions 75 in 1996.
Recent projects include Tilework, a series of 14 pieces for solo instruments, published by Editions 75 in 2003, Same or Different, a piece commissioned by the Dutch radio in 2004, and the Combinations for String Quartet, premiered in Berlin on the MärzMusik festival in 2004. As performer he frequently plays his Galileo, a 45-minute piece written for a self-invented percussion instrument.
Johnson received the French national prize in the victoires de la musique in 2001 for Kientzy Loops.

Cellist Katie Kennedy enjoys a varied performing career. She resides in West Hartford CT and performs with the Hartford Symphony and Orchestra New England in New Haven. Recently she has performed on the chamber music series at Trinity College (Hartford), was featured in the premier of Steven Bathory-Peeler’s Chamber Symphony and performed concertos with I Giovanni Solisti and the Connecticut Doctors Orchestra. She is a member of the performer-composer collective the Hartford Sound Alliance and the cello-percussion duo The Uncanny Valley and has solicited and premiered numerous new works. As a member of the Island Chamber Players at the Loomis Chaffee School, she regularly performs standard classical repertoire as well. She is on faculty at Loomis, Bethwood Suzuki School and Community Music School Springfield. This August, she will teach at Music Adventure Chamber Music Program in Siena, Italy.
Katie has spent spent the past four summers performing as a member of the esteemed New Hampshire Music Festival Orchestra. She has performed at Sebago Long Lake Chamber Music Festival, as a soloist with the New Hampshire Bach Festival, at Tanglewood and other summer music festivals. Her performances have been broadcast on NPR Performance Today and Maine Public Radio’s Maine Stage and In Tune by Ten. Katie gave a recital at Smithsonian Institute in D.C. on the collection’s Axelrod Strad cello during a month-long residency in 2000. Her collaborations with singer songwriter Laurent Brondel will be commercially released in 2010.
A graduate of Oberlin College Conservatory with a degree in cello performance, Katie studied with Peter Rejto on a full scholarship and was a featured performer at commencement. She continued her studies at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary with Csaba Onczay. While living in Europe she performed in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Sweden and Switzerland. Originally from Maine, Katie has performed concertos with the Bangor Symphony and several other ensembles and was twice grand prize winner of the Bay Chamber Concerts Young Artists Competition. She returns to Maine frequently to perform as has been featured on guest artists recital series at the Portland Conservatory, Trinity Church Portland, University of Maine-Farmington and the Arts Institute of Western Maine. In 2005 she was guest artist in residence in a rural Maine school district and explored various musical idioms and contemporary compositional techniques with students of all grade levels.

The Ludovico Ensemble was founded in 2002 by Nicholas Tolle and currently serves as Ensemble in Residence at the Boston Conservatory. Its mission is to dually promote rarely heard works of the European and American avant-garde as well as to foster the development of new American repertoire for mixed chamber ensemble. The configuration of the group varies as required by the repertoire. Its performances have been enthusiastically received by composers such as Helmut Lachenmann and Jonathan Harvey. The group takes its name from the fictional medical treatment featured in the Anthony Burgess novel and Stanley Kubrick movie “A Clockwork Orange,” in which the protagonist is subjected to a classical conditioning regimen that induces nausea at the sight of violent or exploitative acts, but also, inadvertently, to the music of Beethoven. webpage

Jeffrey Means has been hailed as a musician displaying “outstanding gifts and accomplishments”by the Boston Globe, and as a “sure conductor, his hand seemingly unfazed” by Seen and HeardInternational. Means pursues a parallel career as a conductor and percussionist in the Boston area.He is a ubiquitous presence in Boston’s contemporary music community, and regularly leads the Firebird Ensemble, Ludovico Ensemble, Callithumpian Consort, and Xanthos Ensemble. Means isArtistic Director of Sound Icon, a large ensemble dedicated to contemporary music. As a percussionist,Means has performed with the Boston Philharmonic, Atlantic Symphony, Emmanuel Music, Back BayChorale, and many others. In 2009, Means was one of two conductors selected to study with PierreBoulez in Lucerne, Switzerland. In 2008, Means led the opening concert of the Ditson Festival ofContemporary Music, a four-day festival featuring Boston’s finest new music ensembles. This season,he led the opening concert of Boston’s Celebrating Boulez festival – the program featured Boulez’sseminal Marteau sans Maitre. Means was a fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center in 2005. He holdsa BM and MM from New England Conservatory. At NEC, he received the 2005 John Cage Award ,the 2006 Tourjee Alumni Award, and the 2008 Gunther Schuller Medal. He has recorded for Mode,Albany, New World, and Navona records.

