LUCIANO BERIO - SEQUENZA VIII for accordion - born into a musical family in 1925 in Oneglia, Italy, is one of the most important composers and musical thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. A major force in the development of new music since 1950, he has produced a body of works that embrace a wide range of interests, genres and techniques and reflect his continuing exploration of the human voice, the virtuoso capabilities of solo instruments, the orchestral idiom, music theater, and the digital processing of sound. In addition, Mr. Berio's interest in re-examining the music of the original domains of Western culture, in particular the voice, has resulted in his transcriptions of works by many composers ranging from Monteverdi to Mahler, as well as in several pieces based on sketches or unfinished works by such composers as Mozart and Schubert. Luciano Berio's life-long literary interests, particularly twentieth century modernism and postmodernism, have led him to work in close contact with some of Italy's greatest literary minds: Italo Calvino (who wrote the text for two of his stage works), Edoardo Sanguineti and Umberto Eco. Of the same generation as Stockhausen and Cage, Berio pioneered modernism in music and the use of electronics to explore new musical frontiers. He has employed a myriad of idioms and techniques during his long and prolific career, specializing in works for the voice, "chance" music, serialism, electronic music, and virtuoso pieces he calls "Sequenza." In Modern Music and After, a quote by David Osmond-Smith differentiates Luciano Berio's perception of indeterminacy from that of John Cage. He refers to Berio's works as works which: "although physically completed, are nevertheless 'open' to a continuous germination of internal relations that the spectator must discover and select in the act of perceiving the totality of stimuli." This form of indeterminacy is bought about by ambiguity of both verbal and musical languages and by avoiding finality in any statement. Luciano Berio is currently ending a position as Distinguished Composer-in-Residence at Harvard University.

*BERNARD RANDS - MEMO for solo soprano - Through some ninety works composed for a wide range of performance genres, Bernard Rands is established as a major figure in contemporary music. The originality and distinctive character of his music have been variously described as "plangent lyricism" with a "dramatic intensity" and a "musicality and clarity of idea allied to a sophisticated and elegant technical mastery" - qualities he developed from his early studies with Dallapiccola and Berio in Italy. Born in England in 1934, Rands emigrated to the United States in 1975 since when he has been honored by awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Guggenheim Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Barlow, Fromm, and Koussevitzky Foundations; the Pew Trust and the Carey Trust among others. Recent commissions include orchestral works for the Suntory concert hall in Tokyo; for the New York Philharmonic's 100th anniversary; the centenary of Carnegie Hall; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Internationale Bach Akademie, Stuttgart. Other recent commissions have resulted in works for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Dale Warland Singers, Chanticleer, the Mendelssohn Quartet and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; the Boston Symphony Orchestra for a 'cello concerto for Rostropovitch in celebration of his seventieth birthday; from the Philadelphia Orchestra; the B.B.C. Symphony Orchestra; the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia and from Meet the Composer for a consortium of orchestras and soloists. In addition to his own frequent appearances on the podium, Rands' music has been conducted by many including Boulez, Berio, Maderna, Marriner, Mehta, Muti, Ozawa, Rilling, Salonen, Sawallisch, Schiff, Schuller, Schwarz, Silverstein, Sinopoli, Slatkin and von Dohnanyi. He has been guest composer at many international festivals around the world and Composer in Residence at the Aspen and Tanglewood festivals. From 1989 to 1996 he was Composer in Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Rands' work Canti del Sole, premiered by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 1984 Pulitzer Prize in Music. His orchestral suites Le Tambourin won the 1986 Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. In the academic world, Rands has held fellowships and professorships in the universities of Wales, York, Brasenose College Oxford, Princeton, Yale, the University of California, Boston University and The Juilliard School. He is the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music and the Walter Channing Cabot Fellow at Harvard University. Click here to listen to part of Rand's "London Serenade," Howie Smith, saxophone; Regina Mushbac, cello; Cleveland Chamber Symphony, ensemble; Edwin London, music director.

