(2010/2012) for solo piano and ensemble // performed by Chi-Chen Wu (piano) and the Festival Chamber Orchestra (Ithaca, NY), cond. by Cynthia Johnston Turner

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Nikolas Agrafiotis (b. 1998, Athens, Greece) is a composer currently pursuing postgraduate studies in Composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig under the guidance of Professor Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf. He previously completed his Master’s degree in Composition at the same institution, studying with Professors Mahnkopf and Fabien Lévy, and earned his Bachelor of Composition at the Conservatorium Maastricht under the guidance of Professor Vykintas Baltakas.

His works have been performed across Europe by leading orchestras and ensembles, including MDR-Sinfonieorchester, Ensemble Recherche, Ensemble Ascolta, Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, K.A.S. Orchester, Contemporary Insights, Osimun Quartet, Roman Quartet, and the Philharmonie Zuidnederland, among others. His orchestra work Stryphos, premiered by MDR-Sinfonieorchester, was also broadcast on MDR Klassik Radio.

He has been selected for the Ulysses Journeys for Composers 2025, part of Warsaw Autumn Contemporary music festival. He has also been selected for and taken part in esteemed programs and masterclasses such as the Peter Eötvös Foundation’s Spotlight on Ramon Lazkano (2023), Impuls Academy (2025), the Delian Academy for Contemporary Music (2024), the Sävellyspaja Composition Masterclass (2024), Casa della Musica San Michele (2025), She Lives Budapest Masterclass 7th edition (2025), and the ContemPlay Workshop in Vilnius (2023).
Through these opportunities, he has worked with renowned tutors including Peter Eötvös, Mark Andre, Franck Bedrossian, Johannes Kalitzke, Ramon Lazkano, and Jukka Tiensuu, among others.
In 2022, his Two Movements for Ensemble received the Special Mention at the Winds Composition Contest Saxony.

I'm an Irish composer, sound engineer/programmer and improviser with a research interest in the philosophy of sound, music and aesthetics. 
If you want to collaborate or chat, send me a message here or via email.
Please see my links for more information.
Thanks for visiting, 
Ben

Iranian-Canadian Composer and Pianist - Pianist and Co-Founder of Piano Pinnacle - Doctor of Musical Arts, University of Michigan

Composer (/curator/writer/researcher/video artist) Mu-Xuan Lin (林慕萱) (Taiwan/USA) defines her life as a quest for an artistic autonomy poetically engendered by both its will and its vulnerability to one’s corporeal experience and to the world one lives in. Having had extensive training in the visual arts and creative writing and frequent exposure to theatre, dance, and literature from an early age, and profound influences from the cinema, Mu-Xuan is interested in the intrinsic kineses latent within any expressive matter which can be extracted, dissected, critiqued, and recreated in new artistic deliverances.

Described by the Los Angeles Times as “fascinating” and by the SRF2 kultur as “sonically sensuous,” her music has been heard worldwide, and on a SOOND (EU) and an ein_klang (Austria) records. She is a guest-composer/faculty at the Novalis music+art Festival (Croatia) and the New Music on the Bluff festival (USA), the winner of the Protonwerk No.3 award (Switzerland) and Ensemble Adapter’s commission project “Adoptions 2017” (Germany), an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (France), an awardee of New Music USA, Max Kade, Mellon, Center for German and European Studies (DAAD program), FACE Croatia, Gardner Read, ASCAP grants, and multiple NCAF (國藝會, Taiwan) grants. Formerly, she has participated as a selected active fellow at various festivals and conferences such as the Summer Academy at Schloss Solitude (Germany), Darmstadt Summer Course (Germany), EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO’s Matrix15 (Germany), June in Buffalo (USA), Acanthes de Metz (France), Sävellyspaja (Finland), Ticino Musica (Switzerland), Delian Academy (Greece), and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts working with Master Artist Georg Friedrich Haas, a representative for KoFoMi (KomponistInnenforum Mittersill) and the residency in Salzburg (Austria). Her works have been featured at Festival AFEKT 2022 (Estonia), the Donaueschinger Musiktage – Next Generation konzert 2016 (Germany), Innovation Series 2017 (新點子樂展) – 30thAnniversary Edition of Taipei National Theater & Concert Hall (Taiwan), deciBels Festival 2020 (Latvia), the Piano Spheres Concert Series (Los Angeles), Mise-En Festival 2019 (New York), Hear Now Festival (Los Angeles), New Gallery Concert Series (Boston), Splice Festival (Missouri), and the 180º Festival (Bulgaria), and honorable mention/finalist of various competitions including the 2016 neuverBand’s and 2022 loadbang’s international commission competitions (honorable mention) and the 2015 Darmstadt Music Theatre Competition (semi-finalist).

