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Sat, June 28, 2025 at 6:00 PM
COMPOSERS' WORKSHOP CONCERT
Pierre Boulez Saal - Mozart Auditorium
Join us for an evening of new music featuring works by members of the Barenboim-Said Akademie’s composition community, alongside an open-form ensemble piece by renowned American composer George Lewis, performed here with percussion and a small ensemble.
The performers are members of soundSCAPE, a group of instrumentalists based in the U.S. and Canada, many of whom are long-standing members of New York’s International Contemporary Ensemble. They are also part of an annual composition and performance exchange held in Blonay, Switzerland.
Artists
Flute
Clarinet
Cello
Cello (BSA Student)
Piano
Piano
Percussion
Percussion
Program
artist biographies
A champion of contemporary music, Lisa Cella has performed throughout the United States and abroad. She is Artistic Director of San Diego New Music and a founding member of its resident ensemble NOISE. With NOISE she has performed the works of young composers all around the world. She is co-artistic director of NOISE’s annual festival of modern music, soundON, and co-founded the flute collective inHALE, a group dedicated to developing challenging and experimental repertoire for two and three flutes. inHALE was an invited ensemble at the National Flute Association Convention in San Diego in August 2005. She has performed as a soloist both nationally and internationally and is a faculty member of the Soundscape Festival of Contemporary Music in Cesena, Italy, and of Nief-Norf based in Knoxville, Tennessee. She completed her undergraduate studies at Syracuse University and received a Master of Music degree and a Graduate Performance Diploma from Peabody Conservatory as well as a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in contemporary flute performance from the University of California, San Diego. Her main teachers include John Oberbrunner, Robert Willoughby, and John Fonville. Lisa Cella is a full professor of music and department chair at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a founding member of its faculty contemporary music ensemble, Ruckus. Recent projects include a focus on low flutes.
Felix Fan is one of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected cellists performing in the world of contemporary music today. As a soloist, collaborative artist, and advocate for new music, Felix is admired for his technically refined interpretations and independent spirit, working with diverse composers including Philip Glass, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Meredith Monk, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Julia Wolfe, Hans Werner Henze, Oliver Knussen, Kaija Saariaho, Tan Dun, and Charles Wuorinen. A strong advocate for the creation and commissioning of new music, he has premiered more than 100 works and made dozens of recordings. He has appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the Vienna Musikverein, and the Royal Festival Hall and as a soloist with orchestras including the Hong Kong Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra (Taiwan), and the Munich Chamber Orchestra. As a member of the Flux Quartet, he pushes the boundaries of contemporary music, embracing the avant-garde and interpreting the innovative styles of emerging composers and artists. Flux has been featured on screen and in soundtracks for acclaimed director Matthew Barney and collaborated with esteemed choreographers Pam Tanowitz, Shen Wei, and Christopher Wheeldon. Before Flux, he enjoyed touring with the Bang on a Can Allstars for several years. Beyond the world of contemporary music, he believes in the power of collaboration between musicians, filmmakers, actors, and artists. In this capacity, he has worked with director Charlie Kaufman and the Coen Brothers on a live radio play featuring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Steve Buschemi. He has also performed with members of Sonic Youth, Wilco and The National. Felix Fan studied cello with Eleanore Schoenfeld (University of Southern California), Janos Starker (Indiana University), Aldo Parisot (Yale University), and Boris Pergamenschikow (Hochschule fur Musik, Cologne, Germany). In 1994, he was honored by Bill Clinton as a Presidential Scholar.
Aiyun Huang is a soloist, chamber musician, teacher, researcher, and producer. Globally recognized since winning the 2002 First Prize and Audience Prize of the Geneva International Music Competition (awarded in Percussion only three times since 1939), she has commissioned and premiered more than 200 works. Recent highlights include projects with San Diego Symphony Orchestra, St. Lawrence String Quartet, Aventa Ensemble, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and Taipei Symphony Orchestra. Beyond her body of creative work, her research focuses on the multidisciplinary exploration into the performing body in theater, music, technology, and media arts using percussion as the central voice. Her influential work on percussion theater is published in the Cambridge Companion to Percussion and on the DVD Saving Percussion Theater. As a leader in her field, Aiyun Huang has directed multiple conferences and festivals dedicated to percussion and new music, including Transplanted Roots: Percussion Research Symposium (since 2015), PASIC Focus Day (2017), Illuminations: Brian Cherney at 75 (2017), and Random Walks: Music of Xenakis and Beyond (2013). Born in Taiwan, she holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of California, San Diego. Between 2004 and 2006, she held the position of Faculty Fellow at UCSD. From 2006 to 2017, she led the percussion program at McGill University. She currently leads the percussion program at the Faculty of Music of the University of Toronto. She joined soundSCAPE in 2009.
