Victoria Aschheim is a lecturer in music at Dartmouth College. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and co-directed Dartmouth's 2022 New Music Festival. Victoria studies contemporary music and its relations to civic life. Her writing has appeared in Staging History: 1780-1840 (Bodleian Library, 2016) and in MLA Notes, American Music, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and is forthcoming in Exploring the Performance Practices of Early and New Music (Routledge). She received a PhD in musicology from Princeton University with a certificate in the Program in Media and Modernity.
Robert Barry is a freelance writer and musician, based in London. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Wire and Frieze. He has lectured at the Darmstadt Summer School, Zagreb Academy of Music, and St. Martins College of Art. As a composer/performer, he has worked with sculptors, choreographers, film-makers, installation artists, and once got to number two in the Japanese pop charts. His most recent book, part of Bloomsbury Publishing's Object Lessons series, is called Compact Disc (2020).
Sebastian Black is a British/New Zealand composer who was born in 1996 in Colchester, UK. He studied composition at King's College London with Sir George Benjamin, and at the University of Oxford. His music has been commissioned by Aldeburgh Music, the BBC, Mahler Foundation for Het Concertgebouw's Mahler Festival, Cambridge University and New Music North West. He runs the festival SmorgasChord, and is also active as a pianist. Recent performances and commissions have been for CEME Festival in Tel Aviv, Orchestra Wellington (New Zealand), Smorgas Chord, Mahler Foundation for Het Concertgebouw's Mahler Festival in Amsterdam, and Lontano Ensemble. sebblack.co.uk.
Philipp Blume studied composition at University of California, Berkeley and at the Musikhochschule Freiburg (under Mathias Spahlinger). From 2005-2013 he taught the entire music theory curriculum at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He took a hiatus from composition after leaving academia to train as a web developer. Recently he has begun work on a monodrama based on Yiannis Ritsos' poem ‘Beneath the Shadow of the Mountain’. By day he works on the Wolfram Alpha web client.
Composer Christian Carey is Associate Professor of Music at Rider University, where he teaches in the Music Composition, History, and Theory Department of Westminster Choir College. He has composed eighty works and his research has been published in TEMPO, Perspectives of New Music, The Open Space and Intégral. His chapter on narrativity in Elliott Carter is published in a proceedings by Editions Delatour.
Ian Colverson (1940-2022) was a visual artist and educator. Born in London he graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1962, going on to work in Rome and then Paris, where he studied printmaking with Stanley William Hayter. From 1969 until 2005 he directed the printmaking department at Bradford School of Art; he also taught summer courses at UCLA. The works published in this issue of TEMPO all originate in a series of collaborative projects he undertook with Christopher Fox between 1989 and 1994.
Ed Cooper is a composer and musicologist completing a PhD at the University of Leeds, UK, supervised by Scott McLaughlin and Martin Iddon; this is fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, through the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH). His practice considers the listening body as an intermediary, simultaneously acting as both a boundary and transmitter to itself, exploring various musical liminalities. As such, his work is often very quiet and fragmentary.
Christopher Fox is a composer who also writes about music. He is Emeritus Professor of Music at Brunel University London, Honorary Professor of Music at the University of York and a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Since 2015 he has been editor of TEMPO. His most recent album, Hieroglyphs, was released on the Hat Hut label in March 2021.
Nathan Friedman is a composer, performer, and scholar from British Columbia, Canada, based in Toronto. He has degrees in composition from Wesleyan University and the University of Victoria, where he studied with Paula Matthusen, Anthony Braxton, John Celona, and Wolf Edwards. He has been an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre since 2016 and is currently pursuing an MA in musicology at the University of Toronto.
Roger Heaton is Emeritus Professor of Music at Bath Spa University. He performs with groups such as the Kreutzer Quartet and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble and was Music Director of Rambert Dance Company and Clarinet Professor at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik during the 1990s. Recent recordings include works by Trandafilovski, Radulescu and Boulez. He has contributed to the Cambridge History of Musical Performance and a chapter on Bryars music for dance is forthcoming.
Alex Huddleston is a composer, graphic designer, and artist currently living in Buffalo, New York. His music occupies a liminal space in which serendipitous relationships emerge and collapse in a play of familiarity and otherness. Centered on themes of alienation, sorrow, anxiety, schizophrenia, and fear, his work embodies a singular affect - there is too much and too little, it is too fast and too slow, it is elegant and awkward, it makes too much sense and makes no sense.
