Artists

The music of Mexican-born composer Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon is characterized by its detailed sculpting of musical ideas and "kaleidoscopic" contrapuntal design. Mexican literature has provided the point of departure for many of his compositions, such as Pluck. Pound. Peel., on aphorisms by Raul Aceves, the miniature opera NinoPolilla, on a libretto by Juan Trigos Sr., and the scenic cantata Comala, based on the novel Pedro Paramo, by the noted Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. Comala was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. Other professional honors include the 2011 Lillian Fairchild Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Camargo Foundation, and Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Artes. Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon joined the composition faculty of the Eastman School in 2002.

Dr. James Zingara has performed throughout the United States as well as England, Germany, the Czech Republic, Denmark, China, and Singapore. Currently he serves as Assistant Professor of Trumpet at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where his responsibilities include applied trumpet and brass methods, coaching and conducting brass ensembles, performing with the UAB Faculty Brass Quintet and UAB Chamber Trio, and coordinating the annual Brass Symposium. Former positions include Associate Professor of Trumpet at Troy University, and principal cornet/trumpet soloist with the US Air Force Heritage of America Band. He has held positions with the Northwest Florida Symphony, National Symphonic Winds, Sinfonia da Camera, Illinois Symphony, Virginia Symphony, Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, Pensacola Symphony, and the Cheyenne Symphony. He has recorded on the Telarc, Zephyr, Capstone, and Mark labels, including performing on a Grammy® Award-winning album in 1994.

Michael Wittgraff (b. 1962) is an electronic music composer whose recent work explores live manipulation of feedback, interactive improvisation, and time as data. His music has been performed in North America, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia, and appears on the Eroica, New Ariel Recordings, and SEAMUS labels. He has awards, commissions, and recognition from ASCAP, Modern Chamber Players, National Symphony Orchestra, Tempus Fugit, Louisiana State University, University of Minnesota, University of North Dakota, Florida State University, PiKappa Lambda, Zeitgeist, Chiara String Quartet, Bush Foundation, North Dakota Council on the Arts, and more.

Betty R. Wishart and music are synonymous. Her earliest memories involve singing in church choirs and playing the piano. She was introduced to contemporary music while studying with Richard Bunger at Queens University. At the end of her junior year, she wrote her first composition, submitted it to a music fraternity and was invited to perform a mini-recital of her music at their international conference. That event inspired her to continue composing while earning an M.M. degree in piano performance at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While pursuing further study in piano and composition in New York City, she accepted and won a challenge from a writer to see who could get published first.

Mark Winges was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and currently resides in San Francisco, where he has been resident composer/advisor for the chamber choir Volti since 1990. He was also composer-in-residence for the San Francisco Choral Artists in the 2012–13 season. He is a graduate of both the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and San Francisco State University, and has studied at the Musikhögskolan in Stockholm, Sweden, with composer Arne Mellnäs.

Born in Long Beach CA, Mark Edwards Wilson is a composer of remarkable artistic range and diversity. His earliest influence was undoubtedly his mother, Rosalie Brashears Wilson, a talented pianist, who, as a teenager, was among the last generation to work as an organist for silent film theaters in the Los Angeles area. In a recent interview, Wilson commented on his earliest memories of her playing. “I can remember her thundering away at the family piano. Given a melody, she could improvise on the spot, filling the house with cascades of show arpeggios and runs.” Wilson began his musical training in earnest with violin studies starting at the age of six and he played in various chamber music groups and orchestras throughout his youth and early twenties.

Bill Whitley works with shapes and patterns, correlating musical materials to kinetic sculpture. His music is defined by interlocking, often hypnotic patterns interspersed with passages of intense rhythmic energy, while placing linear content in the foreground.

Frances White writes instrumental, vocal, and electronic music. She studied at the University of Maryland, Brooklyn College, and Princeton University. She has received awards, commissions, grants, and fellowships from organizations such as  The Guggenheim Foundation, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Ditson  Fund, the Mary Flagler Cary Trust, the Copland Fund, Prix Ars Electronica, the International Computer Music Association, Hungarian Radio, ASCAP, the Bang On A Can Festival, the Other Minds Festival, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Dale Warland Singers, the American Music Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Recent works include commissions from the Third Practice Festival for the ensemble eighth blackbird, the Fromm Foundation, the MAP Fund, the Solaris Vocal Ensemble, Commissioning Music USA (formerly Meet the Composer), and The Crossing chamber choir.

Eight Strings & a Whistle has been committed to presenting and expanding the repertoire for the unique combination of flute, viola, and cello since 1998. A cutting-edge presence, the Trio champions Baroque, Classical, and Romantic repertoire  and collaborates regularly with a wide roster of living composers, premiering and performing their pieces throughout the concert season.

Hope Wechkin is best known for her simultaneous and virtuosic pairing of voice and violin that innovatively combines elements of folk, classical and world music. She is also known as a soprano soloist and interpreter of contemporary music for the voice. She performed her one-woman show "Charisma," featuring her unique compositions and arrangements, to sold-out audiences in an extended run at Seattle's ACT Theater. She was a founding member of the quartet Sorelle, specializing in 20th- and 21st-century music for piano, cello, flute and voice, and has appeared as soprano soloist with numerous Northwest-area musical ensembles. Hope is also a physician specializing in palliative medicine and lives in Seattle with her husband and son.

