Composer
The music of Evan Williams draws from a wide range of influences, both musical and cultural. His work reflects inspirations from the Baroque, Romanticism, Modernism, Minimalism, contemporary popular music, and everything in between. Williams’ music has been performed across the country and internationally in Canada, Italy, and Switzerland. His work has been performed by members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Fifth House Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, the Verb Ballets, and at festivals such as Fresh Inc, N_SEME, SEAMUS, Studio 300, the New Music Gathering, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, the New York City Electronic Music Festival, and the Midwest Composers Symposium. He has been commissioned by notable performers and ensembles including the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Lawrence University Symphony Orchestra, the V3NTO Brass Trio, Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra, Patchwork Duo, and a consortium led by Andy Hall for his baritone saxophone concerto Wild Velvet. He has also received readings by the JACK Quartet, Oasis Saxophone Quartet, and the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, among others. His work can be found on recordings by The Namaste Ensemble's "No Borders Quartet," Levels, and an upcoming recording by soprano Katherine Jolly and pianist Emily Yap Chua.
Williams has received awards and recognition from the National Federation of Music Clubs, ASCAP, Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and in 2018, was chosen as the Detroit Symphony’s inaugural African-American Classical Roots Composer-in-Residence. Originally from the Chicago suburbs, Williams completed his Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition with a cognate in Orchestral Conducting at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. There, he studied with Michael Fiday, Mara Helmuth, and Douglas Knehans, and served as a teaching assistant in electronic music. He holds a Masters degree from Bowling Green State University (Bowling Green, OH), and a Bachelors from the Conservatory of Music at Lawrence University (Appleton, WI). His other primary teachers have been Asha Srinivasan, Joanne Metcalf, Christopher Dietz, Mikel Kuehn, and Marilyn Shrude. He has also received instruction in festivals, masterclasses, and lessons from composers Julia Wolfe, Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, David Maslanka, Libby Larson, Evan Chambers, Stacy Garrop, Dan Visconti, and others.
As a conductor, Williams and has led performances with the Lawrence University Symphonic Band and Wind Ensemble, numerous chamber ensembles, at the 2012 New Music Festival at BGSU, with Café MoMus (CCM’s contemporary chamber ensemble), and with members of the International Contemporary Ensemble. He has also trained at the Bard Conductors Institute and the Band Conducting and Pedagogy Clinic at the University of Michigan.
Williams serves as Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Instrumental Activities at Rhodes College, where he teaches composition, music technology, and is music director of the Rhodes Orchestra. He previously held teaching positions at Lawrence University, Bennington College, and at The Walden School’s Young Musicians Program.
Composer
Nate May (b. 1987) is a composer, performer, and educator whose interest in human ecosystems has impelled explorations of a wide variety of sounds and interactions. Raised in Huntington, West Virginia, much of his work stems from a “fascination, love, and respect for the people” of Appalachia (Soapbox), including his oratorio State, the result of interviews he conducted with Appalachian migrants on a fellowship from the Berea Sound Archives, and “Licorice Parikrama,” a networked performance featuring a live conference call with West Virginians affected by the 2014 Elk River chemical spill. Nate is an accomplished keyboardist and improviser as well as an electronic musician and producer, collaborating with Paris-based choreographer Wanjiru Kamuyu on the world-touring work Spiral and indigenous experimental trio Khoi Khonnexion on their debut album Kalahari Waits, recorded during a year in South Africa on a Reese Miller scholarship from the Telluride Association. Selected as one of three U.S. composers to participate in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2017 National Composers Intensive, Nate has been a fellow at the Sō Percussion Institute, the Next festival, and the highSCORE festival. His chamber and orchestral music, characterized by textural intricacy, rhythmic drive, and repurposed sounds, has been performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, Wild UP, the Yale Philharmonia, Eric Wubbels, Adam Sliwinski, Patchwork Duo, Quartetto Indaco, and many others. Currently a doctoral candidate in composition at Yale, he holds degrees from Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music (M.M., Composition) and the University of Michigan (B.F.A., Jazz and Contemplative Studies), and has studied with Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, Christopher Theofanidis, Geri Allen, Stephen Rush, and Michael Fiday. He serves on faculty at the Walden School, where he was awarded the 2018 Arno and Ruth Drucker Faculty Chair.
Composer
From the composer:
"My practice occupies two distinct (but overlapping) realms: multimedia art and music.
I am a composer and performer of music for instruments, voices, and electronics. My compositions are born from direct collaboration with performers, and often includes electronic/acoustic interactions. As an electroacoustic performer, I am interested in connecting to audiences through embodied gesture, novel interfaces, and improvisation.