Nikki Joshi is a Boston-based percussionist and arts administrator. Previously based in Toronto, she completed the 2018 Rebanks Family Fellowship at the Glenn Gould School. A passionate advocate for contemporary music, she has worked closely with composers including Roger Reynolds, Vinko Globokar, Kotoka Suzuki, Steve Reich, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Dai Fujikura, and Jo Kondo. She has performed with ensembles including Continuum, Against the Grain Theatre, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and New Music Concerts. In 2019, she performed her original composition accompanying artist Sin Wai Kin at MOCA Toronto. She has given lectures and masterclasses at University of Michigan, Boston Conservatory, Montserrat College of Art, and the University of Toronto. Nikki Joshi holds a Master’s Degree in percussion from McGill University and a Bachelor’s Degree, Performer’s Certificate, and Arts Leadership Certificate from the Eastman School of Music. She has served as Executive Director of soundSCAPE Festival since 2019.
Inspired by the music of our time, Nathanael May seeks to enlighten audiences around the world with innovative performances, initiatives, and outreach. He has performed on three continents with appearances in Germany, Türkiye, Italy, the Netherlands, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Panama, and throughout North America. He was named the 2012 Winner of the American Prize for solo piano performance in recognition of his recordings on a variety of record labels. His leadership of the soundSCAPE Composition and Performance Exchange has been profiled by the webzine I Care If You Listen and in the Eastman Case Studies published by the Institute for Music Leadership at the University of Rochester, New York. He founded this festival and non-profit foundation in 2005 and served as the artistic director until 2019. He is currently the Tim & Gail Buchanan endowed chair for the Fine Arts division at Friends University. From 2020 to 2022, he served as chair of the School of Fine Arts at Missouri Western State University. He received faculty awards for Teaching Excellence, Outstanding Scholarship, and Service Leadership in recognition of his achievements at Missouri Western. Nathanael May holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Kansas and a Master’s of Music from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, with undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Thomas Rosenkranz has charted a career that breaks through the conventional boundaries of solo piano, chamber music, and the art of improvisation. He has established himself as one of the most innovative pianists of his generation. He was honored to serve as a Cultural Ambassador on behalf of the United States’ Department of State, traveling to the Middle East and North Africa promoting diplomacy through artistic collaboration. He was named the recipient of the Classical Music Fellowship Award from the American Pianists Association and regularly performs at important musical centers in America, Europe, Africa ,and Asia. Recent festival appearances have included the Lincoln Center Festival, Shanghai New Music Week, Hong Kong Modern Academy, Vianden in Luxembourg, ProPiano in Greece, MusicARTE in Panama, Rivello in Italy, and the International Festival of Carthage in Tunisia. In addition to his performing career, he is a celebrated teacher. In 2021, Portland Piano International named him a Tholen Master Teacher. In 2019, he was granted the title of Visiting Professor of Piano at the Sichuan Conservatory of Music in China, where he is one of three pianists in the school’s history to hold this title. He continues to be presented in residencies and master classes at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including the Shanghai, Shenyang, Tianjin, Wuhan, Xi’an Xinghai, Wuhan, and Zhejiang conservatories as well as Princeton University, the Eastman School of Music, and New York University. His former students have been prize-winners at national competitions and hold professorships throughout the United States and Asia. During the summers he serves on the faculty at the Amalfi Coast Festival (Italy) and the Atlantic Music Festival. He has been teaching at soundSCAPE since 2006. Thomas Rosenkranz studied with Robert Shannon at the Oberlin Conservatory, Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen in Paris, and with Nelita True at the Eastman School, where he received a Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance and Literature. He is currently the coordinator of the Keyboard Division and Associate Professor of Piano at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory (UMKC).
Joshua Rubin is a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, where he previously served as the program director and then artistic director from 2011 to 2018, overseeing the creative direction of more than 100 concerts per season in the United States and abroad. He has worked closely with many of the prominent performers and composers of our time, including George Crumb, Matana Roberts, Alvin Lucier, David Lang, Chaya Czernowin, Du Yun, Christian Wolff, Cory Smythe, George Lewis, Vijay Iyer, Steven Schick, Claire Chase, Kaija Saariaho, Craig Taborn, Pauline Oliveros, Okkyung Lee, Nathan Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, John Zorn, and Mario Davidovsky. Joshua can be heard on many recordings. His album There Never Is No Light highlights music that uses technology to capture the human engagement of the performer and the listener. He holds degrees in Biology and Clarinet from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and a Master’s Degree from the Mannes School of Music. He served on the faculty of the Banff Music Centre’s Ensemble Evolution summer program from 2016 to 2019 and is currently on the faculties of soundSCAPE Festival and Ensemble Evolution as well as the College of the Performing Arts at The New School. This season, Joshua Rubin performs on modern and historical clarinets in New York with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Teatro Nuovo, and the American Composers Orchestra, in Los Angeles with Wild Up, Monday Evening Concerts, and Tesserae, at the Ojai Music Festival, and on tour in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Miami, Boston, Houston, Kansas City, San Diego, and Chicago. His passion for technology in arts led him to develop LUIGI, a management software that is available to ensembles and other arts organizations who value transparency and collective management.
