Born in Monterrey, Mexico, Arturo Salinas studied composition with Robert Cogan at the New England Conservatory, ethnomusicology with Charles Boilès in Montreal, electroacoustic music and microtonality with Jean-Etienne Marie in Paris, and orchestral conducting with Igor Markevitch. His music has been performed in at least 17 countries and has been enriched not only by his research and personal contacts with Mexican Indian and other world musics, but also by his involvement with animal sounds and soundscapes, microtonality, human languages and astronomy. Since 1981, he has been recording authentic pre-Columbian instruments (in museums and private collections) and composing music to bring their ancient sounds back to life with the help of computer and digital systems. Distinquished Visiting Composer in Residence at Mills College in 1987, he has also taught composition in Brazil and at Princeton University.
Margrit Schenker born 1954 in Marbach, Switzerland.
Living in Zurich, Schenker is a singer, composer, organ player, performance artist and piano teacher. She completed a one year residency at the Pauline Oliveros Foundation (now Deep Listening Institute) in Kingston N.Y.
Compositions include 50 SONGS short pieces for accordion, voice, performance premiered by the composer at the Pauline Oliveros Foundation,
GESCHICHTEN for women’s choir – premiered in Zuerich, Furore edition Kassel Germany, BENEDICTA scenario for choir, masks, instruments and soprano premiered in Basel, Furore edition Kassel
BAUMKLANG piano pieces for students, Furore edition Kassel
KRAK CD with the Swiss clarinet player Valentin Vecellio
SPIEL for soprano, flute, organ and speaker premiered in Karthause Ittingen Switzerland, that gave birth to the sky for alto and 10 string guitar. Premiere in september 2005 in Zuerich and Klagelieder for voice and percussion which premiered in 2007at St. Martin Effretikon.
Praise for The Maze Game:
“This book is like a recurring dream—haunting, prophetic, a wish fulfilled. Diana Slattery’s investigations of the future approach the limits of what can’t be said. She is a true visionary and The Maze Game—infused with love, grace, crazy wisdom and humor—is the work of a life time.”
—Lewis Warsh, Editor, United Artists
“The Maze Game is a remarkable achievement, envisioning a society in which elaborate rituals have evolved around a visual language that can gestured but not spoken. Working at the crossroads of electronic and print literature, Diana Slattery breaks new ground in thinking about the multiple sensory modalities through which experience can be transformed into
narrative. A ‘must-read’ for anyone interested in science fiction, electronic literature, and the future of narrative.”
—N. Katherine Hayles, Author, How We Became Post-Human
http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/
Scott Smallwood was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up at 10,000 feet in elevation in the Colorado Rockies. When Smallwood was 10 years old, his father gave him a cassette tape recorder, and ever since he has been fascinated by the possibilities of recorded sound. His work deals with real and abstracted soundscapes based on a practice of listening, improvisation, and phonography. He has worked with a variety of artists and ensembles, including Cor Fuhler, Mark Dresser, Ensemble SurPlus, The BSC, and Pauline Oliveros. His work has been presented worldwide, including recent presentations at Roulette in NYC, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the 2006 Sonic Circuits festival in Washington DC, and the Kulturhaus E-Werk in Frieberg, Germany. His work has been released on Autumn Records, Deep Listening, Televaw, Simple Logic, Static Caravan, and Webbed Hand Records.
A composer, improviser, visual artist and teacher, Smith plays viola and violin as well as vocalizes. She has worked with many leading figures in improvisation and new composition. Active in the international surrealist movement, she heads the record label TransMuseq and is a contributing editor to the journal, The Improvisor. She also composes and performs from interdisciplinary areas of discovery, especially dance and visual art.
Spiegel attended Shimer and Brooklyn Colleges, Oxford University and the Julliard School. She studied composition with Jacob Druckman and computer music with Emmanuel Ghent and Max Mathews. Spiegel draws on a wide variety of musical roots, and her instrumental background includes banjo, folk and classical guitar, and renaissance and baroque lute. She is best known, however, for her work with electronic media, an activity in which she has been involved since the late 1960s. After several years of instrumental and analog composition, she began to compose with computers at Bell Telephone Labs in 1973. Her music has been heard widely in festivals, with video, film and dance. She has received commissions to compose works for chamber orchestra and other instrumental media.
