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Rather than quoting Hispanic American folklore directly, Alex allows its echoes to resonate abstractly, shaping his unique sonic language. Central to his artistic vision is Hemofiction, the literary aesthetic developed by Juan Trigos S., which inspired Jiménez Ruanova to create MúsicaHemoficción, his own musical interpretation of the genre.

His music has been performed by leading ensembles and orchestras including the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, OSEM, ASKO|Schoenberg Ensemble (Netherlands), Onix Ensamble (Mexico), Duo Luxa (Germany), and triO+ (France). His works have featured in international festivals such as the Festival Internacional Cervantino, Foro Internacional de Música Nueva “Manuel Enríquez,” and Dni Muzyki Kompozytorów Krakowskich (Poland).

He has received numerous awards, including Second Prize in the 2025 Art & Violence Composition Competition (The Secret Drawer), and Third Prize in the Primer Concurso de Composición Orquestal de Morelia (Five Pieces for Orchestra). He has also been a finalist or semifinalist in competitions in the U.S., Mexico, and Europe.

Jiménez Ruanova holds a Master’s degree from Codarts (Rotterdam), where he studied with Klaas de Vries, and has participated in masterclasses with composers such as Steve Reich and Brian Ferneyhough. He has held residencies at the Camargo Foundation and Dora Maar House in France. He is a member of ASCAP and publishes with PromoMusica International and soon in Universal Edition.

Images by Luciano Trigos.

for more information please visit: 
https://ashkanbehzadi.com

Contact: 
behzadi.ashkan@gmail.com

Ashkan Behzadi, a recipient of 2025 Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize and a 2021–2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition, is an Iranian-Canadian composer based in New York. He earned his DMA in composition at Columbia University, where he studied with Fred Lerdahl, George Lewis, and Georg Friedrich Haas. Prior to this, he graduated from McGill University with a bachelor’s degree in composition and music theory, studying composition with Chris Paul Harman and Brian Cherney. Ashkan also holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Tehran University, where, at the same time, he took composition and music theory lessons with Alireza Mashayekhi.
Ashkan’s music has been commissioned and performed by various international performers and ensembles, including Ensemble Recherche, TAK Ensemble, Oerknal Ensemble, Ensemble Mosaik, Yarn/Wire, JACK Quartet, Grossman Ensemble, Divertimento Ensemble, Ensemble Alternance, Ensemble UnitedBerlin, Exaudi, Ekmeles, Wet Ink, Talea Ensemble, and le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM). 
His work has also been recognized with awards, artist residencies, and participation in festivals such as the Koussevitzky Foundation, Fromm Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, the Graham Sommer Second Prize, the Prix de Composition at Fontainebleau, the MacDowell Fellowship, the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Divertimento Ensemble Composers Meeting, the Dialoge Festival at Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg, the Manifeste Festival at IRCAM, and the CIRMMT New Music Series.
For the 2019–2020 academic year, Ashkan Behzadi joined the Department of Music at the University of Chicago as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Center for Contemporary Composition. Since september 2023, he teaches at the Manhattan School of Music as a faculty member in Music Composition.
The issue of genre identity or genre-blurring, along with the dialectical relationship between modernist lyric poetry and contemporary music, has formed the core of Ashkan’s aesthetic concerns in recent years. Structurally, his music demonstrates a great attention to detail, conveying a miniaturist and gentle lyrical landscape. By employing techniques of allusion and pastiche as the foundation of his craft, his music ultimately seeks to invoke the collective memory of folklore music.

Dr. Kevin Day (b. 1996) is an award-winning, multi-disciplinary composer, jazz pianist and conductor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Internationally acclaimed as one of the world’s leading musical voices, Dr. Day’s work is known as a vibrant exploration of diverse musical traditions from contemporary classical, jazz, R&B, Soul and more. A unique voice in the world of classical music, Dr. Day takes inspiration from a broad range of sources, including romanticism, late 20th century music, jazz fusion and gospel. Across all areas, his work explores the complex interplay of rhythm, texture and melody across genres.