The music of SAWAI, TADAO-(1937- 1997) - SANKA (Song of Praise) for koto solo - "is dramatic and intense, yet with an element of lightness intertwined, leaving the listener spiritually refreshed" writes Elizabeth Falconer. Sawai has received numerous awards for his performances, recordings, and compositions, and has performed extensively in Japan and abroad, including North America, Germany, France, Yugoslavia, and the Netherlands. He has composed over 70 pieces for the koto, and while some combine koto with various instruments, from shakuhachi and shamisen to violin and soprano, for the most part he has focused on the koto and bass koto, looking at the instruments from many different angles, working with them as solo and small ensemble instruments of their own merit. Perhaps his most significant contribution was a technical one: he brought western levels of precision to tuning and rythmn, popularized a range of innovative techniques which increase significantly the tonal possibilities of the koto, and raised the bar in the training and evaluation of teachers of the instrument.For the koto world, struggling to find a meaningful niche in postwar Japan, this has been more than a blessing. It has helped to keep koto alive. Sawai wrote for beginners as well as advanced performers. His pieces demonstrate not only his creative genius and compositional skills, they demonstrate his appreciation for writing music that fit the performer. He always wrote with the distinct personalities of the performers in mind, be they amateur or professional. Sawai's most recent recordings include a CD of his works entitled "Sanka" (Song of Praise) on the Kyoto Records label (KYCH-2010) with English and Japanese liner notes; and "Koto Music: Tadao Sawai Plays Michio Miyagi," a Playasound production that includes liner notes in English, French and Japanese (PS 65180). Sawai Tadao, master of the Japanese koto, founder of the Sawai Koto School, prolific composer, teacher, and visionary leader in the world of Japanese music, died in 1997 the age of 59.

KEIKO ABE - VARIATIONS ON JAPANESE CHILDRENS SONGS for solo marimba - writes of her piece: "Flutes and drums echoing from a distant summer festival, the sound of my wooden clogs clacking along an empty street-- the sounds and memories of my childhood, linked with traditional children's songs, are constantly in my mind. I have tried to portray these songs not just as melodies providing fond memories of the past but as my own music, music of great vitality with its roots in the search and the present." Keiko Abe was born in Tokyo and studied piano, composition, xylophone and marimba as a child. At the time she began her studies in the 1950s, the marimba was regarded as an amature folk instrument. "There were almost no works for marimba in the classical repertoire, and so I had to begin my career as a performer by creating the works myself." Her compositions and performances introduced new techniques and a level of virtuosity that helped spawn a new, classical and contemporary style of marimba music. Donald P. Berger from the Japan Times made the following comment in 1969: "She was able to create a very musical effect upon an instrument that in itself is probably one of the least expressive."

*MARTIN BRODY - (writing for Nimbus: flute, euphonium, violin, and viola) a native of Elgin, Illinois near Chicago, played the cello and piano from an early age and went on to study music and literature at Amherst College and Yale University. After a stint as a professional rock musician, he began an academic career which has continued to the present. He is currently Catherine Mills Davis Professor of Music at Wellesley College, where he has been on the faculty for 20 years. Brody's works have been supported by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, the MacArthur Foundation Touring Commissions, the National Endowment for the Arts (under both its artists fellowships and opera/musical theater programs), the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts and Humanities, and most recently, the Guggenheim Foundation among others. He has also written extensively about contemporary American music for such journals as Perspectives of New Music, Musical Quarterly, and the Journal of Music Theory. Active as an advocate of modern and contemporary music, Brody has served as a director of the Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center, the Boston Musica Viva, and Art of the States (WGBH). He is also president of the Stefan Wolpe Society and a co-founder of the seminar for music and culture at the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies. Brody has has also composed extensively for television and film, where his credits range from the PBS series, "Frontline" to such movies as John Sayles's "Brother From Another Planet." Lately, Brody has been particularly interested in musical theater and has written two chamber operas. Click here to listen to an excerpt from "The Crab," Act I of the music-theater piece, "Earth Studies." "The Crab" is a fairy tale adaptation of a 17th c. Japanese Kyogen play translated by Carolyn Morley. In this excerpt, a priest and his porter encounter a giant, supernatural crab in the forest. Performers: Janice Felty, mezzo-soprano (the Crab), William Hite, tenor (the Porter), and James Maddelena, baritone (the Priests), with the CORE Ensemble: Andrew Mark, cello, Hugh Hinton, piano and Michael Parola, percussion. The electronic portion of the score was conceived in collaboration with Dennis Miller, and was realized by Dennis.

*VOLKER BLUMENTHALER - SPEC for flute, horn, trumpet, euphonium, koto, mandolin, erhu, and string ensemble- Music at the End of Utopia," by Jörg Krämer" (Bavarian Broadcast 1998) CLICK HERE FOR GERMAN . . . The power of utopian ideas seems to be less powerful today. In 'post-modern' times, such ideas come to be considered ideological relics of the great 'meta-narrations' (J. F. Lyotard) of history. Of course no music, if it is to be more than a functionally acustic background, could exist without utopian ideas; all serious music builds up counterworlds, and rises up into new orders. The work of Volker Blumenthaler circles round these relationships. His music neither follows the paths of established trends of New Music nor the 'post-modern triviality of anything goes.' In his own way Blumenthaler stands against the decay of utopian ideas of society and culture. . . . Nevertheless elements of those ideas will sustain these moments of decay and unravel and gradually take on a structural significance. They manifest themselves in the form and the order of the work of art . . . . Click here to listen to a portion of Volker Blumenthaler's Caronglo IV (...Blumen und Steine...) (1992) Auszug (49", 98k) recorded by the Phorminx Ensemble Darmstadt on ambitus 97 955. | Click here for bio.

