New York City-based, JUNO-nominated composer Haralabos [Harry] Stafylakis (b. 1982) hails from Montreal, Canada. "Dreamy yet rhythmic" (NY Times), with a “terrible luminosity” and “ferociously expressive” (Times Colonist), his concert music is “an amalgamation of the classical music tradition and the soul and grime of heavy metal” (I Care If You Listen). With an intimate background in progressive metal and traditional Greek music, Stafylakis has developed a unique conception of musical temporality and rhythm, infusing his compositions with a propulsive vitality that “favors doomsday chords and jackhammer rhythms” (The New Yorker).

Since 2016, Stafylakis is the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra's Composer-In-Residence and Co-Curator of the WSO's Winnipeg New Music Festival. His works have been performed by orchestras including the Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Ottawa, Regina, Québec, Victoria, PEI, Spokane, Stamford, Longueuil, FSU, and Greek Youth Symphony Orchestras, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Orchestre Classique de Montréal, and Israel Chamber Orchestra. 

He has collaborated with artists and ensembles including Animals As Leaders, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Roomful of Teeth, JACK Quartet, Bent Knee, Decoda Ensemble, ShoutHouse, Raphael Weinroth-Browne, Contemporaneous, Vicky Chow, Hard Rubber Orchestra, Alexandre Da Costa, and Philippe Sly, among others. 

His works have been featured at venues and festivals around the world, including Carnegie Hall and the NY Philharmonic Biennial. In 2018–19 he collaborated with progressive metal pioneers Animals As Leaders on the symphonic adaptation of their music for metal band & orchestra, and in 2020–21 collaborated with Courtney Swain and members of Bent Knee and ShoutHouse on the prog metal & chamber music fusion dontwaitforme. Hard Rubber Orchestra’s 2022 album Iguana earned Stafylakis a JUNO nomination for his metal–big band fusion composition Source Code, featuring the composer on guitars.

Recent recordings featuring his music include albums by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra & Miguel Harth-Bedoya (Naxos), Jenny Lin (Sono Luminus), the Cicchillitti-Cowan Duo (Analekta), Patrick Kearney (Contrastes), and the Hard Rubber Orchestra (Redshift).

His music has been recognized with the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP’s Leonard Bernstein Award, SOCAN’s Classical Composer of the Year Award, four SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers, and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, FACTOR, SSHRC, and New Music USA. He serves on the board of directors of GroundSwell (Winnipeg), is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre, and a founding member of the NYC composer collective ICEBERG New Music.

Stafylakis holds degrees from McGill University and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He lectures at the City College of New York (CUNY) and Purchase College Conservatory of Music (SUNY), and is a guest lecturer at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY. His research examines the conception of rhythm and meter in progressive metal.

www.hstafylakis.com


current as of Apr. 9, 2023

Berlin-based British composer
www.rebeccasaunders.net

Pianist. Composer. Conductor. Musicker.

www.cutza.xyz

https://jessmaysmusic.com/

Jessica Mays is a composer, pianist and songwriter based in New York City and her hometown of Denver, Colorado. Her music pulls inspiration from the worlds of jazz, pop, contemporary classical and avant-garde, evoking a blended sound that is both visceral and distantly familiar. 

Mays’s music has been performed both locally and abroad, by a wide variety of soloists, ensembles and orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, the Playground Ensemble, Ensemble Paramirabo, Ensemble Lunatik, Blackbox Ensemble, Thin Edge New Music Collective, The Labo de musique contemporaine de Montréal and many others. She has been featured by a variety of festivals as composer and performer including the Chelsea Music Festival, Loon Lake Live, and the Cluster Music Festival. She has also written arrangements for both large and small forces on a variety of projects with the Colorado Symphony. Her music has received praise from such major publications as the Boston Globe and the Boston Musical Intelligencer.

Christina Volpini is a composer whose music has been described as “focused intently on the subtle sounds that fall between the cracks” (Ludwig Van Toronto) and “very nuanced, rustling and whispering” (Neomemoire). Informed by the ephemerality and spontaneity of natural sonic environments, her work explores gradual unfolding through time, found objects, sonic spatialization, instrumental textures and liminal spaces. Her music develops through collaborative creative processes with pieces crafted for specific spaces and performers. 

Christina has been commissioned by Esprit Orchestra, Array Ensemble, Continuum Contemporary Music, Caution Tape Music Collective, and Duo AIRS with performances in Toronto, Montréal, Ottawa, Vancouver, Edmonton, New York and throughout the U.S. east coast. She has collaborated with artists including Jumblies Theatre, Echéa Quartet, guitarist Rob MacDonald and Ensemble Bakarlari, among others. Her work has been featured by organizations including the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Soundstreams and The Music Gallery, and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Zihan Wu is a composer and concert pianist from China, currently based in Cologne, Germany. www.zihanwumusic.com

Anahita Abbasi’s music (Iranian-born/world citizen) has been described as “a dizzyingly sophisticated reverie, colorful and energetic. It embodies tremendous timbral exploration and multilayered performance gestures”… (Classical Voice America and A Cunning plan). 