Matt Sargent is a composer, guitarist, and laptop artist based in Hartford, CT. He is a graduate of theHartt School of Music (MM in Music Composition, 2008) and St. Mary’s College of Maryland (BA in Music and English, 2006). His principal composition teachers include Robert Carl, Ingram Marshall, Ken Steen, and David Froom. He has also studied classical guitar with Orlando Roman and Andres Hidalgo. His composing grows out of an appreciation of natural resonances, acoustic spaces, field recording, and outdoor listening.  His recent works have involved notating found processes (aural, visual, or structural), generating found processes out of notation, and assembling music from points in between. In addition to the documented spaces and environmental recordings heard in much of his electroacoustic work, these influences also enter his acoustic music in tangible ways: pine sap drops as melodic material in his Soft Song (for solo cello), river stones lightly scraped on wood in his solo percussion work, Riverbed. Matt frequently collaborates with musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, and visual artists. Since 2007, he has directed the Hartford Sound Alliance, a CT-based performer/composer ensemble that presents concerts, installations, improvisations, and workshops at universities and art spaces across New England.  Along with collaborator Bill Solomon, he organized the ensemble’s residency at the Studio at Billings Forge art space, and co-curated the Hartford New Music Festival. In June of 2010, he was in residency at the Goldwell Open Air Museum in the foothills of Death Valley, where he developed manmade mountains + underground river, a six-channel generative sound installation which was presented at the Goldwell site, as well as the Machine Project (Los Angeles, CA) and the Art Factory (Las Vegas, NV) in July 2010.  In early 2010, he completed a tour of his of his concert-length solo percussion work, Ghost Music, performed by percussionist Bill Solomon, which included six performances at art spaces and universities across the East Coast. In the upcoming season, Matt will be a resident artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in February 2011, where he will be studying with master artist David Behrman, while creating a new set of sound art pieces based on field recordings and tidal algorithms generated at the Florida site.  In May 2011, he will be returning back to the desert as a composer-in-residence at University of Nevada Las Vegas, where he will be presenting a solo concert of new laptop-based works, as well as a series of lectures and workshops on computer music composition and interactive media. In addition to composing, Matt maintains a busy schedule as a performer and educator. He is an adjunct professor at Capital Community College (Hartford, CT), where he teaches music production technology and music composition, while directing the school’s recording studio and co-curating the Concerts@Capital music series. He is also on the faculty of Hartford Conservatory (recording arts), Hebrew High School of New England (instrumental music), and Middlesex Academy for the Performing Arts (classical guitar). He also regularly performs with singer-songwriter Kat Mulvaneyand the Hartford-based band Sunspots.

Thomas Schuttenhelm is an American composer and guitarist. His compositions can be heard on numerous recordings and have been performed throughout the country and abroad by such artists as: the Adaskin String Trio; the Alturas Duo (guitar and viola); classical guitarists: Eliot Fisk, Jason Vieaux, Alex Walker, Daniel Salazar and the Hartford Festival Orchestra; pianist Paul Bisaccia, the Goldspiel-Provost Classical Guitar Duo, bassist Robert Black from Bang on A Can All-Stars, bassist Volkan Orhon, the Connecticut Trio, and the Connecticut Yankee Chorale. His piano music was featured on the PBS (WGBY- Springfield, WGBH-Boston) special “The Great American Piano.” In addition to composing for some of America’s top soloists and ensembles, he is an experienced performer and scholar. He has performed electric guitar with the FIREWORKS Ensemble, a contemporary music ensemble; collaborated with the Wellspring Dance Company, a performance art company based in New York; toured with Purple Rock Productions, a diverse theater group, performing on guitar and balalaika; and was a composer-performer member of the Boston Public Works Contemporary Music Series held at Harvard University. He has given lectures at Cardiff University (Wales, UK), University of Newcastle (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK), University of Sussex (UK), University of London (UK), and at the Mannheim Hochschule for Music. His publications include “The Selected Letters of Michael Tippett”, published by Faber, and he is the contributing author to an edition on Fernando Sor. He has also authored numerous articles and reviews for the journal Soundboard. In addition, he has contributed to various BBC Radio programs. In 2007 he was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to the U.K. (London). In 2008 he was a British Music Studies fellow at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently completing a monograph for Cambridge University Press on ‘Meaning and Identity in the Orchestral Music of Michael Tippett’. webpage