Bill Stevens (1977) is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory, Pi Kappa Lambda, with a major in music composition and an independently designed major in oral music. His work has been recognized by organizations including the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts (level one finalist, music composition) and the Whitehouse Commission on Presidential Scholars (1995). He is a member of the faculty of the Walden School Young Musicians Program and Teacher Training Institute, where he has designed and implemented the Jazz Musicianship curriculum. Bill is currently a fourth year student with Helix Training, a ministerial program bringing together psychological and spiritual teachings for the purposes of healing and transformation.
Carl Stone was hailed by the Village Voice as "one of the best composers working in the country today." He was born in Los Angeles and now lives in San Francisco. He studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts with Morton Subotnick and James Tenney. His works have been performed in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the Near East. His most recent tour in Japan included concert, radio and television appearances. Numerous choreographers, including Ping Chong, Blondell Cummings, Bill T. Jones & Hae Kyung Lee, have used his music. Other collaborations include those with Yuji Takahashi, Setsuko Yamada, Dazue Sawai, Aki Takahashi, Rudy Perez, Sterlarc, Yoshihide Otomo, Z'ev, and Bruce & Norman Yonemoto. Recordings of Carl Stone's music appear on many labels, including New Albion, CBS Sony, Toshiba-EMI, EAM Discs, the New Tone label and others. Stone has received many prestigious awards, commissions and grants for his work.
Philadelphia-born Jason Finkelman is a percussionist who specializes in the Afro-Brazilian bow instrument berimbau. His extended instrumentation includes African and Brazilian percussion, congas, riti (African fiddle), found metal, bird calls, and ocarinas. His compositional credits for theater and dance include Cynthia Oliver's works from 1995 to 2000 and Carl Hancock Rux's No Black Male Show (2000), and Shakespeare's Henry V (2001) produced by the theater department of the University of Illinois. He recently founded Elliptical Orbit while seeking unusual instrumentation for improvised music in Champaign/Urbana, Illinois where he currently resides.
Guitarist/Composer Geoff Gersh performs in various ensembles of improvised and composed music in NYC as well as composing for dance and film.. He is currently a band member for the Off-Broadway production of Blue Man Group: Tubes, where he plays the electric zither. In the spring of 1999 he began his studies on the shamisen with Kiharu Nakamura, who teaches in the Nagauta style. He received a Special Opportuity Stipend from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1999 and Meet the Composer Awards on multiple occasions.
Based in Philadelphia, Charles Cohen, has been composing and performing electronic music since 1971. He specializes in collaborative, cross-disciplinary projects with theatre, dance, music, and media artists, and is especially interested in live performance and improvisation. His instrument is the Buchla Music Easel. It is an extremely rare integrated analog performance instrument made by synth pioneer Don Buchla. In regards to his work, he states, "Mood, atmosphere, and landscape are what my sounds are about. Collaboration and exploration are what my process is about. The intent is sharing our favorite pastime with others."
Web site: www.straylight.ws
Will Swofford is a composer/improviser, filmmaker, writer and curator living in Brooklyn, NY, and is the founder of Saturnalia, a media consultancy and outsider publishing label dedicated to digital collaborations with artists, composers and experimental filmmakers. In the present time cycle he has been devoted to a continuum of solo performances and collaborations known as anahata: the rituals of akasha.
He has studied with noted composers Anthony Braxton, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, Pak Sumarsam and B. Balasubrahmaniyan. In 2004, Will received a three-year Deep Listening Retreat certificate and is an active workshop leader in the Deep Listening practice. At Wesleyan, he organized the student forum Deep Listening, Improvisation, and Ritual, a credited undergraduate tutorial introducing listening meditation and experimental music to a large group of academically diverse students.