Dr. Day burst onto the musical scene in 2018 with his Concerto for Euphonium, which has since gone on to become a Classic FM sensation and has been recently performed by the United States Marine Band. Since then, some of the world’s top instrumental soloists, wind bands, chamber ensembles and symphony orchestras have commissioned and performed his works, including the Boston Brass, Castle of Our Skins, Cincinnati Opera, Houston Symphony Orchestra, Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Winds, the National Intercollegiate Band, Nu Deco Ensemble, Capitol Quartet, Puerto Rican Trombone Ensemble, Syrinx Quintet, Sheffield Chamber Players and many others throughout the United States, Canada, Austria, Taiwan, South Africa, Australia and Japan. His music has also been streamed over a million times across YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, & SoundCloud. Dr. Day is the recipient of numerous awards, including the TCU Band of Fame, ITEA Harvey Phillips Award for Excellence in Composition, a Copland House Residency Award, the MacDowell Fellowship for Music Composition, the BMI Composer Award, the TCU Alumni Outstanding Young Professional Award, a three-time ASCAP Morton Gould Finalist, a finalist for the ABA Sousa-Ostwald Award, a finalist for the NBA Revelli Award, and many more. 

Dr. Day’s original opera, Lalovavi: An Afrofuturist Opera, will premiere July 2026 at the Cincinnati Opera as the lead work in its ground-breaking new Black Opera Project. The work is the first of three commissioned by the Cincinnati Opera as part of its initiative to engage Black creators in developing new works celebrating Black stories. As part of the project, Dr. Day is collaborating with renowned director Kimille Howard and librettist Tifara Brown, who’s recognized as one of the country’s leading performance poets. Other recent works include his acclaimed Concerto for Wind Ensemble and Birds in the Cathedral, as well as Ignition, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Low Brass and Unquiet Waters, commissioned by Jordan VanHemert.

In addition to his work as a composer, Dr. Day also enjoys an active career as a jazz pianist. Passionate about collaborations that reimagine and advance the future of jazz as an art form, he brings his extensive musical background to the stage and studio as improviser and collaborator. He’s currently working on a debut solo album. His music has been featured on numerous high profile releases, including albums by Thomas Mesa and Michelle Cann, The Alias Chamber Ensemble, Jeremy Wilson, Jarrett McCourt, and Nicki Roman.

Dr. Day currently works as Artist Teacher in Residence, Composition at the Keys Conservatory at the Pinecrest Academy in Henderson, Nevada. He holds degrees from Texas Christian University (TCU), the University of Georgia, and the University of Miami. He has studied composition with Dorothy Hindman, Charles Norman Mason, Peter Van Zandt Lane, Emily Koh, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Neil Anderson-Himmelspach. Dr. Day is an alumnus of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, an honorary member of the National Chapter of Tau Beta Sigma, and an honorary member of the National Chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi.

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).

nyc-based composer & sound designer. i do other stuff, too.

email: 
aviamonmusic@gmail.com

British-German composer Charlotte Bray is an esteemed and in-demand composer, exhibiting uninhibited ambition and desire to communicate. Her music is exhilarating, inherently vivid, and richly expressive with lyrical intensity. An Ivor Novello Award winner (2019), she uses her voice to spotlight global issues, including the refugee crisis, unification, terrorism, and humanity’s impact on nature. She is currently the Composer-in-Residence with L​’Orchestre de Chambre de Genève, which is a 3‑year position for the 2023/24 – 2025/26 seasons. 

Bray’s music has been performed and commissioned by institutions such as BBC Symphony and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestras, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Aurora Orchestra, and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. Her work has featured at festivals in Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, Tanglewood, Aix-en-Provence, Verbier and Kuhmo, as well as with renowned conductors including Marin Alsop, Sir Mark Elder, Sakari Oramo, Oliver Knussen, Jessica Cottis, Daniel Harding, Duncan Ward, and Karina Canellakis.

Sidney Marquez Boquiren grew up in the Philippines and has spent most of his adult life in the United States. He collaborates with artists on various projects including Biblical illumination; multimedia and multi-sensory art experience; chamber opera; and dance. He has received commissions from the German vocal quintet, amarcord; harpist, Tasha Smith Godinez; the contemporary ensemble, counter)induction; and Parhelion Trio. He is one of 32 artists in the international roster commissioned to compose new solo piano works for Yael Weiss’ “32 Bright Clouds”. His compositions are often informed, influenced, and shaped by contemporary concerns; his Catholic faith; and his Philippine identity.

A MacDowell Fellow, Sidney is Professor of Music at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York. He sings with the Ignatian Schola as well as the choir of The Church of St. Francis Xavier in Manhattan, New York.

Gregory Rowland Evans is a classical cellist and composer.

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