Jonathan Newman composes music rich with rhythmic drive and intricate sophistication, creating broadly colored musical works that incorporate styles of pop, blues, jazz, folk, and funk into otherwise classical models. Trained as a pianist, trombonist, and singer, his work is informed by an upbringing performing in orchestras, singing in jazz choirs, playing in marching bands, and accompanying himself in talent shows. From opera to bubblegum pop, Newman delivers a new perspective on American concert music. Recent work includes MASS, a large-scale project with texts by poet Victoria Chang which premiered in 2018 with The Choir of Trinity Wall Street as part of their Mass Reimaginings commissioning program. In 2016 he was appointed Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras Composer-in-Residence; CYSO’s 2011 commission BLOW IT UP, START AGAIN has been performed by orchestras worldwide, including the Minnesota Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony, the 2015 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the 2015 BBC Proms. He is currently working with playwright Gary Winter on an imaginary ballet suite project for the Florida State University Wind Orchestra. He resides in Virginia, where he serves as Director of Composition & Coordinator of New Music at Shenandoah Conservatory.

The music of composer Nina C. Young (b.1984) is characterized by an acute sensitivity to tone color, manifested in aural images of vibrant, arresting immediacy. Her experience in the electronic music studio informs her acoustic work, which takes as its given not melody and harmony, but sound itself, continuously metamorphosing from one state to another. Her musical voice draws from elements of the classical canon, modernism, spectralism, American experimentalism, minimalism, electronic music, and popular idioms. Her projects, ranging from concert pieces to interactive installations, strive to create unique sonic environments that can be appreciated by a wide variety of audiences while challenging stylistic boundaries, auditory perception, and notions of temporality. 

Young’s works have been presented by Carnegie Hall, the National Gallery, the Whitney Museum, LA Phil’s Next on Grand, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series. Her music has garnered international acclaim through performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Phoenix Symphony, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Aizuri Quartet, Either/Or, the JACK Quartet, wild Up, and Yarn/Wire. Winner of the 2015-16 Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, Young has also received a Koussevitzky Commission, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Salvatore Martirano Memorial Award, Aspen Music Festival's Jacob Druckman Prize, and honors from BMI, IAWM, and ASCAP/SEAMUS. 

IN 2019 Carnegie Hall commissioned "Out of whose womb came the ice" with the American Composers Orchestra: for baritone, orchestra, electronics, and generative video, commenting on the ill-fated Ernest Shackleton Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914-17.  Other recent projects include "Tread softly" that opened the NY Philharmonic’s Project 19, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh from the Philadelphia Orchestra, and "The Glow that Illuminates, The Glare that Obscures" for the American Brass Quintet alongside an immersive audio-visual installation version commissioned by EMPAC showcasing their wavefield synthesis audio system.

A graduate of McGill University and MIT, Young completed her DMA at Columbia University. She is an Assistant Professor of Composition as USC’s Thornton School of Music.  She serves as Co-Artistic Director of New York’s Ensemble Échappé.  Her music is published by Peermusic Classical.

ninacyoung.com

D.M.A. Cornell University, current 
M.A. Eastman School of Music, 2018
B.M. Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music, 2016

Trio Jinx has been hailed as “turning the classical concert into a jam session” by KTEP radio broadcaster Dennis Woo. Together they bring together the low hums of double bass, spinning lines of flute and amber swirls of violin/viola. They are a classical core trio, offering concerts of classical music spiced with dashes of folk, jazz and improvisation. In April of 2017, Trio Jinx did a residency in El Paso, Texas with El Paso Pro Musica. This summer they continue their adventures, participating in the Imani Winds Chamber Music Festival in New York City, then on to a residency at the Iowa Great Lakes Festival this July. All three members (Louna Dekker-Vargas, Ledah Finck and Yoshiaki Horiguchi) are graduates of Peabody Institute and are proud to call Baltimore their musical and artistic home.

Ash Graham (they/them) is a composer of contemporary music.  They seek to explore concepts of visceral energy, unconventional forms, and elements of humor by incorporating abstractions of familiar rhythmic idioms into their music.

Composer of contemporary classical music, I am pursuing a Ph.D at Eastman School of Music as a Sproull Fellow, Samuel Adler Scholar, and beneficiary of the Imagination Fund.  A student of David Liptak, I have also studied with Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon and Robert Morris at Eastman and with Robert Kyr and David Crumb during my master's study at U of Oregon.

Beneath the surface-lyricism of my music, I am concerned with the psychoacoustics of perception,  dense chordal textures toeing the boundaries of consensus-tonality, complexity in the guise of simplicity, reconciling the mathematics of music with the scope of imagination, emotional depth and contrapuntal integrity.  

email: 
diana@alumni.princeton.edu
drosenb3@u.rochester.edu
website: 
www.ovanovi.com

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