is an Irish composer and vocalist. Freely intertwining acoustic and electronic music, O’Halloran has written for folk musicians, chamber ensembles, turntables, laptop orchestra, symphony orchestra, film, and theatre. Her work has been described as “intensely beautiful” (Washington Post) and “unencumbered, authentic, and joyful” (I Care If You Listen), and has won numerous competitions, including National Sawdust’s inaugural Hildegard competition and the Next Generation award from Beth Morrison Projects.

O’Halloran’s music aims to capture the human experience, exploring complex emotions felt at specific moments in time. This approach has found a wide audience: her work has been featured at Classical NEXT in Rotterdam, the Prototype Festival in New York, New Music Dublin Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival, and MATA Festival. Additionally, her music has been performed by Crash Ensemble, Contemporaneous, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, ~Nois Saxophone Quartet, the Refugee Orchestra Project, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, and the Irish National Symphony Orchestra, amongst others.

Along with composer Amanda Feery and in collaboration with the Irish National Concert Hall, O’Halloran founded the Creative Lab, a mentorship programme for young composers from traditionally underrepresented groups in music composition. She holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University and is currently working as a freelance composer. Current and future projects include works for F-PLUS, Friction Quartet, the Irish Youth Training Choir, and an evening-length song-cycle.

Written for what the composer describes as a “reverb-drenched marimba quartet,” O’Halloran’s 2020 work Shell was commissioned by the X4 Percussion Quartet. The inspiration for the composition came from the work of photographer Seph Lawless, who focuses his art on capturing images of shopping malls, once full of life and commerce, but now abandoned and empty. Through her pieces, O’Halloran aims to capture the “shells” that these buildings have become, stripped of the color and joy that they once held inside their walls after new internet shopping methods made them obsolete. Aided by thick reverb effects to emulate the echo of such a large, empty space, the continuous use of ostinatos– short repeated themes– draw continued attention. As the reverb builds, it evokes the feeling of the repeated, deafening sounds of footsteps as one walks through these architectural corpses, or the inevitable awareness of breathing that comes with the immense loneliness in buildings that have been left purposeless for years as they wither away.

-Brianna Dene

Composer Krists Auznieks has been praised for his “exhilarating… stunning… luminous“ (San Francisco Classical Voice) music, possessing “astonishing complexity and beauty“ (Broadwayworld), and “old-fashioned elegance“ (Herald Tribune). His quintet “Piano” was featured in The New York Times among the week’s best classical music moments; he is also a recipient of Aspen Music Festival’s Jacob Druckman Prize and the youngest composer to ever receive the Latvian Grand Music Award for best composition of the year. In 2021 he received the main prize from International Rostrum of Composers in the “Composers under 30” category and was also named “person of the year in culture” by Latvijas Avīze. Auznieks is currently a composer in residence with the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra for the 2022/23 season and a recipient of the Paris Cité internationale des arts fellowship.

Recent commissions include works for the Swedish Radio, Latvian National Opera, O/Modernt Festival and violinist Hugo Ticciati, Atlanta Symphony, Bang on A Can, Kremerata Baltica, choral pieces for Cappella Amsterdam and Latvian Radio Choir, a guitar concerto for Sinfonietta Riga and JiJi, ensemble works for Swedish Radio, New York based new music ensemble Unheard-Of, a multi-media work for Canadian soprano Meghan Lindsay, and a piece for Los Angeles based Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra.

Auznieks’ music has been performed at the Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Royal Danish Theatre, Atlanta Symphony Hall, Prague Quadriennial, Beijing National Arts Centre, Shanghai City Theatre, Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw, The Southbank Center (London), Théâtre Maisonneauve (Montreal), The Kitchen (NYC), National Sawdust (NYC), Chassé Theater (The Netherlands), Cultuurcentrum Hasselt (Belgium), and Théâtre De Nîmes (France).

He has also been commissioned by American Composer Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Yale Percussion Group, Albany Symphony, Latvian Radio Big Band, Contemporaneous, pianists Melvin Chen and David Fung, and worked with conductors Tarmo Peltokoski, Kristiina Poska, Robert Spano, Patrick Summers, Christopher Rountree, pianist Stephen Gosling, and bassist Robert Black.

He received his Doctoral and Masters degrees from Yale School of Music and is also an alumnus of The Royal Conservatory of The Hague. His most recent recognitions include fellowships from Paris Cité internationale des arts, Hermitage and AIR Serenbe residencies, Aspen Music Festival, NEXT Festival of Emerging Artists (NYC), Bennington Chamber Music Conference, American Academy of Fontainebleau and Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, The Woods Chandler Memorial Prize from Yale, awards from American Composer Orcestra’s Earshot, The Chicago Ensemble’s Discover America XI, Association for the Promotion of New Music, and Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra competitions.

He has served on the faculty of Yale School of Music, Montclair State University, Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Music Academy, and has taught for NY Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers Program and Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Alaska. He has presented guest lectures at Manhattan School of Music, SUNY Stony Brook, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Florida State University. Auznieks is a long term Vipassana practitioner and also loves literature, bouldering, and cooking.

Prelude and Ether was commissioned by Yale Percussion Group and Ji Su Jung, also receiving the premiere performance from them . Samantha and I first met Krists during the Sarasota Orchestra’s presentation of the EarShot Festival, a program of The American Composers Orchestra and we were immediately struck by his wonderful musical voice and inventive harmonic language. We are thrilled to be able to perform this gorgeous piece here in Sarasota.

