Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, and creator of new opera and music-theater works. Over the last five decades, she has been acclaimed by audiences and critics as a major creative force in the performing arts. A pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique,” Monk has been hailed as a “magician of the voice” and “one of America’s coolest composers”. Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words. Among her many accolades, Monk was recently named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Republic of France, and the 2012 Composer of the Year by Musical America. She is also one of NPR’s 50 Great Voices, and has received a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award and a 2011 Yoko Ono Lennon Courage Award for the Arts.
 
In 1965, Monk began her innovative exploration of the voice as a multifaceted instrument, composing mostly solo pieces for unaccompanied voice and voice and keyboard. In 1978, she formed Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble to further expand her musical textures and forms. In addition to numerous vocal, music-theater works and operas, Monk has created vital new repertoire for orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo instruments, with commissions from Michael Tilson Thomas / New World Symphony and San Francisco Symphony, Kronos Quartet, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Monk has made more than a dozen recordings, most of which are on the ECM New Series label, including the 2008 Grammy-nominated impermanence and highly acclaimed Songs of Ascension (2011) and Piano Songs (2014) with pianists Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker. Her music has also been featured in films by Jean-Luc Godard and the Coen Brothers, and on So You Think You Can Dance and the recent HBO series True Detective. Celebrated internationally, Monk’s work has been presented by Lincoln Center Festival, BAM, Houston Grand Opera, London’s Barbican Centre, and at major venues in countries from Brazil to Syria.
 
Monk’s numerous honors include a MacArthur “Genius” Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, an American Music Center Letter of Distinction, an ASCAP Concert Music Award, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds honorary Doctor of Arts degrees from Bard College, the University of the Arts, The Juilliard School, the San Francisco Art Institute and the Boston Conservatory.
 
In 1999, Monk performed A Vocal Offering for His Holiness the Dalai Lama as part of the World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles. In 2005, her 40th year of performing and creating new music was celebrated by a series of New York city-wide events, including a marathon concert in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall. Another marathon, Meredith Monk Music @ the Whitney, was presented by the Whitney Museum in 2009. In 2012, Monk was honored with a remix and interpretations cd, MONK MIX, featuring 25 artists from the jazz, pop, dj and new music worlds. More recently, she premiered Realm Variations for six voices and small ensemble, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, and performed in John Cage’s Song Books as part of the Symphony’s American Mavericks Festival. Monk’s newest music-theater piece, On Behalf of Nature, premiered in January 2013 at UCLA and is currently touring internationally. This fall, Meredith Monk will mark her 50th season as a creator and performer. Recognized as one of the most unique and influential artists of her generation, she has been appointed the 2014-2015 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall.
 
Meredith Monk official site
 
Photo credits: Jesse Frohman and Andrew Hurlbut

Pianist Ursula Oppens, one of the very first artists to grasp the importance of programming traditional and contemporary works in equal measure, has won a singular place in the hearts of her public, critics, and colleagues alike. Her sterling musicianship, uncanny understanding of the composer’s artistic argument, and lifelong study of the keyboard’s resources, have placed her among the elect of performing musicians.
 
During the 2013/2014 season she will perform Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated for the Fundação Osesp in São Paulo, return to Portugal in a recital honoring Elliot Carter at the Festival of the Azores, and perform in recital at Shenendoah University. She performs twice at the Library of Congress this season first in a program with the JACK Quartet featuring quintets by Adés and Carter, and later in a concert celebrating works commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation, and will premiere a new work by Tania Léon with the Cassatt Quartet at Symphony Space.
 
In 2008, she celebrated the 100th birthday of her friend and colleague, Elliott Carter, with critically acclaimed performances of his complete works for solo piano at the Boston Conservatory of Music, Symphony Space, the Ravinia Festival, Merkin Hall, the Tanglewood Festival and elsewhere leading up to her Grammy nominated recording of his works.
 
Driven by an enduring commitment to integrating new music into regular concert life, Ms. Oppens has commissioned and premiered many compositions, including works by Anthony Braxton, Elliott Carter, Anthony Davis, John Harbison, Julius Hemphill, Laura Kaminksy, Tania Léon, György Ligeti, Witold Lutoslawski, Conlon Nancarrow, Tobias Picker, Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Singleton, Joan Tower, Christian Wolff, Amnon Wolman, and Charles Wuorinen.
 
Ursula Oppens studied piano with her mother, the late Edith Oppens, as well as with Leonard Shure and Guido Agosti. She received her master’s degree at The Juilliard School, where she studied with Felix Galimir and Rosina Lhévinne. After 14 years as the John Evans Distinguished Professor of Music at Northwestern University, Ms. Oppens is now a Distinguished Professor on the faculty of the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
 
A co-founder of Speculum Musicae, Ms. Oppens has an extensive recording catalogue and has received four Grammy nominations: Winging It, music of John Corigliano; Oppens plays Carter; for her Vanguard recording of Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated; and for American Piano Music of Our Time, a classic compilation of piano works by 20th century American composers for the Music & Arts label.
 
