Angus Lee (b.1992) is one of the foremost performer-composers of his generation. Born and raised in Hongkong, Lee has appeared at international music festivals across Asia, central Europe and North America in his capacities as flautist, composer and conductor. He completed his studies at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (2010-14) and the Royal Academy of Music (2014-16) with the highest honours, with his studies fully supported financially by the Aedas Scholarship and the Hong Kong Jockey Club Music & Dance Fund.

Lee was by training a conductor, and is recognised as one of Hongkong's leading performers in contemporary music. Since 2016 he has been a core musician of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, and has worked in close quarters with, among others, Hingyan Chan, Unsuk Chin, Brett Dean, Du Yun, Toshio Hosokawa and Zhu Shirui, partaking in the regional and world premieres of their works. Most significantly, Lee has performed as soloist in Pierre Boulez's Mémoriale ( ... explosante-fixe ... Originel) at the composer's 90th birthday concert series (2015) and memorial concert (2016) at the Lucerne Festival. He has also stepped in at short notice at the Hong Kong premiere of composer Eugene Birman's multimedia music theatre, "The Once and Future" (2023), performing in the Berlin Philharmonic's ZeMu! Ensemble Berlin. Lee's recording of Camilo Mendez's solo flute music was also released in 2024 on the composer's monograph, released by the Austrian new music label, KAIROS.

As a composer, Lee was largely autodidactic, but has benefited, in particular, from the tutelage of composers Franck Bedrossian, Oscar Bianchi, Frédéric Durieux, Dimitri Papageorgiou, Philippe Manoury, Isabel Mundry, Yann Robin, and Johannes Schöllhorn at international composition academies. While his earlier works focused largely on the notion of 'virtuosity' and the relationship between notation and realisation, his recent works demonstrate a persistent interest in exploration different forms of musical temporality; his works have been performed by the likes of Ensemble Intercontemporain (FR), Ensemble Modern (DE), Ensemble Multilatérale (FR), HereNowHear (US), Klangforum Wien (AT), Kollektiv Totem (CH), the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Trio Accanto, and the Subaerial Collective (US). In 2022, Lee's first opera, Chasing Waterfalls, received its world premiere at Germany's Semperoper Dresden to critical acclaim; the work subsequently toured back to Hong Kong's New Vision Arts Festival to equally enthusiastic reception. The year 2024 saw the premiere of Des flammes... (2023-24), created for the HK Philharmonic's Robert Ho Hong Kong Composers Scheme, and ... aux cendres (2024), created under the baton of Elim Chan.

Lee is equally in demand as a conductor, largely though not exclusively focused on new music. He was one of the conducting fellows at Ensemble Modern's 10th International Composers and Conductors Seminar, studying under Stefan Asbury. He has additionally worked with Ensemble Suono Giallo, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Musikfabrik. the Hong Kong New Music Enasemble and the Neu Vocalsolisten Stuttgart at the ilSUONO Contemporary New Music Week (2016), Ticino Musica Festival (2018, 2022), the Frankfurt ...cresc... Biennale for Actual Music (2023) and the ECLAT Festival for New Music Stuttgart (2024), premiering the works by emerging fellow young composers. He has also stepped in at short notice to lead the Asian premiere of Michel van de Aa's music theatre, "The Book of Water" at the 2023 Hong Kong Arts Festival. In 2024, he led for the first time the University of Hong Kong's University Philharmonic, performing Bernstein's Candide Overture and Shostakovich's Symphony no.5 in D minor to popular acclaim.

A holder of the Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music (LRAM), Lee is currently serving as a full-time assistant lecturer at The University of Hong Kong's Music Department, coordinating all of the Department's performance courses in addition to teaching elementary music theory, conducting, chamber music, as well as supervising an undergraduate level capstone practice-based research course. He also teaches woodwind chamber music at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. He has also served as flute faculty at the Lucerne Festival Academy in 2022 and 2023.