*BUN-CHING LAM- (writing for saxophone, trombone, marimba, koto, and soprano) Was born in the Macao region of China in 1954. She began studying piano at the age of seven and gave her first public solo recital at fifteen. In 1976, she received a B.A. degree in piano performance from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She then accepted a scholarship from the University of California at San Diego, where she studied composition with Bernard Rands, Robert Erickson, Roger Reynolds, Pauline Oliveros, and earned a Ph.D. in 1981. In the same year, she was invited to join the music faculty of the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where she taught until 1986. A winner of the Rome Prize (1991), Lam has also been awarded first prizes at the Aspen Music Festival, the Northwest Composer's Symposium, and the highest honor at the Shanghai Music Competition, which was the first international composers' contest to take place in China. She has also been a recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer/Reader's Digest Commissioning Program, New York Foundation for the Arts, King County Arts Commission and Seattle Arts Commission. She was in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Study and Conference Center. Most recently, she received a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council for a three -month study trip to Japan, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her current projects include the chamber opera "Wenji" supported by the International Collaborative Project of Meet the Composer, and commissions from Chamber Music America and the New Jersey Symphony. Ms. Lam's orchestral works have been performed by the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, Women's Philharmonic, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra of Holland, and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta. Her compositions have been featured in music festivals around the world such as the Bang on a Can (New York), New Music America (Los Angeles), Tokyo Summer Festival, Pacific Sounding (Japan), Hong Kong Arts Festival, ISCM World Music Days (Hong Kong), Steirische Herbst (Austria), and the 24 Heures Communication (Belgium). She was a composer in residence at the America Dance Festival, the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East. She is currently on the Board of Director for the American Composers Orchestra, and has served on the Advisory boards of the New York Foundation for the Arts, Composer's Forum and the Pauline Oliveros Foundation. In 1997, Bun-Ching Lam taught at Bennington College in the Spring Semester, and served as a Visiting Professor in Composition at the School of Music, Yale University in the Fall. She now lives and works in New York. Her music has been recorded on CRI, Tzadik, Nimbus, Koch International Classics, Sound Aspect and Tellus. Click for German. Click here for a review of Bun-Ching Lam's "The Child God." Click here to listen to a bit of "I-7" on Bun-Ching Lam's CD ...Like Water from John Zorn's new music series on the Tzadik label. Performed by the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio of piano, violin and percussion.

*CORD MEIJERING - (writing for saxophone, trombone, marimba, koto, and soprano) - was born of Dutch descent in Germany in 1955, and lives now in Darmstadt. He studied guitar under Olaf Van Gonnissen, and composition under Dietrich Boekle and Johannes G. Fritsch. From 1983 to 1986 he studied with Hans Werner Henze in Cologne and received a stipend to complete his studies with Hans Juergen Wenzel at the Academy of Arts in East-Berlin. In 1985 he was awarded the Stuttgarter Composition Prize for his orchestral composition The Voice of the Winter. In 1987 at the International Hambacher Composer's Competition, Meijering was commended for his string trio ...bewegt... . In 1991 he received a fellowship to attend the MacDowell artists colony in New Hampshire. His compositions have been performed at Festival de Tardor, Barcelona (Spain); the Styrian Autumn, Graz (Austria); the Festival d'Evian (France); the Frankfurt Festival; the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt (Germany); the Guggenheim Museum, New York and other places. Meijering has written compositions for orchestra, chamber music, ballet, and film and teaches composition and music theory at the Nürnberg-Augsburg Conservatory and the Akademie für Tonkunst in Darmstadt. He also has worked with children to compose two children's operas for singers, children choir and chamber orchestra. Click to listen to Meijering's SERENADE II - vers libre - (1992) für Flöte und Harfe (flute and harp), recorded by the Phorminx Ensemble Darmstadt, Angelika Bender - flutes, Marina Paccagnella - harp, on the ambitus lable, amb 97 955.

*HIROKO ITO - (writing for erhu, accordion, flute, horn, koto, and string quintet) - was born in Japan. She studied composition under Mario Davidovsky, Stephen Mosko, Mel Powell and Bernard Rands. She also studied Gagaku with Suenobu Togi at the University of California in Los Angeles. Following receipt of her undergraduate degree in literature in Tokyo, Hiroko earned a Master's degree in composition and conducting from the California Institute of the Arts and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in composition at Harvard University. One of her most recent performances was in Halifax, England, directed by Shakuhachi virtuoso Elizabeth Bennett. Ito's current interest includes a composition for an ensemble using non-western instruments and European orchestral instruments. She is also working on a reference addressing problems and issues associated with composing and performing works for such an ensemble. The project with CrossSound satisfies her strong interest in the topic. She is currently writing a dissertation, while teaching at Asahi Gakuen in Los Angeles. She is also an active performer of Gagaku in Southern California.