-George Nickson

best be described by his influences, ranging from Stravinsky to Radiohead to Schoenberg to Tower of Power to George Crumb. With a penchant for the dark and rhythmic, Shaun gravitates towards emo-esque tape elements and moments of unrest/aleatory.

With performances in Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, South Korea, Italy and more, Shaun’s Abstracts for Percussion & Flute has quickly become a standard for mixed chamber ensemble.

An Hour of Change, a piece for solo snare drum and digital audio, is currently enjoying premieres around the world and can be found in the very popular collection, The Dynamic Snare. Shaun’s piece is included alongside works of Andy Akiho, Timo Andres and John Psathas.

His percussion trio, The Infantryman, has been live broadcast by the President’s Own Marine Band and Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra percussion section.

Recently, Shaun was commissioned by Orphic Percussion for a percussion quartet to premier on their first European tour, and by the Moreau VanTuinen Duo for a mixed percussion and euphonium duo to premiere at the International Women’s Brass Conference. He has also composed for the Urban Nocturnes and ensemblenewSRQ chamber ensembles.

His book, The Regimen, has sold over 2000 copies and is used in 17 different countries.

In his spare time, Shaun enjoys playing with his dogs (Dmitri and Hana), reading unnecessarily dense literature and learning about dinosaurs with his son, Keiji.

Mr. Tilburg has given master classes at the AZ Percussive Arts Society Day of Percussion, the Colburn School, the New York Day of Xylophone and has also given classes in many universities across Asia. He joined the percussion faculty at Arizona State University in 2014 and the faculty of the Lynn Conservatory of Music in 2016.

Shaun is currently endorsed by the good people of Zildjian, Vic Firth and Dragonfly Percussion.

Kagome progresses through a loose representation of the Buddhist stages of death. For weeks, following the moment of death (the first Bardo), the spirit limbos amongst deities who work to assess the spirit’s purity (the second Bardo). Failing to fully grasp the wrongs committed in life, and unable to recognize the evils within, the spirit is deemed unworthy of Nirvana and is reincarnated (the third Bardo) to continue along the path towards enlightenment. The Abhidhamma is a 2,400-year-old collection of text detailing the teachings of the Buddha. The religious texts can be roughly summarized as the Buddha’s guide to recognizing the true nature of all things in all the universe. It gives systematic guidelines for developing one’s own mind and seeing truth in all things, thereby assisting in the spirit’s ascension into Nirvana.

I composed the Eulogy in a mother-reading-her-child-a-bedtime-story sort of way. This scene is heavily influenced by American composer, Stuart Saunders Smith. Hopefully it serves as a palette cleanser from all the preceding heaviness, preparing us for an extended meditation to the end.

A composer of international stature, Mark-Anthony Turnage (b.1960) is indisputably among the most significant creative figures to have emerged in British music of the last three decades. His first opera, Greek, established Turnage’s reputation in 1988 as an artist who dared to forge his own path between modernism and tradition by means of a unique blend of jazz and classical styles.

Three Screaming Popes, Kai, Momentum and Drowned Out were created during his time as Composer in Association in Birmingham with Simon Rattle between 1989 and 1993, followed by Blood on the Floor, his unique score written for the distinguished jazz musicians John Scofield and Peter Erskine, and Martin Robertson.

His opera, The Silver Tassie, was premiered by English National Opera in 2000, winning both the South Bank Show and the Olivier Awards for Opera. Anna Nicole played to sold–out houses at Covent Garden in 2011 and has also been staged in Dortmund, New York and Nuremburg, while his opera for family audiences Coraline, was staged by The Royal Opera at the Barbican Theatre in 2018, traveling on to Freiburg, Lille, Stockholm and Melbourne. Turnage has written ballet scores for both Sadler’s Wells (Undance) and the Royal Ballet (Trespass and Strapless).

Turnage has been resident composer with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra. Collaborations with the London Symphony Orchestra have included two new works, Speranza premiered under Daniel Harding in 2013 and Remembering which Simon Rattle conducted in London and with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 2017.

Much of Turnage’s music is recorded on Decca, Warner Classics, Chandos and the LPO and LSO labels, while Scorched, on Deutsche Grammophon, was nominated for a Grammy. Turnage is Research Fellow in Composition at the Royal College of Music, and is published by Boosey & Hawkes. He was awarded a CBE in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday honours.

Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new piece for percussion sextet, New England Etudes, receives its world premiere on February 6, 2023 with the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble. This work was co-commissioned by the New England Conservatory, Colin Currie Group, Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Eastman School of Music, ensembleNEWSRQ, Geneva Percussion Ensemble, The Juilliard School, The New World Symphony Percussion Consort, and Southern Methodist University.

New England Etudes is made up of six different etudes. Turnage dedicated the piece to Will Hudgins, the recently appointed head of the percussion department at New England Conservatory and longtime member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The two met as fellows at Tanglewood in the summer of 1983, and have remained close friends since.

Will Hudgins comments: “Turnage incorporates a variety of traditional instruments throughout the work. His interest in jazz music is a consistent source of inspiration in his output and is immediately evident as this piece has a swinging lilt from the opening measures. The use of a drum set-style setup and two vibraphones also adds to his nod to the genre. Odd meters and the sharing of motives throughout the group abound. The exception to this style is the fifth etude, entitled ‘Bells for Ukraine,’ a movement that stands apart from the others in its solemnity. This eighteen-minute work is a tremendously welcome addition to the percussion repertoire, and we are pleased to present the work with the composer in attendance.”