Japanese Saxophonist, Tadayoshi Kusakabe performs as soloist and chamber musician vigorously.

Mainly he focuses into contemporary musics, and he is trying to applicate the experiences into traditional and classic musics.

He received Bachelor Degree from Aichi University of the Arts, and currently he studies as a master student under prof. Lars Mlekusch by Konservatorium Wien Privatuniversität.

Kusakabe has the 2nd and Golden price of the 2nd EMONA International Woodwinds Competition 2013, and in 2014 he performed as a Semi­Finalist at the 4th Jean­Marie Londeix International Saxophone Competition.

Douglas Boyce writes chamber music that draws on Medieval and Renaissance traditions and modernist aesthetics, building rich rhythmic structures that shift between order, fragmentation, elegance, and ferocity.  His approach is deeply historical and broadly philosophical.  Many of his works have an direct historical touchstone, such as his  Etude on 'Pymalion qui moult subtilz estoit' (A Book of Etudes, Quire 4, No. 1) which features quotations of and elaborations on music from 15th century Cyprus, or La Deploration for clarinet, violin, and cello, which couples Josquin's lament on the death of Ockeghem with works of his own teacher Robert Suderburg, synthesizing jazz and Renaissance approaches. Other works draw on sources from antiquity, such as the string quartet Alcyone, a partially spoken setting of a tale of Ovid's Metamorphoses, or Tethys, a violin concerto which links the sea-goddess to geological time and tectonic change.
Literature and philosophy are also significant points of articulation: The Winter Journey, a current project commissioned from the ensemble Yarn|wire, is based on a short story by George Perec; the story itself  takes the form of a 19th century fairytale of memory and loss, and so the new composition will involve transformation of the French and German art-song tradition of the 19th and early 20th century. A song cycle focused on settings of American poets (Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, Wallace Stevens) entwines with the poems fragments from philosophers (James, Aristotle, Husserl, Bergson). The piano trio 'Fortuitous Variations' draws upon the language of William James and C.S. Peirce in inspiration, organization, character markings, and movement titles. This approach and the works themselves connect to many aspects of the scholarship in the humanities, including history, anthropology, literary studies, and philosophy. 
His works have been praised many times in the press.  Regarding his Quintet “l’homme armé”, Allan Kozinn wrote “he couches [the medieval melody] in such thoroughly modern scoring that the ear is lured to other things, including the juxtaposition of eerie string writing with playful material for the clarinet and piano, or the lively interplay among all five instruments.” (The New York Times March 12, 2005.) Regarding A Book of Songs (2006), the Stephen Brookes wrote “[they] can only be described as drop-dead beautiful. Easily the most captivating works on the program, these songs of love and death are extraordinarily well written and insightful.” (The Washington Post May 23, 2006)  Regarding La Déploration, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote that "...the violinist, cellist... and clarinetist... spread out throughout the crypt. Against vaporous harmonics and ghostly fragments of Renaissance music played by the strings, [a] warm, clear clarinet announced itself as very much alive as it sashayed in and out of blues territory and laughed in the face of their mournful keening." (The New York Times May 17, 2015.)
He has been awarded the League of Composers ISCM Composers Award (2005), the Salvatore Martirano Prize (2006), and the Robert Avalon Prize (2010), and a Fromm Commission (2012). He is a MacDowell Fellow in Winter 2017, and an Avaloch Music Farm Fellow in Fall 2017. His music has been performed by  counter)induction, Aeolus Quartet, Inscape Chamber Orchestra, Redlight Music, Dan Lippel, Robert Baker, Trio Cavatina, Edge Ensemble/Contemporary Music Forum (DC), pianists Ieva Jokubaviciute (Shenandoah University), Alice Belem (State University of Minas Gerais), and Ning Yu; cellists Elise Pittenger (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and Schuyler Slack (Richmond Symphony) and Lori Barnett (George Washington University); and clarinetists David Jones (Washington National Opera), Benjamin Fingland (Dorian Winds).
He is a founding member, curator, and composer-in-residence of counter)induction, a composer/performer collective active in the New York region (www.counterinduction.com).

