2009 Participants
Daniel Abrams
Mark Applebaum
Jonathan Berger
Aaron Lee Berkowitz
Moy Eng
Gregory T. Lombardo
Vinod Menon
Ingrid Monson
Bill Murphy
Josh Roseman and the Water Surgeons
Keith Sawyer
Carol Wincenc
Daniel Abrams, Stanford University
bio coming soon
Mark Applebaum is Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in composition from the University of California at San Diego where he studied principally with Brian Ferneyhough. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia with notable premieres at the Darmstadt summer sessions. He has received commissions from Betty Freeman, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Fromm Foundation, the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Vienna Modern Festival, Antwerp’s Champ D’Action, Festival ADEvantgarde in Munich, Zeitgeist, MANUFACTURE (Tokyo), the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Jerome Foundation, and the American Composers Forum, among others. His music can be heard on recordings on the Innova, Tzadik, Capstone, and SEAMUS labels.
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The Billie Bennett Achilles Professor in Music, & The William R. and Gretchen B. Kimball University Fellow in Undergraduate Education Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa)
Jonathan Berger has composed symphonic works, three concerti, works for all varieties of chamber ensemble, vocal, choral and electroacoustic works. Among his awards and commissions are three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, prizes from ASCAP, commissions from WDR, and prizes from the Bourges Festival. His works are available on Sony, Neuma, CRI and Harmonia Mundi labels. His current commissions include Tears in Your Hand for piano trio, a violin concerto and his fourth string quartet. Berger's most recent CD, Miracles and Mud was released by Naxos Records on their American Masters series in Spring 2007.
In addition to composition Berger is an active researcher with over 60 publications in a wide range of fields relating to music, science and technology.
Berger is Professor of Music at Stanford and Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SiCa) and the University's arts initiative.
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Aaron Berkowitz is currently completing his M.D. at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and his Ph.D. in music at Harvard University, where he is the recipient of a Presidential Fellowship. After completing a B.A. in music and a B.S. in biology from George Washington University, he spent a year in Paris, France studying piano and composition and teaching English before entering graduate school. His dissertation research examines cognition in improvisation from the perspectives of neuroscience, psychology, ethnomusicology, and historical musicology, drawing on functional brain imaging (fMRI), interviews with improvisers, study of historical treatises on improvisation, and analysis of improvised performances. The fMRI component of this research was funded by a Harvard Mind/Brain/Behavior Interdisciplinary Research Award and conducted in collaboration with Daniel Ansari of the University of Western Ontario. The results were recently published in the journal NeuroImage, and received the journal’s Editors Choice Award in Systems Neuroscience in 2008. Berkowitz has presented his research at Harvard University, M.I.T, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and at the “Music and Language as Cognitive Systems” Conference at Cambridge University in Cambridge, England.
As a pianist and fortepianist, Berkowitz has played concerts on modern instruments as well as on original and replica instruments spanning the 18th and 19th centuries in solo and chamber music recitals in Baltimore, Bruges, Cambridge, Ithaca, Paris, Philadelphia, New Haven, New York, Williamstown, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Berkowitz’s compositions have been performed in locations such as Carnegie Hall in New York, The BKA Theater in Berlin, The Zeitgeist Gallery in Inman Square, Haverford College, University of the Arts, Harvard University, The Cello Seminar in Salem, NY, and the Bartók Festival in Szómbathely, Hungary by artists including France-Marie Uitti, Jonathan Fisher, and Matthew Bengtson and ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound, Trio Ascolto, White Rabbit, and The Callithumpian Consort.
In 2007, Berkowitz held a visiting joint appointment in the departments of music and psychology at Tufts University, where he taught a course in the psychology of music. In 2009, he collaborated with neurologist Sebastian Espinosa of the Centro Internacional en Neurociencias in Ecuador to assist in organizing a group of U.S. neurologists who spent a week providing neurological consultations and educational workshops for patients in a rural area of Ecuador with no access to neurological care.
