STEFAN HAKENBERG, 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."
JOCELYN CLARK attended grades K-12 in Juneau where she took piano lessons and played the clarinet and oboe in various school music groups as well as the Juneau Symphony. After graduating from Juneau-Douglas High School in 1987 she spent a year in Japan where she became interested in non-Western music. She started studying the koto at the age of 18 with the Sawai Koto Academy at Wesleyan University. From 1990 she studied zheng at the Nanjing Academy for the Arts in China, continuing her studies the following year with Wang Changyuan in New York City. In the winters of 1992 and 1993 she toured Southeast Alaska performing zheng and doing workshops with the Orion Trombone Quartet and the Alaska Musicians Guild. From 1992 to 1995 she received a scholarship to study traditional Korean music majoring in kayagûm performance at the National Classical Music Institute in Seoul, Korea. Currently she is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University in Boston where she has produced a number of concerts featuring both traditional and modern compositions for East Asian instruments. Clark performs regularly with the Wang Changyuan Zheng Art Ensemble of New York, and the Sawai Koto Ensemble of New York, and also as a soloist. Most recently, she has won a Seonam Foundation Fellowship for the 2000-2001 academic year to return to Korea to study Korean traditional music.