My art explores how our psyches shape and are shaped by the tools we use, both consciously and subconsciously. How do we adjust our interpersonal relationships, our modes of perception, and even our bodies in order to communicate with and through the digital medium? How can the errors and failures of technologies expose the limits of its abilities – and our trust in its rendering of our intentions?
In my process, I investigate the human interface with technology, and especially the unreliable translations between the natural and artificial, the physical and digital, and the embodied and electronic. These themes manifest in multimedia installations and performances, often employing custom software and digital/physical hybrids to create sound, animation, and light in real-time generative systems."
Composer
Tina Tallon (b. 1990) is a Boston-based composer, computer musician, vocalist, educator, and arts documentarian completing her doctoral studies in composition at the University of California, San Diego. Her music has been performed internationally by such esteemed musicians as the LA Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, wild Up, Talea, the La Jolla Symphony, the Phoenix Symphony, Tony Arnold, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Calder Quartet, members of the JACK Quartet, h2 quartet, HOCKET Duo, and Transient Canvas, among many others. She has received major awards, grants, and fellowships from organizations such as ASCAP, the Barlow Endowment, the La Jolla Symphony, NewMusicUSA, and UC San Diego. Recent commissioners include the LA Philharmonic, Guerilla Opera, Steven Schick and the La Jolla Symphony, pianist Brianna Matzke and the Response Project, and Composers in Schools. Her artistic and scholarly work has been presented internationally at festivals, conferences, and forums including the MIT-Grafenegg Forum, IRCAM’s ManiFeste, the LA Philharmonic’s National Composers Intensive, New Music Gathering, International Saxophone Symposium, N_SEME, the PARMA Music Festival, Cortona Sessions for New Music, soundSCAPE festival, New Music on the Point, and the UC Davis Composition Workshop. Academically, her research interests include technological mediation of the human voice, embodied music cognition, physical paradigms of sonic expectation generation, computational modeling of energetic relationships between various musical parameters based upon Newtonian mechanics, data sonification, development of software for spectral analysis and composition, algorithmic composition, and computational approaches to musicological inquiry. In addition to research grants from Brandeis University, she won one of four inaugural Katzin Prize Fellowships to fund her research at UC San Diego, where she is currently ABD. Ms. Tallon holds B.S. degrees in Biological Engineering and Music from MIT and an M.F.A in Composition and Music Theory from Brandeis University. Her primary composition teachers include Peter Child, David Rakowski, and Lei Liang, and she has studied computer music with Tom Erbe and Miller Puckette. She is also the owner and lead documentarian of SALT Arts Documentation, a company that specializes in artistically-informed audiovisual recordings of the performing arts with an emphasis on contemporary music, visual arts, theater, and dance. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and Visiting Assistant Professor of Music in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at Clark University, and was previously Lecturer of Music Technology in the Music and Theater Arts program at MIT.
Composer
Charles Peck is a composer whose work has been called “daring” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “stunning” (Cut Common), and “wild and shimmering” (Broad Street Review). His music, spanning a range of chamber and large ensembles, has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, the Columbus Symphony, Alarm Will Sound, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Symphony in C, the New York Youth Symphony, the JACK Quartet, Sandbox Percussion, the Network for New Music, Ji Hye Jung, and Holly Roadfeldt.
Recent projects include a chamber orchestra piece, titled Vinyl, which imitates the skips and pitch warping of vinyl records. The piece, praised as “substantial, personal, genuine” (Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music), was written for Alarm Will Sound and the Mizzou International Composers Festival and has since been awarded an ASCAP Morton Gould Award and been performed at the Beijing Modern Music Festival and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Other recent works include a sextet, titled Kindling, commissioned by the Boston New Music Initiative, and a piano quartet, titled Sunburst, commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony as part of their First Music program. The latter piece, after receiving its premiere at Carnegie Hall, has been named a winner of the Left Coast Composition Competition, the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award, and the NFMC Emil and Ruth Beyer Composition Award, and has received its Australian premiere by the Forest Collective.
Peck’s music has also been selected as a winner of composition competitions with the Lake George Music Festival, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Symphony in C, Quartet Nouveau, Frame Dance, the Locrian Chamber Players, Iceberg New Music, the Foundation for Modern Music, and the Castleton Festival, among others. Recently, his music has been featured at a variety of festivals, including the Aspen Music Festival, the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute, Cultivate at Copland House, the Mise-En Music Festival, the American Music Festival, the New Music Miami Festival, the New Music Gathering, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, and the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival. Peck’s work has also been supported by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the McKnight Foundation, the American Composers Forum, and the Cornell Council for the Arts.
Peck currently teaches at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and is a doctoral candidate at Cornell University where he earned the Otto R. Stahl Memorial Award in composition. He received his Master’s in Music from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. There, he was named the winner of the Composition Competition and was awarded the Scott Huston Award for composition. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Music Industry from Drexel University.