Composer Patrick Chin Ting CHAN grew up in Hong Kong and came to the United States in 2003. He has been featured in events including Ars Electronica, IRCAM's ManiFeste, ISCM World Music Days, UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, and Venice Art Biennale, among others. He has worked with ensembles such as City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong, Ensemble intercontemporain (France), Ensemble Metamorphosis (Serbia), eighth blackbird (U.S.), Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Mivos Quartet (U.S.), and New York New Music Ensemble, with performances in more than thirty countries. His scores are published through BabelScores and Universal Edition. He is also an active performer and improviser of accordion, guqin, as well as live electronics using a Eurorack modular system and other custom interfaces on the computer. He is currently an Associate Professor of Music Composition at Ball State University.

We think it's time to talk about new music.

All inquiries: contemporaryclassicast (at) gmail (dot) com

Erika Malpass is an interdisciplinary creator – composer, violinist, vocalist, poet, and visual artist. She writes for percussion and chamber ensembles, symphonic band, and vocal music.
 
Erika is interested in exploring challenging emotional spaces and the physicality of how emotions are embodied. In her work, she centers these concepts in order to process, understand, and more fully experience emotions that are challenging or difficult.

 

Recent works have focused on the relationships between two emotional spaces: anxiety and self-doubt; and calm, contentment, comfort, and grounding. She embraces these spaces as a part of her creative process and works towards transforming them from intangible abstract concepts into tangible musical experiences. 

She strives to move beyond creating an objective representation of emotional spaces, moving into exploring these concepts collaboratively with performers. She is interested in bringing the performers’ personal experiences into the piece directly and creating a space for both composer and performer to process and understand their emotions. Her goal is for the audience to perceive the depth created from this shared vulnerability, and therefore inspire people to connect through a communal musical experience.  

 

Erika’s music features timbral color painting, affective atmospheric textures, and sounds of nature. Text, form, orchestration, and her exploration of tension and release are focal points in her music. She believes that being honest and vulnerable in her process and in her music is a compelling way to make connections with others. She aims to create pieces that are relevant to our time, centering authenticity and accessibility in her writing.

 

Erika has been commissioned by Sprig of That ensemble, Microcosm Ensemble, OopsMN (Opera-Oriented Projects Minnesota), and New Works Project. She has also written for Unheard-of//Ensemble, Meghan Burke of the Rhythm Method String Quartet, Heartland Marimba Quartet, and Hypercube ensemble, and attended Lake George Music Festival and the So Percussion Summer Institute. In 2018, she received a grant from the Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry program (CURI) at St. Olaf College to create a work for symphonic band. She earned a Bachelor of Music from St. Olaf College in 2019, where she studied with Timothy Mahr and Justin Merritt. She is currently pursuing a Master of Music in Composition at DePaul University, studying with Osnat Netzer and Christopher Wendell Jones.
Malpass works to write music that explores new sounds and techniques, and that engages people with an emotional experience. As a composer, her goal is to convey stories that are often difficult to put into words and to use music to connect people in a way they may not have connected before. She sees music as a language that reaches deeper than our differences and speaks to us on a more intimate level. She aims to create pieces that are relevant to our time, centering honesty, vulnerability, and accessibility.

Malpass explores new combinations of instruments, using the tone and color of the instruments as an expressive technique. Her creative process derives from translating visual and literary motifs into musical ones, drawing from stories and emotions, and creating unique sound-color textures. She often composes from poetry, either setting text in a vocal piece or using text as a rhythmic and color inspiration to translate into an instrumental work. She is inspired by collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, working with poets and choreographers and writing music for film.

Composer and Person
Adjunct Professor - Florida State University
www.marclemaymusic.com

Saxophonist working in and across the classical tradition.

Emily Koh is following