According to Guardian …”She takes even a more radical line with creating dense and pulsing textures”… “Her music has the capacity to immerse the hall into a dark multichannel throat and hissing” … (Bachtrack) 

Volkskrant describes … “the Iranian Anahita Abbasi, shows herself to be a composer with guts in the two-year-old Intertwined Distances Alienating whistling noises and furious fistfights with the keyboard, alternated with delicate strings, lead to a theatrical listening experience” …

Ernst. M Binder also writes: …“As it is also vivid from the titles of her works such as Dialogues, Situations, Distorted Attitudes, she investigates and gesticulate thoughts and emotions. It is manifestation/ observation of a scene or multiple scenes, which occur simultaneously. She has the tendency to take us with her music on a mystical, puzzling journey and leave us within our thoughts, to find out the “ending” ourselves”… 

About her piece for Mahan Esfahani Boulezian Blogspot writes: …” There was, without doubt, an extraordinarily inventive musical imagination at work, but it was never merely invention: it was a sonic and instrumental drama that seemed somehow to summarise, to extend, and quite properly to question many of the tendencies we had heard so far”…

Anahita Abbasi’s works explore the "organic physicality of sound" (Sound Barrier). Each of her works grows out of a fascination with a specific sound and its distinctive tonal color.  

Abbasi’s music has been commissioned and performed worldwide by renowned musicians, including Mahan Esfahani, Steven Schick, Ilan Volkov, Vimbayi Kaziboni, Jack Adler, Sergej Tchirkov, Ensemble Modern, International Contemporary Ensemble, Meitar Ensemble, Der gelbe Klang, Radio France, EBU, Zaafran Ensemble, Contrechamps, Contemporary Chamber Orchestra Elbe, Broken Frames Syndicate, Kommas Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, Seattle Modern Orchestra, Ume Duo, Long Beach Opera, Quatuor Diotima, Mivos Quartet, Argonaut Quartet, Thin Edge, neuverBand, Omnibus Ensemble, Schallfeld Ensemble, and others. 
 
Her works have been featured internationally at festivals such as Darmstädter Musiktage, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Acht Brücken Festival, Radialsystem, Beethovenfest Bonn, Podium Esslingen, Tritonus Festival, Elbphilharmonie (Germany), IRCAM - Manifeste Academy, Présences Festival, Festival Ensemble  (France), Time of Music (Finland), BIFEM (Australia), Klangspuren Schwaz, Impuls Festival (Austria)  Sound State Festival (Southbank Centre, London), Tectonics (Glasgow),Klang Festival (Copenhagen), Contempuls (Prague), Tongyeong International Music Festival (Korea), Musica Polonica Nova (Poland), Atlas Festival, Grachten Festival (Netherlands), Borealis Festival (Norway), Festival Archipel (Geneva), Gaia (Tel Aviv), Mostly Mozart Festival, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, The Kitchen, Roulette, National Sawdust, Time Spans (USA), and many others. 

Ms. Abbasi has received numerous awards, including a work-scholarship from the Experimental studio of SWR, Freiburg (2014), a Morton Gould ASCAP Young Composers Award (2015), a nomination for "Composers of Our Time" (2017), the Composition Prize of the Acht Brücken Festival (2020), the German Record Critics’ Prize 2020 (Mahan Esfahani’s album MUSIQUE?), and the New Music USA creator’s fund award (2025). In 2022, she was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy, a Ucross Foundation Residency in Wyoming, and a three-year residency at the Fondation Singer-Polignac in Paris. She is also one of the recipients of the 2024 Music Prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, recognized by Georges Aperghis. In 2025 she received the New Music USA’s creator's fund for her project “Thawing Tides”.  

In addition to being a founding member of the Schallfeld Ensemble (Austria, 2013), she is also a founding member of the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA, USA, 2017). Anahita Abbasi studied composition with Beat Furrer and Pierluigi Billone at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG) in Austria and worked closely with Georges Aperghis, Franck Bedrossian, and Philippe Leroux. In 2014, she moved to the USA to pursue a PhD in composition with Rand Steiger at UC San Diego. 

Currently, Anahita Abbasi lives in Flensburg, and Paris, where she holds a three-year residency at the Fondation Singer-Polignac (Paris, France). Her recent projects include commissioned works for Ensemble Modern and Jack Adler, both premiered at the Darmstädter Musiktage in 2023.  Her upcoming projects include a commission for solo percussion (USA) as well as a commission from Radio France for an ensemble piece for Philharmonie de Radio France for the opening night of Présences Festival (2026).

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