Venezuelan cellist Horacio Contreras has gained esteem through a multifaceted career as a concert cellist, chamber musician, pedagogue, and researcher. He has collaborated with prestigious institutions across the Americas and Europe as a concerto soloist, a recitalist, a chamber musician, and a master class clinician.
Highlights of his career include solo performances with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra and the Municipal Orchestra of Caracas in Venezuela, the EAFIT University Orchestra in Colombia, the Camerata de France in France, and the Lawrence Symphony Orchestra and the Music Institute of Chicago’s Chamber Orchestra in the US; chamber collaborations with members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and members of the Detroit and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras and the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin; and master classes at Bloomington, Juilliard, Michigan, Oberlin and the ASTA National Convention, as well as at many renowned programs from Latin America. Recent collaborations include the recording of the works for cello and piano by Ricardo Lorenz, the commission and premiere of Diáspora for cello and piano by the Schubert Club’s composer-in-residence Reinaldo Moya, and the recording of Shuying Li’s World Map Concerti with the Four Corners Ensemble.
Horacio serves on the faculty of the University of North Texas and the Music Institute of Chicago, and the University of Michigan’s MPulse summer institute Center Stage Strings. His students have attended festivals such as Aspen, Orford and Domaine Forget, and have won awards at regional and national competitions. They have continued their education at institutions including the University of Michigan, the San Francisco Conservatory, the Haute École de Musique de Lausanne in Switzerland, and the Hochschule for Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Mannheim, Germany. Some of his former students have pursued successful careers as orchestral musicians, chamber musicians, teachers, and freelancers. Others have devoted their energies to grow in other professional areas and enjoy a meaningful connection with music through the cello.
He is the coauthor of The Sphinx Catalog of Latin-American Cello Works, a comprehensive database with information about works for cello written by Latin American composers, created in partnership with the Sphinx Organization and CelloBello.org. His pedagogic book Exercises for the Cello in Various Combinations of Double-Stops has received recognition as a significant contribution to the instrument’s literature. He is a member of the Four Corners Ensemble and the Reverón Piano Trio. He started his musical studies in Venezuela through El Sistema, and holds degrees from the Conservatoire National de Région de Perpignan, France, the Escola de Musica de Barcelona, Spain, and the University of Michigan.

Venezuelan Composer born in Caracas in 1959. 

In 1989 she obtained a PhD from York University in England and since then she returned to Venezuela where she has taught at the Simón Bolívar University, where she now a days directs  the Digital Musical Laboratory.
Adina has written extensively for the flute and the guitar among other genres, nowadays she is concentrating on electronic music and video art, and many of her works are being played at festivals of this genre.
She has been part of organizations such as Venezuelan contemporary music, the ISCM (executive committee) and the Venezuelan electro acoustic music. She is also part of RedAsla (a very active net of Latin-American sound art composers organization) and also is the only woman at the Collegium of Latin American composers.

Her work has always been related to consonance, rather than tonality. Lately she has researched on early music materials and composers such a Machaut and Landini. In the electroacoustic work she has predilection for sound of nature, especially birds, together with street calls, particularly those of Spanish origin still present in Caracas streets.
At the moment she is working on a video Opera based on a love poem of the XI century in Toledo, Spain, where she mixes her version of early music (using baroque guitar and tiorba), puppets, electronic music and love poems read by ordinary women.
Her music has been recorded by BIS Grammophon, and Elektron, Sweden, Leonardo, (MIT, USA), RedAsla, (México) and Equinoccio, Caracas, Venezuela, among many other independent record companies in Venezuela, Argentina, Denmark and Colombia.
She is currently teaching a programme of electronic music for non-musicians based on the Supercollider programme, within a philosophy of freeware for young people, and runs regular courses of Max/Msp for the postgraduate composition programme at the Simón Bolivar University.

She has represented Venezuela many times at the ISCM, and has participated in other latinamerican festivals such as Visiones Sonoras and Manuel Enríquez Contemporary Music Forum (México), Sonoimágenes and EMS 09 (Argentina), and also in San José de Costa Rica, Montevideo, Uruguay, Cuenca, Ecuador, Medellín, Colombia, United States, Fylkingen, Estocolmo and Canada. Her flute works are frequently mentioned in academic works on contemporary latinamerican compositions.

Dan Forrest: Composer, Educator, Pianist
www.danforrest.com

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