Ed Hughes studied composition at Cambridge University with Robin Holloway and Alexander Goehr, and later completed a PhD in composition at Southampton, supervised by Michael Finnissy. Commissions have included The Opera Group, Glyndebourne Education, I Fagiolini, Mahogany Opera Group, and, for the Brighton Festival, Cuckmere (2018), Symphony of a City (2016), Battleship Potemkin (2005). Recordings for Metier include Time, Space and Change and Music for the South Downs, with further recordings for NMC and BBC Radio 3. He won a British Composer Award for his organ composition, Chaconne for Jonathan Harvey (2013). He is Professor of Composition at University of Sussex.
Claire Jackson is a writer and editor. She is a regular reviewer for BBC Music magazine and has a classical music column in the Big Issue. Her features appear in newsstand publications including Country Life and Pianist, industry titles like Music Teacher and International Arts Manager, and supplements such as Clarinet and Saxophone Society's quarterly instalment. She covers opera for Opera Now, Opera and the Daily Telegraph.
Andrew Kurowski joined the BBC in 1979 and became a producer with Radio 3 in 1982. He was appointed Editor of New Music in 1991 with responsibility for all aspects of contemporary music output, including the commissioning of new work and sitting on panels with partner organisations, such as the ISCM, RPS, BASCA, PRSF and Sound and Music, to help further the exposure of new music to as diverse an audience as possible. He left the BBC in 2013 and continues to work with contemporary music organisations, encouraging and promoting new work.
Thomas R. Moore (1980) studied music performance at Indiana University (1998-2002) and the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp (2004-2007). He is currently the trombonist and conductor of Nadar Ensemble as well as head of the brass department and lecturer of artistic research at the Royal Conservatoire of Antwerp. www.thomasrmoore.co.uk.
Caroline Potter is a writer and lecturer who specialises in French music. A Visiting Fellow of the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, she has published books on Satie, the Boulanger sisters, and Dutilleux. She is a frequent broadcaster and was Series Advisor to the Philharmonia Orchestra's ‘City of Light: Paris 1900-1950' season. Her latest book, Erik Satie, a Parisian composer and his world (Boydell Press, 2016), was named Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the Year.
Carla Rees is a performer (low flutes, Kingma system and baroque flutes), arranger and composer. Her career focusses on collaboration and developing the dialogue between composer, performer and flute maker in order to extend and enhance the repertoire. She has premiered several hundred works in the UK and internationally. She is Professor of Low Flutes and Contemporary Flute at the Royal Academy of Music, runs an innovative distance-learning music degree programme at the Open College of Arts, and teaches the flute at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her works are published by Tetractys Publishing. www.carlarees.co.uk.
Xia-Leon Sloane completed a Masters in Composition and Musicology at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2022. Their music responds to the beauty and fragility of the living earth and embodies aspects of queer and autistic identity and experience. Their academic work explored ethical listening as a pathway to sonic symbiosis, and a way of uncovering and granting the rights of sounds and sound sources. Xia-Leon hopes to expand ethical listening into therapeutic work, particularly the healing of trauma.
Neil Thomas Smith is a composer and musicologist. He works as a Teaching Associate at the University of Nottingham, where he recently completed his PhD on German composer Mathias Spahlinger.
Adam Stephenson is a freelance Creative Technologist and Games Programmer with a focus on interactive, immersive experiences through the lens of traditional games interaction design. His specialty is in 3D development using the Unity game engine to create Augmented and Virtual Reality experiences, as well as traditional apps and games.
Craig Vear is Research Professor at De Montfort University where he is a director of the Creative AI and Robotics Lab in the Institute of Creative Technologies. He has been engaged in practice-based research with emerging technologies for nearly three decades, and was editor for The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research, published in 2022. His recent monograph The Digital Score: Creativity, Musicianship and Innovation, was published by Routledge in 2019, and he is Series Editor of Springer's Cultural Computing Series. In 2021 he was awarded a €2Million ERC Consolidator Grant to continue to develop his Digital Score research.
J. Zhu is a composer, artist, and carillonneur. She is the recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for her interdisciplinary work, visual and aural, that has since been exhibited and performed internationally. Zhu studied at Yale University (mathematics), the Royal Carillon School, Hunter College (MFA art), and is currently pursuing a DMA in composition at Stanford University.