STEFAN HAKENBERG (Click here for bio in German) (Click here for bio in Korean)- STRANDS for koto and tombone - born in Wuppertal, Germany, studied music at the conservatories in Düsseldorf and Cologne, and composition with Hans Werner Henze. He contributed to Henze's "Alternative Cultural Projects". Inspired by experiences there, he developed his own projects such as "Der Kinderkreuzzug" for the Opera of Cologne. In 1994 Stefan Hakenberg was accepted into a Ph.D. program at Harvard University where he studied with Mario Davidovsky and Bernard Rands. Other grants and fellowships brought him to the summer festivals in Tanglewood, Aspen, and Fontainebleau, to the artists' colonies "The MacDowell Colony" in New Hampshire, "Yaddo" in Saratoga Springs, and the "Atelierhaus Worpswede" in Lower Saxony. The Endowment for the Arts in North-Rhine Westfalia has sponsored his work repeatedly. Amongst the presenters of his music are the "Arcadian Winds" from Boston, the "Ensemble Phorminx" from Darmstadt, "The New Millennium Ensemble" from New York, the "Bangkok Saxophone Quartet," "Duo Contemporain" from Rotterdam, "UnitedBerlin," the "Heidelberger Sinfoniker," and the "Gürzenich Orchester der Stadt Köln," conductors like Jeffrey Milarsky, Morris Rosenzweig, Richard Pittman, George Tsontakis, Johannes Stert and Markus Stenz, and soloists like Phoebe Carrai, Xiaolian Dai, Aeri Ji, Woongsik Kim, and Changyuan Wang. His compositional output includes works for a wide variety of media, from solo chamber music to stage works to multimedia installations. His composition "Like Juicy Peaches" has been interpreted in a video by Theo Lipfert first shown at the Art Frankfurt 1999. Lipfert and Hakenberg have last developed the video into an interactive computer kiosk which was first shown at Galery Metroarts in Salt Lake City. Of particular meaning in Hakenberg's artistic development are both composing in collaboration with amateurs, and the integration of players from the folk music world or of non-western background. His music has been described as "highly original," "dramatic and memorable," and "creating strong musical expressions in a densely contrapuntal style." Click here to listen to "Calm" from "Strands," Ishigure Masayo - koto, Russell Jewel - trombone.

*ALEXANDRA GARDNER - (writing for flute, horn, trumpet, euphonium, koto, mandolin, accordion, and string ensemble) is a composer and sound artist making music for performance and concert settings, dance, video, theater and installations. She works with acoustic instruments, electronics, environmental sounds and found objects to create aural landscapes of evolving sonic textures. Her compositions have been presented internationally at festivals and performance spaces including the Aspen Music Festival, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Akiyoshidai International Art Village, Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, the Florida and Santa Fe Electroacoustic Music Festivals, Franklin Furnace, American Visionary Museum, The Mid-Hudson Art and Science Center, and The Smithsonian Institution. Alex's music has received awards from the American Composers Forum, ASCAP, the MacDowell Colony, Meet the Composer, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Montgomery County Arts Council and the Peabody Conservatory of Music. She studied music composition at Vassar College (BA 90), the California Institute of the Arts and The Peabody Conservatory of Music (MM97). A trained percussionist, she has studied orchestral, West African and Latin percussion, and performed in drumming ensembles, as a dance accompanist, and with a salsa band. Currently Alex lives and works in the Washington, DC area.

*PAUL COX - GALE IN CROSS SOUND for trombone ensemble - born and raised in Sitka, Alaska, received B.M. in percussion performance in 1992, from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Michael Rosen. He pursued additional study at London's Royal College of Music, Rice University, the Aspen School of Music, and Yale's Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. In addition, he holds a Certificate in Non-Profit Management from Case Western Reserve University. An avid composer, his Percussion Quartet No. 1 was premiered by the Oberlin Percussion Group in 1996. Two new works, Totems (a trio for three marimbas) and Manhatta for solo percussion and film, will be premiered at the Cleveland Museum of Art on May 12, 2000. In addition, Cox has given lectures at the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Orchestra on topics ranging from Mendelssohn's watercolors to John Adams' latest piano concerto. Since 1996, he has been the assistant curator of musical arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he contributes to the production of more than 60 concerts a year. Among his many pastimes are sea kayaking, hiking, chess, gardening, and traveling. He is married to Kirsten Docter, violist of the Cavani String Quartet.

*CrossSound 2000 Commissions