Stuart Weber's passion for the guitar was ignited early on when at age 12 when a cousin loaned him a flood-ravaged folk guitar. Undaunted by its poor condition, Weber began a ravenous period of self-study, which carried him through his teenage years and beyond.

He shared a birthday with composers Benjamin Britten and Joaquín Rodrigo. He died the same day as Andrés Segovia. Hailed as “one of our age’s truly important composers,” Frank Wallace was a rare artist whose wizardry on his instrument rivaled the range and depth of his musical ideas in composition. He left us at 67 at the height of his powers, having enjoyed a distinguished career as a concert and recording artist, composer, director, and teacher. The American Record Guide calls Wallace’s music “exciting, unpredictable, and fresh” and Guitar Review “a brilliant collection of new repertoire performed by its composer, who happens to play with equal amounts of grace, sensitivity, and virtuosity.”  His colleagues speak with one voice—guitarist Bill Kanengiser: “What a shining and big-hearted spirit, imbued with laughter, love and boundless creativity. [His] grace and artistry are an inspiration to us all.”—composer Stephen Goss: “a wonderful human, a deep thinker and a fantastic musician…Inventiveness, creativity, and fantasy in abundance.”

Ken Walicki is an American composer who is widely recognized and acknowledged for his dramatic, and engaging music.

Because of his unusual and interesting background, his sound world has evolved into a unique combination of Art, Pop, Jazz, and World music. Walicki was one of the first composers to use turntables in his music and the first composer to have turntables as a regular instrument in a standing ensemble.

An engaging and accomplished clarinetist, Andrea Vos-Rochefort regularly premieres new works in recitals and at Clarinetfest, and has performed with the Dayton Philharmonic, Orchestra Kentucky, Richmond Symphony, Lima Orchestra, Carmel Symphony, Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, West Virginia Symphony, Fort Worth Symphony, Corpus Christi Symphony, Midland-Odessa Symphony, and San Antonio Symphony. Vos-Rochefort is the Assistant Professor of Clarinet at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and previously served as Adjunct Instructor of Clarinet at University of Dayton and Stivers School for the Arts.

William Vollinger is predominantly a composer of vocal music, spoken and/or sung, performed by groups such as the Gregg Smith Singers and New York Vocal Arts Ensemble, whose performance of Three Songs About the Resurrection won first prize at the Geneva International Competition. The instrumental work The Violinist in the Mall won the 2005 Friends and Enemies of New Music competition. Sound Portraits is a collection of his vocal works featuring soprano Linda Ferraira recorded by Capstone-Ravello. Raspberry Man was selected for both the 2009 National SCI Conference in Santa Fe NM and the University of Nebraska 2009 New Music Festival.

Mark Vigil (b. 1954) was born in Spokane WA in October of 1954. In 1981, Vigil received a Bachelor of Music degree in composition and piano performance from the Cornish Institute of the Allied Arts. Cornish is located in Seattle Washington. At Cornish, Vigil studied composition with Janice Giteck and piano performance with Corri Celli. In 1996, Vigil received his Master of Music degree in composition from the University of Oregon School of Music. The University of Oregon School of Music is located in EugeneOR, a very cosmopolitan city. From 1991-1996 Vigil studied composition with Robert Kyr and Hal Owen. At present he studies composition with Tomas Svoboda. Vigil has been his student for ten years. He currently makes his home in Eugene Oregon.

The members of Trio Verlaine are drawn together by friendship and a strong desire to further this unusual instrumental combination first dreamt of by Debussy. Each player has distinguished themselves in their respective field. David Harding is Professor of Viola and Chamber Music at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. He has an extensive solo and chamber music career, having performed in such venues as the chamber music halls of Berlin Philharmonie and Concertgebouw, and Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall. In addition to Trio Verlaine, David is also member of Philip Glass' chamber ensemble, the "Days and Nights Festival Players" with whom he has made several recordings.

Michael J. Veloso (b. 1977) was born in Brooklyn, NY. He earned his B.A. in Music in 1998 from Williams College, where he studied composition with Lewis Spratlan, Robert Suderburg, Karl Korte, and David Kechley. After graduating Cum Laude and with Highest Honors in Music, he continued his education at New England Conservatory, earning an M.M. in 2001 and Graduate Diploma in 2002 while studying composition with Michael Gandolfi and piano with Douglas Buys. Michael has written dozens of works for a wide range of musical forces. He has composed music for Joshua Lawton, David Stansbury, Sharon Hsin-Yi Chen, Fireworks, New Century Voices, and Roseae Feminae, and has received commissions from the NOW Ensemble and the Arlington-Belmont Chamber Chorus.

With his unique blending of musical styles, cellist Caleb Vaughn-Jones’s playing style has been described by The Baltimore Sun as an “exploratory grasp of the cello with an anything-but-classical approach to the classical repertoire.”

Born in Charleston SC, Vaughn-Jones had his first exposure to classical music by attending performances by the Charleston Symphony Orchestra.

During his teens, he was inspired by a wide range of musical styles. However, he grew increasingly interested in jazz and classical music during this time.

Composer and Sound Artist Kyle Vanderburg (b. 1986) grew up in southeast Missouri where the Ozark foothills meet the Mississippi River valley. Raised on southern gospel and American hymnody, his music walks the line between eliciting nostalgia and devising innovative sonic worlds. His electronic works often play with familiar sounds in new contexts (like a teakettle that turns into a thunderstorm, or duct tape that brings about the apocalypse); his acoustic works feature memorable melodies and a very fluid sense of time.