A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer/vocalist/sound artist who is currently a Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor Chair in Music. Ensembles and performers who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Wendy Richman, Greg Oakes, BMOP, Alarm Will Sound, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, Other Minds, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival. Ken’s piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. In 2012, he was a featured artist on Other Minds 17. In 2014, Frances-Mairie Uitti and the Boston Modern Orchestra premiered his concerto for two-bow cello and orchestra, and Guerilla Opera premiered a run of his chamber opera, Gallo, to critical acclaim. He has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in New York and Boston, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and with orchestras in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and California. Ken holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. A monograph CD of three orchestral concertos was released on the Bmop/sound label. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

Dr. Benjamin Robinette attained the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Saxophone Performance from Texas Tech University (TTU) in May 2013, where he served as the studio teaching assistant and in-house arranger to Professor David Dees. His studies and mentorship under Dr. Christopher Smith and Dr. Angela Mariani also garnered him a certificate in Early Music Performance Practice from TTU. He holds the Bachelor of Music degree in Saxophone Performance from The University of Tennessee in Knoxville (UTK) where he studied with Dr. Connie Frigo, and the Master of Music degree in Saxophone Performance from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), where he served as the studio teaching assistant to Professor Taimur Sullivan.

At UTK he won the university’s concerto competition twice, received the School of Music's award for woodwind performance excellence three times in a row, was awarded several outside performance scholarships, and had a soprano saxophone concerto written for him by David Pegel. At UNCSA, Robinette won the School of Music's concerto competition as well as the UNC-based Rosen-Schaffel Competition, which resulted in a performance of Alexander Glazunov's celebrated Concerto in E-flat with the Eastern Music Festival Orchestra under the direction of Gerard Schwarz. Robinette also collaborated at this time with composer Duncan Youngerman on two newly-commissioned saxophone works: Stillicidium and Déjà.

Recently at TTU Robinette performed several successful conceptual recitals. A retrospective of Duncan Youngerman's saxophone works resulted in the world premieres of two complete cycles of his compositions: the Splash cycle (previously known as Stan the Man) and the F.M. Air cycle of unaccompanied soprano saxophone works. Robinette’s saxophone octet arrangement of György Ligeti's Hungarian Rock also inspired an all-saxophone arrangement of Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra for over 70 university and independent saxophonists from Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. 

In addition to the saxophone, Robinette is still actively involved in both the World Music and Early Music programs at TTU. Getting involved in vernacular music led Robinette to rekindle his interest in dance as well, joining the Tech Irish Set Dancers and participating most recently as a dancer and singer in the 2012 production Dancing at the Crossroads.

Due to a long-standing love of the Zimbabwean thumb piano styles of the mbira dzaVadzimu and the matepe (both of which he taught himself how to play), he founded and is currently leading the TTU Mbira Group, the first academic ensemble of its kind in the state of Texas—earning him the TTU Vernacular Music Center's annual scholarship. Outside of his academic activities, Robinette has also recorded a matepe DVD (the first of its kind!) entitled “Matepe Spirit” with his teacher Joel Laviolette.

His interest and pursuit of Early Music as a bass vocalist and as a researcher has encouraged Robinette to ponder fundamental questions about the nature of historically-inspired performance, leading to the creation of his latest project: Quartet Exordium. A saxophone quartet only in instrumentation, they explore repertoire of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in order to deliver performances of early music that excite modern audiences and challenge conceptions of how modern instruments can effectively transmit the music of the distant past. Their initial series of concerts involved the subtle but complex music of the Ars nova and Ars subtilior from the late 14th and early 15th centuries, culminating in their appearance as featured guests of the TTU Early Music Ensemble in January 2013. In March 2013 on Easter Sunday they recorded a compact disc featuring a liturgically accurate four-saxophone adaptation of Renaissance composer Johannes Ockeghem's Missa Prolationum. Additionally, this recording supplements Robinette's doctoral thesis entitled “Interlocutio: A Process for Performing Renaissance Vocal Polyphony on Saxophones.” 

Robinette currently lives and works in Lubbock, Texas with his fiancée Melody and their two cats Loki and Belle. During his downtime he enjoys singing complicated Medieval and Renaissance music (as well as not-so-complicated catches and glees), trying new restaurants and coffee shops, baking desserts, reading science fiction and magical realism novels, and adventuring across the country.

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