Described by the New York Times as “virtuosic” and by the Albany Times-Union as “amazingly skilled,” percussionist/cimbalomist Nick Tolle recently performed the solo cimbalom part in Pierre Boulez’ Repons in Lucerne, Switzerland with the composer conducting. As a percussionist, he has performed with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Nederlands Radio Kamer Philharmonie, the Boston Pops Orchestra, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Boston Lyric Opera, Collage New Music, Cantata Singers, and is a core member of the Callithumpian Consort. Nicholas is also a founding member of Ensemble XII. In 2009, Nicholas won an Encore Grant from the American Composers Forum. He has attended the Tanglewood Music Center, the Lucerne Festival Academy, the Carnegie Hall Professional Training Workshop, and the Aspen Music Festival. Nicholas has been a guest teacher at the Hochschule fur Musik in Detmold, Germany and the Arnhem (NL) Conservatorium. He attended the Boston, Amsterdam, and New England Conservatories. webpage

Inspired by Don Ross, Alex de Grassi, Preston Reed, Laurence Juber, Michael Manring and the late Michael Hedges, Joel Weik began experimenting with alternate guitar tunings and two-hand fingerstyle techniques in his early teens.  Rarely seen without his instrument, Weik practiced incessantly.  Although he lacked formal training, a daily regimen of listening to and dissecting the songs of his Fingerstyle Guitar Heroes served as his primary tutelage.  Soon, Weik felt restricted playing in conventional guitar tunings such as ”Standard” and “Drop D.”  In order to rekindle creativity and inspiration, he would arbitrarily detune his guitar strings.  Then, by forcing himself to “re-learn” the guitar in these newly invented foreign tunings, compositions would arise… Fast forward to 2011; Weik composes and plays lead guitar for the Hartford-based instrumental World Fusion trio String Theorie, which he formed in the summer of 2009 with Berklee Graduate Karl Messerchmidt - bassist, and world percussionist – Jordan Critchley.  Within its first year, the band achieved milestones such as an interview by WNPR’s Where We Live and the completion of a successful self-recorded/produced/mastered 5 track EP.  String Theorie has become virtually a household name in Connecticut, boasting an eclectic venue resume including the Mark Twain House, La Paloma Sabanera, 125 Riverside Drive, WNPR, the Lyceum, Firebox Restaurant, The Studio at Billings Forge, Capitol Community College, The Space, Stella Blues and the Pond House Cafe in Elizabeth Park, to name a few!   Performing relentlessly (twice a week on average since the band’s inception) Weik has continued to compose and innovate. Weik continuously collaborates with local musicians such as Matt Sargent (Sunspots) and Jesse Stanford (Heirlooms), and plays lead guitar for John Parson while also co-writing with singer/songwriter April Street.   2011 will see the release of String Theorie’s full length album of all new original material, as well as Weik’s debut solo fingerstyle guitar album.  For more information on Joel Weik and String Theorie: webpage

The dates for the festival are February 18, March 18 and April 15, all concerts beginning at 7:30pm. Studio@Billing’s Forge is located at 539 Broad St., Hartford, CT 06106.

HNMF will feature performers, ensembles and composers from New England and New York hand-picked by co-curators Matt Sargent and Bill Solomon. Music presented on the festival includes instrumental, vocal, theatrical and electronic works including composers Georges Aperghis, John Cage, Martin Iddon, Robert Ashley, Michael Gordon, Jacob Ter Veldhuis, David Macbride, Susan Botti, Matt Sargent, Carl Testa, Kirsten Volness, Jacob Richman, Levy Lorenzo, Ben Klein, Akiko Hatekayama and Christian Gentry. Performers and ensembles include Robert Black, Ludovico Ensemble, ekmeles vocal ensemble, Andie Springer, James Moore, Jon Stehney, ensemble 016, Lauretta Pope, Ryan Ford, HSA Ensemble and the Hartt Saxophone Studio.

Check this space for future information including concert programs, links to composer and performer websites as well as ticket information. Please direct any inquiries to solomon.bill@gmail.com or mattsargentmusic.com.