She is working with ensemble 3peoplemusic (三個人, Taipei), loadbang (NYC), duo NéMeu (Paris) and sheng artist Li-Chin Li (Taiwan) among others, and has worked with TAK Ensemble (USA), Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart (Germany), Ensemble Adapter (Germany), Ensemble SurPlus (Germany), Ensemble Proton Bern (Switzerland), Secession Orchestra (France), Avanti! Chamber Orchestra (Finland), Norrbotten NEO (Sweden), members of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra (Lapin Kamariorkesteri, Finland), Talujon Percussion Group, Radnofsky Quartet, Lydian Quartet, Dinosaur Annex, Transient Canvas, Urbanity Dance Project, percussionist Aiyun Huang, soprano Tony Arnold, pianist Vicki Ray, and flutist Shao-Wei Chou among many others.

Recently, in addition to composition and an increased engagement in video art, Mu-Xuan is venturing into the work of performing arts curation and dramaturge. In 2023, she co-founded Studio Nekton (宇宙微波) with flutist/performer Shao-Wei Chou for further developing collaborative projects involving programing, curation, and creations.  She was the concept-curator, dramaturg, visual and stage designer of Taiwanese zheng artist Jing-Mu Kuo’s 2023 abstract-theatrical recital “Waterfalls” involving five new compositions (Taiwan), and served as the artistic director/conception, visual and stage designer, media artist, and co-producer for Studio Nekton’s 2024-25 multimodal program “Speak, Transparence” (France and Taiwan) featuring Shao-Wei Chou, storytelling artist Soma Yang, and herself (as composer-dancer).

Mu-Xuan received her Bachelor of Music in Composition from the New England Conservatory, MFA and Ph.D. in Music Composition and Theory from Brandeis University, and the Certificate of Advanced Studies Curating (CAS) at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.  Her primary instructors in composition include David Rakowski, Melinda Wagner, Yu-Hui Chang (張玉慧), Eric Chasalow, Michael Gandolfi, Larry Bell, and Ya-Ming Hsu (許雅民). She has also received instruction from Mark Andre, Oscar Bianchi, Chaya Czernowin, Francesco Filidei, Joshua Fineberg, Beat Furrer, Bernhard Gander, Georg Friedrich Haas, Stephen Hartke, Philippe Hurel, Louis Karchin, Fabien Lévy, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Samir Odeh-Tamimi, Hilda Paredes, Hèctor Parra, Rebecca Saunders, Dominique Schafer, Johannes Schöllhorn, Oscar Strasnoy, Hans Thomalla, and Jukka Tiensuu. At the ZhdK (Zürich) for the curating program, she was under the tutelage of Dorothee Richter.

As a researcher, Mu-Xuan’s Ph.D. dissertation “On the Epistemological and the Methodological Approaches in the Analysis of Contemporary Music and a Synthesized Analysis of Fausto Romitelli’s La Sabbia del Tempo (1991) illuminates her interest in the epistemological aspects of artistic and musical creativity. Her 2023 article “The Erotic and the Melancholy of a Sincere Postmodern Identity – the cinematic spaces and a vulnerable time” will be published by Cambridge Scholars in the volume "Crossing into Distance: Contemporary Composers on the Present and Future of Art Music" in 2024/25. As the primary investigator, her interview (co-authored with Maria Sorensen) with German sociologist Klaus Theweleit about his psychoanalytic works on right-wing fascism, will be published in 2025-26.

As a music educator, Mu-Xuan is an Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of California, Berkeley.  She has previously taught at Brandeis University and California State University Long Beach, and had served as an Instructional Professor and a lecturer at Chapman University.

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Peter Fahey Composer