A cultural bureaucrat by day, Moy Eng is a jazz and classical singer during nights and weekends. She studied piano and classical voice as a child. After a long hiatus, Moy began singing and learning the American Songbook during her three-hour commute on New York City’s West Side Highway. Over the past year, Moy has performed in intimate and larger venues on the Peninsula, in San Francisco and New York. Inspired by the 1970’s duet albums by Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass, she and guitarist Bill Murphy are working on their first recording, scheduled for release later this year.
bio coming soon.
Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences & Program in Neuroscience & Neuroscience Institute at Stanford
Dr. Menon is the author of 77 publications, and the recipient of many academic awards. His research interests include Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive development, Psychiatric neuroscience, Functional brain imaging, Dynamical basis of brain function, and Nonlinear dynamics of neural systems.
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Ingrid Monson, Harvard University
Ingrid Monson is the Quincy Jones Professor of African American music at Harvard University and holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Music and African and African American Studies. She is former chair of the Music Department and was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow of Harvard University in 2008. Monson is the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2007), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and an edited a volume entitled the African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (Garland/Routledge 2000). Her most recent article, “Hearing, Seeing, and Perceptual Agency” (Critical Inquiry 2008) explores the implications of recent work on cognition and perception for perception for poststructural theoretical issues in the humanities. She is currently working on a book about Malian balafonist Neba Solo. Her articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Critical Inquiry, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Black Music Research Journal, Women and Music, and several edited volumes. She began her career as a trumpet player and has recently been studying contemporary Senufo balafon.
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Bill Murphy works as a finance manager during the day. Nights and weekends he plays jazz guitar and acoustic bass, studies journalism at San Francisco State, and dinks around with public affairs and as a DJ at KFJC-FM at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills. His first band, at age 11, was called "The Uncalled Four," specializing in Paul Revere and the Raiders tunes. His biggest musical influence is "Does Humor Belong in Music?" - a live concert video of the Frank Zappa band performing a lively set outdoors at night on a hot New York evening.
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Josh Roseman and the Water Surgeons
Is a multitasking chamber choir bound by a live wire and many a yard of hammered brass.
The ensemble features improvisors Curtis “Curha” Hasselbring and Jacob Garchik, along with pianist and circuit blender, Barney McAll of Groove Collective, Kurt Rosenwinkel fame. They are all very professional and virtuosic. The founder is one Josh Roseman, noted brass custodian in his own right.
Surgeons repertoire ranges from Pentecostal “shout band” pieces to lush "original chance operations" along with choir pieces adapted from Chopin, Boz Scaggs and Schoenberg.
The sounds are constructed using traditional sliphorns, amplified accordions, ad-hoc electronic appliances, electric basses and one dub guitar. The band is entirely underwater in that they go boldly where they have never been, they are difficult to breathe, and they wrinkle with ease.
www.myspace.com/watersurgeons
www.58northsix.com
www.joshroseman.com
www.curha.com
www.jacobgarchik.com
www.barneymcall.com
Keith Sawyer, Washington University
Dr. R. Keith Sawyer, a professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis, is one of the counry's leading scientific experts on creativity.
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Carol Wincenc was First Prize Winner of the Walter W. Naumburg Solo Flute Competition. She has appeared as a soloist with such ensembles as the Chicago, Saint Louis, Atlanta and London Symphonies; the BBC and Buffalo Philharmonics, the Saint Paul and Stuttgart Chamber Orchestras, and the New York Woodwind Quintet. She has performed in the Mostly Mozart Festival and the music festivals in Aldeburgh, Budapest, Frankfurt, Santa Fe, Spoleto and Marlboro. Ms. Wincenc has premiered numerous works written for her by many of today's most prominent composers, including Christopher Rouse, Henryk Gorecki, Lukas Foss, Peter Schickele, Joan Tower and Tobias Picker. She has recorded for Nonesuch, London/Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, and Telarc. As a result of her fascination with the flute family, Ms. Wincenc created and directed a series of International Flute Festivals in St. Paul, Minn, feturing such diverse artists as Jean-Pierre Rampal, Herbie Mann and the American Indian flutist R. Carlos Nakai. Carl Fischer is publishing a series of Carol Wincenc Signature Editions, featuring her favorite flute repertoire. In addition to teaching at Stony Brook, Ms. Wincenc has also taught at the Juilliard School.
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