composer biographies
Born in Strasbourg in 1992, Etienne Haan studied composition at the Strasbourg Conservatory with Annette Schlünz, Thierry Blondeau, Philippe Manoury, Tom Mays, and Daniel d’Adamo. He earned a Bachelor’s degree before continuing his education with Hanspeter Kyburz at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin from 2017 to 2019, finishing with a Master’s degree. He is currently pursuing an Artist Diploma at the Barenboim-Said Akademie under Jörg Widmann. Alongside composition, he studied conducting with Miguel Etchegoncelay (Strasbourg) and M. Fabricius (Berlin) and completed a Master’s degree at the Centro Superior Katarina Gurska in Madrid with Borja Quintas (2022–23). He specializes in contemporary music and has taken part in workshops with Jean-Philippe Wurtz, William Blank, Titus Engel, and Peter Rundel. He was artist in residence at Casa de Velázquez in 2019–20 and won the Composition Prize of the City of Oldenburg in 2022. His works have been performed by ensembles such as Hanatsu Miroir, Zafraan, Télémaque, and Austria’s Tonkünstler Orchestra. He also collaborates on transdisciplinary projects in theater, dance, film, and visual arts. His aesthetic focuses on perception, expectation, and accessibility.
Elham Hamedi is a Kurdish composer, singer, and kamancheh player from Iran, currently based in Berlin. She is studying composition at the Barenboim-Said Akademie and holds a degree in Iranian Music Performance from the University of Art in Tehran. Her work bridges traditional Kurdish and Iranian music and contemporary compositional approaches, drawing deeply from oral traditions, personal memory, and storytelling. As a performer and composer, she has been active across Iran, Turkey, Germany, Russia, Malaysia, and Canada. Her music has been featured in festivals, cultural collaborations, and commissions, including for choirs, theater productions, and chamber ensembles. She has appeared as a kamancheh player and vocalist in projects ranging from traditional ensembles to children’s music theater. Her artistic language explores the intersection of folk material, modern structure, and emotional nuance. Whether through composition or performance, her work seeks to carry forward cultural memory while opening space for new resonances across genres and geographies.
James Helgeson is a composer and scholar whose work bridges music, literature, and philosophy. Based in Berlin, he serves as Professor and Dean at the Barenboim-Said Akademie, where he teaches across disciplines. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and Oberlin College, he holds two doctorates: a PhD in Music Composition from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a PhD from Princeton University on Renaissance theories of music and poetry. He also studied in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure (rue d’Ulm) and the Université de Paris-VII. Before returning to music full-time in 2017, he taught at Princeton University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Nottingham. His work is grounded in a deep engagement with critical theory, historical hermeneutics, and the role of the arts—especially music—in shaping intellectual and cultural discourse.
George Lewis is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University. He is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, as well as a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. Further honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music and the co-editor (with Harald Kisiedu) of Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today/Afrodiasporische Neue Musik Heute. He is a Yamaha Artist and is regarded as a pioneer in the creation of improvising computer programs using generative artificial intelligence. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, New England Conservatory, New College Of Florida, Birmingham City University, and the Curtis Institute of Music.
Senay Uğurlu, born in 1997, is a Turkish Berlin-based composer. She began her musical journey with piano and flute before studying composition with Yiğit Aydın in Ankara. In 2023, she moved to Berlin to pursue further studies at the Barenboim-Said Akademie, where she studies composition with Stephan Winkler and electronic music with Gilbert Nouno. Her work has been shaped by participation in festivals and academies such as the Lucerne Festival Academy, Impuls Festival, Rainy Days, and the International Young Composers Academy. She has worked closely with prominent composers including Beat Furrer, Wolfgang Rihm, Eivind Buene, Ken Ueno, Milica Djordjevic, Lisa Streich, Simon Steen-Andersen, and Pierre Jodlowski. Her music has been performed by Ensemble Modern, United Instruments of Lucilin, Ensemble Cairn, and others, at venues including Oper Frankfurt, Philharmonie de Paris, and Philharmonie Luxembourg. Her piece Monachopsis II: Kintsugi won third prize at the 12th Pre-Art Competition and her solo cello piece this feeling of déjà vu was released digitally in 2022. She is also active in visual and sound arts, and her installation Çeper was exhibited at the Contemporary Arts Center in Ankara. Her work merges music with philosophy, politics, and visual art.
soundSCAPE Composition and Performance Exchange was founded in 2005 by pianist Nathanael May and has since grown into a vibrant international community. The festival attracts composers and performers from around the world for ten days of concerts, lectures, master classes, lessons, and workshops. Over the past two decades, soundSCAPE has found a home in various locations across Italy. For the past three years, the festival has been in residence at the Hindemith Music Centre in Blonay, Switzerland. With its superb facilities and breathtaking surroundings, this setting has become an inspiring space for musical exploration and creation. soundSCAPE prides itself in being an inclusive, collaborative learning environment.