:: PAIRINGS

Alex Mincek is a New York-based composer and performer. His music is typically characterized by elements of timbral and dynamic extremes and also explores ways in which various forms of repetition affect our sense of time, memory and perception of difference. Mincek’s music has been programmed by major music festivals such as the Royaumont Voix Nouvelles and Musiques Demesurees festivals in France, the Darmstadt and Magdeburg music festivals in Germany, the Ostrava New Music Days festival in the Czech Republic and the World Music Institute’s Interpretations series in New York City. Mincek has collaborated with groups including the Ensemble Cairn, the Orchestra of the SEM Ensemble, the Janecek Philharmonic, the Second Instrumental Unit, Red Light, TACTUS, the Vega String Quartet, Zs and the Scarborough Trio. Mincek’s music has also been recognized through commissions and grants from the New Mendelssohn Chamber Orchestra Leipzig, Ensemble XXI, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, MATA, Meet The Composer, National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, Due East, and Present Music.

Adam Mirza is based in New York. Since 2004, he has directed the new music organization, Amp, which presents a few specialized concerts each year (such as this season's Mikrophonie I and last year's feature of the acousmatic music of Jonty Harrison). In 2008, Mirza was a co-organizer with Michael Ibrahim of the HiFi New Music Festival. The Festival presented 14 ensembles at 5 NYC venues around NYC, a concert (or more) almost every night for two weeks. As a graduate student at NYU he researches contemporary aesthetics with particular interests in musical embodiment, gesture, improvisation and their intersection with continental philosophy.

Robert Morris, born in Cheltenham, England in 1943, received his musical education at the Eastman School of Music (B.M. in composition with distinction) and the University of Michigan (M.M. and D.M.A. in composition and ethnomusicology). Morris has taught composition, electronic music, and music theory at the University of Hawaii and at Yale University. In 1980 Morris joined the faculty of the Eastman School of Music where he presently teaches as Professor of Composition.

Morris has written music for a wide diversity of musical forms and media. He has composed over 160 works including computer and improvisational music. Much of his output from the 1970s is influenced by non-Western music and uses structural principles from Arabic, Indian, Indonesian, Japanese, and early Western musics. While such influences are less noticeable in his more recent works, the temporal and ornamental qualities of Eastern music have permanently affected Morris's style. Moreover, Morris has found much resonance among his musical aesthetics, his experiences in hiking (especially in the Southwestern United States), his study and appreciation of Carnatic Music of South India, and his reading of ancient Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhist texts.

Christopher Otto studied composition at the Eastman School of Music with Martin Bresnick, David Liptak, and Robert Morris. As a violinist, Christopher has premiered many compositions and worked with such composers as Harrison Birtwistle, Pierre Boulez, Helmut Lachenmann, and Steve Reich. Christopher has participated as composer and performer in such contemporary music festivals as the Lucerne Festival Academy, Internationale Musikinstitut Darmstadt, Karlheinz Stockhausen Courses, Institute and Festival for Contemporary Performance at the Mannes College of Music, June in Buffalo, and Festival Internacional de Musica Contemporanea de Michoacan.

Karlheinz Stockhausen is the most bewilderingly provocative composer of the European post-war avant-garde—a genre itself heavily delimited by the wake of his incredible musical imagination. His works display an unfailing faith in unhesitatingly trusting intuition—musical or otherwise—along whatever material path it might construct to any psychic-social situation it may reveal.

In the 50’s and 60’s, his pieces successively reinvented the possibilities of musical language, matter and context, of which his pioneering work with electronic synthesis is perhaps merely the most concrete form. He then turned to a massive 7-part opera cycle Licht: Die sieben Tage der Woche (Light: The Seven Days of the Week), that freely incorporated theater, dance, electronics, and individual, varied forms of classical music into an unbounded artistic attempt at totality. After completing the final opera in 2003, he began a new cycle of mostly instrumental works that was unfinished at his death in 2007.

Scott Wollschleger is a founding member and co-director of Red Light New Music, a non-profit organization dedicated to presenting work of emerging and often unknown composers. Scott Wollschleger is an active member of New York City’s contemporary music scene. His works have been performed at The Stone, Tenri Cultural Institute, Weill Hall, and numerous other important venues throughout the city. As a composer Mr. Wollschleger is concerned with developing new creative practices and perceptions, ones which engender new ways of being a listener or a performer. In 2008 Wollschleger served as composer-in-residence with Ensemble Pamplemouse for their annual Seedlot Project. During his residency he composed Secret Machines no’s 1-4, a series of works exploring the schizophrenic nature of musical creation. Recent notable performances include, New Music Collective, Charleston NC, Hochschule fur Music, "Hanns Eisler," Berlin, and the premiere of Secret Machine no. 5 at the Kennedy Center.