Artists

The University of Alabama at Birmingham Chamber Trio consists of Dr. Denise Gainey, clarinet, Dr. James Zingara, trumpet and Dr. Christopher Steele, piano. The group was established in 2012 and has performed throughout Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia including appearances at the Alabama Music Educators Conference, the College Music Society Southern Region Conference, the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, the National Association of Composers USA Conference, and the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors National Conference. The title Many New Trails to Blaze has a double meaning; as an unusual chamber grouping with little available published works, the UAB Chamber Trio actively seeks out new music, many of which are featured on this recording. Secondly, the people and sports teams of the University of Alabama at Birmingham proudly carry the nickname Blazers, and the title is an acknowledgment of the support and positive creative environment provided by our university, college, and department.

Shelly Tramposh has enjoyed a varied career as a chamber musician, orchestral player, and teacher. She has performed as recitalist in venues across the United States and Canada and in Central America and Europe, including the American Viola Society national conference. Tramposh has also presented lectures and master classes at the ASTA National Conference and various colleges and music schools in the United States and abroad; her first article was published by The Strad in the Fall of 2011. She has been performing with Cullan Bryant for the last five years; in addition to the pieces presented here, they have performed works by Hindemith, Shostakovich, Brahms, Enesco, Kiel, Clarke, and Milhaud. Other chamber music affiliations include The Perron Trio, the Potsdam Piano Quartet, and the Ariel Chamber Players.

Through engaging performances, the City of Tomorrow brings new and recent works to audiences around the world, promoting the appreciation of art music and the wind quintet in contemporary life. Winners of the gold medal at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition in 2011, the City of Tomorrow "plays with an extraordinary sense of ensemble, not just in terms of rhythmic precision but in tone color, balance, gesture, and sensitivity" (Sidney Chen, NewMusicBox).

Originally from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Joshua Tomlinson is a composer, sound artist and teacher specializing in electroacoustic music and technology. His background is in rock music with subsequent classical training in voice and guitar, and his compositions incorporate a range of musical styles, instrumentation and media. Joshua serves on the steering committee of the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival and he has participated as a composer and audio technician at NYCEMF since 2012. His compositions have also been performed at the PARMA, NSEME, SEAMUS, and EMM music festivals.

As a composer and artist who primarily works with sound, Daniel De Togni is fascinated with the concept of space in sound/music. Specifically, the psychological space that music inhabits in our minds as listeners, performers and/or creators, how sonic objects interact with each other in real-time and space, as well how a sound can evoke an image or landscape in our minds.

Michael Sidney Timpson's musical beginnings were borne out of playing baritone saxophone and "electric" bass clarinet with a strong interest in American improvisational forms, especially Free Jazz and Fusion; this would later evolve into incorporations American popular genres, such as Funk, Hip-Hop, and Alternative Techno. A child of the multicultural era in Northern California, he was intrigued with East and Southeast Asian traditional musics, these seeds that would eventually bear a lasting impact on his musical style. With his research on Chinese instruments, he has also become an improviser on various Asian woodwinds.

A classically trained composer with an ongoing fascination for popular culture, Philip  Thompson's music explores a wide array of styles, from his baroque-metal professional wrestling opera The Final Battle for Love to the intimate and introspective Nocturnes for string trio. His compositions have been performed by IonSound Project, Thompson Street Opera, Alia Musica Pittsburgh, violinist Roger Zahab, and bassist Andrew Kohn among others. Performances of his work have taken place in venues including the Virginia Arts Festival, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the Centre for Intercultural Music at Churchill College (UK), Music on the Edge, The Listening Room (Grand Valley State University), and Concordia University’s EuCuE (Montreal).

David Bennett Thomas was born in 1969, in Westminster, Maryland. His official music studies began in high school, when he began taking lessons with jazz pianist Michael Connell. Thomas says "I knew at the first lesson that the course of my future was set." He would later be mentored by Lukas Foss, Ron Thomas, Jacques Voois, and Fred Hersch; and receive degrees from West Chester University, and The Peabody Conservatory of Music. 

Pianist Dr. Martha Thomas has given concerts and presentations across the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe, South America, and Africa. Thomas is featured on 11 albums on the ACA Digital, Centaur, Ravello, and Albany labels. Her latest, ECHOES: Past and Future, features music from the 20^th and 21^st centuries, including Noggin by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Melinda Wagner. She has been praised for the “lyrical beauty of her playing” and “her mastery of rhythmic and textural complexities.”

Described as “spirited and intellectual,” Indianapolis-based musician Cecily Terhune enjoys a rewarding career as a performer, recording artist, and educator. She concertizes regularly as a soloist and proud member of funk-fusion septet Audiodacity and the Hood/Terhune Duo, among other groups. When not on stage, Terhune shares her passion for music by teaching private students and sectionals at Carmel and Noblesville High Schools, serving as a member of the Committee for Gender Equity in the North American Saxophone Alliance, and maintaining her educational YouTube channel.

