NMOP 2023 Faculty
Tony Arnold
Hailed by the New York Times as “a bold, powerful interpreter,” soprano Tony Arnold is recognized internationally as a leading proponent of new music in concert and recording, having premiered over 200 works. She has collaborated with the most cutting-edge composers and instrumentalists on the world stage, and shares with the audience her “broader gift for conveying the poetry and nuance behind outwardly daunting contemporary scores.” (Boston Globe) Tony has been featured at the Darmstadt Festival and Witten New Music Days (Germany); Time of Music (Finland); Cervantino (Mexico); Musica Sacra Maastricht (Netherlands); Tongyeong Festival (Korea); and the Perspectives XXI Festival (Armenia).
Emmanuel Berrido
Emmanuel Berrido is a Dominican-American composer with a passion for telling stories through sound. His work has been performed by a wide variety of artists, and recent experiences have included performances by the JACK Quartet, the Illinois Modern Ensemble, work at the American Composer’s Orchestra EarShot Readings with the Grand Rapids Symphony, the New Music Miami Festival, the Indiana State University Contemporary Music Festival, and the Ball State University Festival of New Music. He has received the Louis Smadbeck Composition Prize in Ithaca, NY, for his work “Bend the Knee” for brass quintet, the Ithaca College Orchestral Composition Competition for his “Danza Ritual” for orchestra, and the 2022 Pittsburgh Composer’s Project for his piece “Footwork” by ensemble NAT 28. Manny is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition and Music Theory at the University of Pittsburgh.
Helena Bugallo
Helena Bugallo holds degrees from the Conservatorio Provincial de La Plata (Argentina) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (USA), where she obtained a Master’s degree in piano performance and a Ph.D. in musicology. She has worked as a researcher at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel and leads a piano class at the Musikschule in Riehen (Musik Akademie Basel). As a pianist, she specializes on twentieth-century and contemporary music. She has performed in major festivals in Europe and the Americas, premiered numerous works, and collaborated with Ensembles such as Thürmchen (Cologne), Mondrian (Basel), Resonanz (Hamburg), Schlagquartett Köln, and SWR Vokalensemble (Stuttgart). In 1998, she co-founded the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo and between 2006 and 2016 she was the principal pianist of the Ensemble Phoenix Basel. Her recordings—including music by Bauckholt, Bartók, Feldman, Ginastera, Jaggi, Khorkova, Kurtág, Nancarrow, Oña, Stravinsky and Williams—have been released by Wergo, Neos, Albany, Musiques Suisses, Coviello, and Boosey & Hawkes. Her edition of Edgard Varèse’s Amériques, arranged for two pianos, eight hands is available on Ricordi. Her writings have been published by Music Theory Online, Soundings, the Paul Sacher Foundation, and Schott Music. She is the editor of the Conlon Nancarrow Critical Edition of Selected Studies, which will be published by Schott in 2024.
The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo
The Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo has been presenting innovative programs of contemporary music throughout North America and Europe since 1995. Helena Bugallo and Amy Williams have premiered dozens of works, many of which were written especially for the Duo, and they have worked directly with such renowned composers as David Lang, Tania Léon, Louis Andriessen, Lukas Foss, Steve Reich, Marcos Balter, Bernard Rands, Betsy Jolas and Kevin Volans. The Duo has been featured at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ (Amsterdam), Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City), Miller Theatre, Le Poisson Rouge and Symphony Space (New York City), CAL Performances (Berkeley), Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (Witten), and Ojai Festival (California), to name a few. As part of their mission to expand the repertoire for piano duet, the Duo has undertaken an extensive transcription project of the Studies for Player Piano by Conlon Nancarrow. This resulted in a critically acclaimed recording of Nancarrow’s music for piano duet and solo piano, released by Wergo in 2004. They have also recorded the music of Jorge Liderman, Erik Oña, Feldman/ Varèse, Ginastera (Neos, 2010), Amy Williams, Kurtág, Bartok, and Stravinsky.
Anthony Cheung
Composer/pianist Anthony Cheung writes music that explores the senses, a wide palette of instrumental play and affect, improvisational traditions, reimagined musical artifacts, and multiple layers of textual meaning. Recent highlights include the song cycle, “the echoing of tenses,” for the American Modern Opera Company at the 2022 Ojai Festival – reprised this past spring at Brown University and the 92nd Street Y – and Parallel Play with the LA Philharmonic, conducted by John Adams. His music has been commissioned and performed by leading groups such as the Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra (as the 2015-17 Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow), Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Scharoun Ensemble, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and many others. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Rome Prize, and received First Prize at the 2008 Dutilleux Competition. As a co-founder of New York’s Talea Ensemble, he served as pianist and artistic director of the group. Recordings include portrait discs on the Kairos, New Focus, Wergo, and Ensemble Modern labels. He studied at Harvard and Columbia and has taught at the University of Chicago and Brown University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Music.