The Escape Ten (Escape X) duo formed from an epic coast-to-coast road trip taken by Annie Stevens and Andrea Venet in a Ford Escape on the Interstate-10 from Virginia to California in 2012. Today, Escape Ten maintains a steady performance schedule touring as guest artists and clinicians internationally. Regularly premiering new works for percussion, they remain active commissioning composers, collaborating on creative projects, joining consortiums, and writing their own pieces. Their mission is to generate creative and diverse music within a variety of genres and timbral contexts in order to bring challenging, lasting works into the standard repertoire.

Welsh-born composer Hilary Tann lives in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York where she is the John Howard Payne Professor of Music Emerita at Union College, Schenectady. Her compositions have been widely performed and recorded by ensembles such as the European Women’s Orchestra, Tenebrae, Lontano, Marsyas Trio, Thai Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and BBC National Orchestra of Wales.  Recent composer-residencies include the 2011 Eastman School of Music Women in Music Festival, 2013 Women Composers Festival of Hartford, and 2015 Welsh Music Center.  Praised for its lyricism (“beautiful, lyrical work” – Classical Music Web) and formal balance (“In the formal balance of this music, there is great beauty …” – Welsh Music), her music is influenced by a strong identification with the natural world.

In 2010, Greg Harrison and Jonny Smith created the percussion duo Taktus while pursuing Masters Degrees at the University of Toronto. With a wide range of musical influences - from classical to electronic - Taktus seeks to create music that crosses borders between genres and is relevant to contemporary audiences. Their premiere project is set of marimba duet arrangements of Glass Houses - a seminal work of Canadian minimalism by composer Ann Southam.

David Taddie, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, spent his teenage and young adult years playing in rock bands, serving as a church organist, arranging and performing on radio and TV commercials, finally beginning his formal studies in music theory and composition at Cleveland State University at the age of 20. He received his BA and MM from CSU, where he studied composition with Bain Murray, Rudolph Bubalo, and Edwin London. From 1985-1992, he served as pianist with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. He also composed for, and performed with, the New Music Associates in Cleveland, performed as a duo-piano team with his wife, Karen, and was active as a theory and piano teacher. After a decade of working as a freelance composer, performer, and music teacher, he moved to Boston in 1992 to attend Harvard University where he received his Ph.D., studying composition with Donald Martino, Bernard Rands, and Mario Davidovsky.

Collaborating as Duo Sureño since 1999, Nancy King and Robert Nathanson share a passion for commissioning and performing new music. As a duo, they have toured extensively throughout the United States, Germany and Austria, with world premieres most recently in Wilmington, NC and Honolulu, Hawaii. Waking The Sparrows, their newest release on Ravello Records represents an almost twenty-year journey, exploring the beauty of the human voice blended with the guitar, as expressed through the music of today's most compelling composers.

Composer Karen Sunabacka often finds inspiration from puzzles, stories, and her Métis and mixed European heritage. She has deep roots in the Red River Area (what is now known as Manitoba, Canada) and feels a strong connection to the Métis, Scottish, Swedish and Finnish cultures. This mix of cultural connections sometimes creates conflicts and new perspectives which she finds both interesting and challenging. Her music reflects this cultural mix through the exploration of the sounds and stories of the Canadian prairies.

Newton D. Strandberg (1921-2001) was born in River Falls, Wisconsin and raised in his youth in mid-America, Iowa. He first attended North Park College (now North Park University) in Chicago and later, in 1983, was awarded an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from the school. He studied piano and composition with Anthony Donato at Northwestern University, receiving a Bachelor of Music Education in 1942, a Master of Music in Piano Performance in 1947, and a Doctorate of Music in Composition in 1956, the first music degree of its sort to be awarded at Northwestern.

Richard Stoltzman’s virtuosity, technique, imagination, and communicative power have revolutionized the world of clarinet playing, opening up possibilities for the instrument that no one could have predicted. He was responsible for bringing the clarinet to the forefront as a solo instrument, and is still the world’s foremost clarinetist. Stoltzman gave the first clarinet recitals in the histories of both the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall, and, in 1986, became the first wind player to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize. As one of today’s most sought-after artists, Stoltzman has been a soloist with more than a hundred orchestras as well as a recitalist and chamber music performer, innovative jazz artist, and prolific recording artist. A two-time Grammy Award winner, he has amazed critics and audiences alike in repertory spanning many musical genres.

My version of this familiar story of Joseph, the devil, et al. is called The Devil’s Tale. Its inspiration comes from basically telling Ramuzʼs story backwards, in effect, as one giant palindrome. This all began with imagining starting my story where Stravinskyʼs leaves off, with the somewhat ambiguous drum solo. (It is sometimes played with [...]

Composer, saxophonist, and educator Demetrius Spaneas has been a featured soloist and composer at major concert venues and international festivals in the U.S., Eastern Europe, and Asia. He was formerly Composer-In-Residence for both the New York City Con Edison and the Bay Area Chamber Symphony Orchestra in San Francisco, California.