Sharon Harms
Praised as “luscious-toned”, “extraordinarily precise and expressive”, and “dramatically committed and not averse to risk” by the New York Times, soprano Sharon Harms is known for fearless performances and passionate interpretations of works new and old for the recital, concert, and operatic stage. A member of the Argento Ensemble, Ms. Harms has premiered the music of some of today’s leading composers. She has sung with Da Capo Chamber Players, Eighth Blackbird, Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble Signal, International Contemporary Ensemble, Juilliard CIA, MET Opera Chamber Orchestra, New Chamber Ballet, Pacifica Quartet, Princeton Festival Opera, Simon Bolivar Orchestra, Talea Ensemble, and Third Coast Percussion, among others. She has also been a guest artist with the American Academy in Rome, Columbia University, June in Buffalo, MATA Festival, Mozarteum, University of Chicago, University of Notre Dame, Radcliffe Institute, Resonant Bodies Festival, and is soprano faculty for the Composer’s Conference at Avaloch Farm and special guest at New Music on the Point this summer. Current projects include new song cycles by Christopher Trapani and Chris Castro, recordings of Milton Babbitt with Erik Carlson, and songs of Charles Ives with Jacob Greenberg and Alice Teyssier. Ms. Harms appears on the Albany, Bridge, and Innova labels. www.sharonharms.com.
JACK Quartet
Hailed by The New York Times as “our leading new-music foursome”, the JACK Quartet is one of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected groups performing today. JACK has maintained an unwavering commitment to their mission of performing and commissioning new works, giving voice to underheard composers, and cultivating an ever-greater sense of openness toward contemporary classical music. The quartet was selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year”, nominated for GRAMMY Awards for recordings in 2018 & 2022, named to WQXR’s “19 for 19 Artists to Watch”, and awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Through intimate relationships with today’s most creative voices, JACK embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform, leading to a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. The quartet has worked with artists such as Julia Wolfe, George Lewis, Chaya Czernowin, Helmut Lachenmann, Caroline Shaw, and Simon Steen-Andersen. JACK’s all-access initiative, JACK Studio, commissions a selection of artists each year, who will receive money, workshop time, mentorship, and resources to develop new work to be performed and recorded by the quartet. Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of new string quartet music.
Dana Jessen
Hailed as a “bassoon virtuoso” (Chicago Reader), Dana Jessen tirelessly seeks to expand the boundaries of her instrument through original compositions, improvisations, and collaborative work with innovative artists. Over the past decade, she has presented dozens of world premiere performances throughout North America and Europe while maintaining equal footing in the creative music community as an improviser. Her solo performances are almost entirely grounded in electroacoustic composition that highlight her distinct musical language. As a chamber musician, Dana is the co-founder of the contemporary reed quintet Splinter Reeds, and has performed with Alarm Will Sound, Amsterdam’s DOEK Collective, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Tri-Centric Ensemble, among many others. A dedicated educator, Dana teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has presented masterclasses and workshops to a range of students from across the globe.
Kerrith Livengood
Kerrith Livengood is a Midwestern mom with a slight gut and a lot of snark. She enjoys maple pie and sunshine. She loves Lake Dunmore better than she does most people. She makes honks and bleeps and bloops sometimes and lovely artful melodies other times. She also likes poetry and is looking forward to sitting in the shade with a beer and several long sci-fi novels after NMOP is over this year.
Levy Lorenzo
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. His body of work spans custom electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, free improvisation, and classical percussion. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. Lorenzo’s work has been featured at MoMA PS1, MIT Media Lab, STEIM, Pitchfork, BBC, Rewire, The Hermitage, Burning Man, and The New York Times which named him an “electronics wizard”. He is a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble and a core collaborator in Claire Chase’s Density 2036 project. He has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, George Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Leo Villareal, Autumn Knight, Christine Sun Kim, Steve Schick, and Henry Threadgill. Dr. Lorenzo is frequently invited to give electronics lectures and is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts. This upcoming season, he will make his debut as a featured electronic concerto soloist with the NY Philharmonic.
Wang Lu
Wang Lu writes music that reflects urban environmental sounds, linguistic intonation and contours, traditional Chinese music, and freely improvised practices. She is an Associate Professor of Music at Brown University. Her works have been performed internationally, by ensembles including the Ensemble Modern, the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra among others. She received the Berlin Prize in Music Composition from the American Academy in Berlin, Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award in Music from American Academy of Arts and Letters, Koussevitzky Award from the Library of Congress, Fromm Commission from Harvard University and was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. Wang Lu’s portrait albums Urban Inventory (2018), and An Atlas of Time (2020) were released to critical acclaim.
Andrew Norman
Andrew Norman’s works have been performed by leading ensembles worldwide, including the Berlin, Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras, the BBC, Saint Louis, Seattle, and Melbourne Symphonies, the Orpheus, Saint Paul, and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestras, the Tonhalle Orchester, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, Ensemble Intercontemporain and many others. Andrew was Musical America’s 2017 Composer of the Year. He is the recipient of the 2004 Jacob Druckman Prize, the 2005 ASCAP Nissim and Leo Kaplan Prizes, the 2006 Rome Prize, the 2009 Berlin Prize, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His large-scale orchestral work Play was named one of NPR’s top 50 albums of 2015, nominated for a 2016 Grammy in the Best Contemporary Classical Composition category, and won the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Andrew currently teaches at Juilliard and is returning to the University of Southern California in fall 2023.
Brian Riordan
Brian Riordan is a composer, performer, improviser, producer, and sound artist originally from Chicago, IL. He is currently a PhD candidate in Music Composition and Theory at University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches a class he designed called “Programming Environments in Music: An Introduction to Max/MSP”. His research interests are in temporal discontinuity, delay-based performance, real-time digital signal processing, and laptop performance aesthetics. As an avid collaborator, he has performed in numerous ensembles ranging from rock, jazz, classical, and experimental throughout North American, Europe, and Asia. His compositions have been performed by The Callithumpian Consort, Wet Ink Ensemble, andPlay, The Meridian Arts Ensemble, Kamraton, Untwelve, Alia Musica, Wolftrap, and his compositions have been featured at STEIM, SEAMUS, SICPP, NMOP, SPLICE, and The Walden Creative Musicians Retreat. As a member of the Pittsburgh ensemble “How Things Are Made,” he produced and performed on over 70 albums for the group and has commissioned 52 compositions.
Alex Sopp
Alex Sopp is a musician and artist living in Brooklyn. As the flutist and founding member of yMusic, The Knights, and NOW Ensemble, the New York Times has praised her playing as “exquisite” and “beautifully nuanced”. She has been a member of Paul Simon’s band for his Homeward Bound Tour, both singing and playing in arenas worldwide. She has appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of David Robertson, and has made regular guest appearances with the NYP, International Contemporary Ensemble, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and many others. Comfortable in many genres, Alex has commissioned, premiered, and recorded with some of the most exciting composers and songwriters of our time. Her paintings grace the covers of many records of artists with whom she has collaborated. Alex grew up in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, and trained at the Juilliard School.
Mazz Swift
Mazz Swift is a composer, conductor, bandleader, educator, singer, and Juilliard-trained violinist, weaving classic African American musics, electronica, and mindfulness into their music. Improvisation is a throughline in their practice across genres and instrumental configurations, and can be found in most of their works. They are a 2019 Jerome Hill Fellow, and 2021 United States Artist Fellow. Works include commissions by the Los Angeles Philharmonic (2020), the International Contemporary Ensemble (2023), the Silkroad Ensemble (2021, 2022, 2023), and the Kronos Quartet (2022+2024).
Matthew Evan Taylor
Composer and improviser Dr. Matthew Evan Taylor has been hailed as a composer of “insistent and defiant… envelopingly hypnotic” music (Alan Young, Lucid Culture). Dr. Taylor’s work is sparked by his curiosity about the surrounding world and the inherent social bonds built through music. Whether he is addressing issues about the nature of time or the bounds of the human breath on musical performance, Dr. Taylor writes music that is engaging, surprising, and unmistakably human. His aesthetic is typified by vibrant instrumental colors, mercurial juxtapositions, and an affinity for groove. Innovative projects such as Life Returns, Say Their Names, Postcards to the Met, and The Unheard Mixtapes were created as new templates for composition and performance in the wake of the pandemic. His ongoing series The Living Score aims to decolonize the compositional process by democratizing the most precious Western musical artifact – the musical score. Dr. Taylor’s music is available through New Amsterdam Records. Dr. Taylor is based in Vermont, where he is Assistant Professor of Music at Middlebury College. He also serves as Artist-Teacher in Composition at The Longy School of Music of Bard College.
Amy Williams
The compositions of Amy Williams have been presented by leading contemporary music soloists and ensembles around the world, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Wet Ink, Talujon, International Contemporary Ensemble, h2 Saxophone Quartet, Bent Frequency, Grossman Ensemble, pianist Ursula Oppens, soprano Tony Arnold and bassist Robert Black. Her pieces appear on the Albany, Parma, VDM (Italy), Blue Griffin, Centaur and New Ariel labels. As a member of the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo, Ms. Williams has performed throughout Europe and the Americas and recorded six critically-acclaimed CDs for Wergo as well as appearing on the Neos and Albany labels. Ms. Williams has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Howard Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as major commissions from the Koussevitsky and Fromm foundations. She holds a Ph.D. in composition from the University at Buffalo, where she also received her Master’s degree in piano performance. She has taught at Bennington College and Northwestern University and is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Pittsburgh. She is Artistic Director of the best festival in the world 🤓.
Will Yager
Will Yager is a double bassist committed to experimental music, improvisation, and collaborating with other artists in the creation of new solo and chamber repertoire for the double bass. He is a founding member of the soprano-double bass duo LIGAMENT, improvising trio Wombat, and the nonprofit organization Bass Players for Black Composers. Performance highlights include appearances at the Big Ears Festival, High Zero Festival, Omaha Under the Radar, University of Iowa Center for New Music, Experimental Sound Studios’ Quarantine Concerts, 2021 International Society of Bassists Convention, Nief-Norf Summer Festival, Cortona Sessions for New Music, and the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival. In addition to his varied performing activities, Yager previously held teaching positions at Maryville College, the University of North Alabama, and is currently on faculty at the North Carolina Governor’s School West. He is based in Baltimore, Maryland.