Ursula Oppens at Colbert Artists

Photo credit: Christian Steiner / J. Sherman

Bruce Brubaker official site

In live performances from the Hollywood Bowl to New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, from Paris to Hong Kong, and in recordings for ECM, InFiné, Arabesque, and Bedroom Community — Bruce Brubaker is the new musician, a visionary virtuoso, an artistic provocateur. Bruce Brubaker performs Mozart with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Philip Glass on the BBC. Profiled on NBC’s Today show, Brubaker’s playing, writing, and collaborations continue to show a shining, and sometimes surprising future for pianists and piano playing. His blog “PianoMorphosis” appears at ArtsJournal.com.

Brubaker was presented by Carnegie Hall in New York, at the International Piano Festival at La Roque d’Anthéron, at Michigan’s Gilmore Festival, and at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, as the opening-night performer in the museum’s acclaimed Diller Scofidio + Renfro building. He is a frequent performer at New York City’s Le Poisson Rouge, and at Folle Journée in Nantes.

Bruce Brubaker is featured on Nico Muhly’s album Drones(Bedroom Community). Along with pianist Ursula Oppens, Brubaker made Piano Songs, a recording of Meredith Monk’s piano music, including four new transcriptions by Brubaker, released by ECM. Brubaker’s new recording of solo piano music by Philip Glass (Glass Piano) for InFiné (Warp Records) was remixed by six artists on Glass Piano: Versions.

Brubaker’s albums for Arabesque include Time Curve (music by Philip Glass and William Duckworth), Hope Street Tunnel Blues (music by Glass and Alvin Curran, featuring Brubaker’s transcription of a portion of Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach), Inner Cities (including a live recording of John Adams’s Phrygian Gates and Brubaker’s transcription of part of Adams’s opera Nixon in China), and the first CD in the series, glass cage, named one of the best releases of the year by The New Yorker magazine.

Brubaker has premiered works by Glass, Meredith Monk, Nico Muhly, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Oliver Lake, Simon Hanes, and John Cage. He performed at Sanders Theater in collaboration with Cage during the composer’s tenure as Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University.

Following his New York debut at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Brubaker was awarded a solo artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was named “Young Musician of the Year” by Musical America. His London debut at the Wigmore Hall led to his first broadcast concert on the BBC, an all-Brahms recital. Brubaker has appeared at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival at Avery Fisher Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, Tanglewood, London’s Wigmore Hall, Leipzig’s Gewandhaus, Antwerp’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Finland’s Kuhmo Festival.

Bruce Brubaker has appeared on RAI in Italy and is featured in the documentary film about the Juilliard School, made for the PBS “American Masters Series.” As a member of Affiliate Artists Xerox Pianists Program, he presented residencies and performed with orchestras throughout the United States.

Brubaker has given masterclasses and forums at the Juilliard School, the Royal College of Music in London, Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Harvard University, Columbia University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Leipzig’s Hochschüle für Musik, the École Normale in Paris, Ghent’s Orpheus Instituut, North Carolina’s Eastern Music Festival, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Brubaker’s articles about music have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Piano Quarterly, Perspectives of New Music, Dutch Journal of Music Theory, and Chamber Music magazine. He was co-editor and a contributor to Pianist, Scholar, Connoisseur: Essays in Honor of Jacob Lateiner (Pendragon Press, 2000), a collection paying homage to his former teacher. His essay “Time Is Time” appears in Unfolding Time (2009), available in the U.S. from Cornell University Press. He presented the closing recital in Harvard University’s Crosscurrents conference in 2008.

Brubaker was the creator in 2000–2001 of “B-A-C-H,” a six-concert series in New York examining the connections between J. S. Bach and the composers who followed him. The previous year, at the turn of the millennium, he organized “Piano Century,” in which 100 pianists performed 101 twentieth-century pieces in eleven concerts. Brubaker created and performed Pianomorphosis, a 70-minute multidisciplinary performance piece for the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in Michigan. Brubaker’s performance piece Haydnseek, was created together with Nico Muhly. Brubaker is the founder and artistic director of the chamber music festival SummerMusic in his native Iowa.

Brubaker trained at the Juilliard School, where he received the school’s highest award, the Edward Steuermann Prize, upon graduation. At Juilliard, where he taught from 1995 to 2004, he has appeared in public conversations with Philip Glass, Milton Babbitt, and Meredith Monk. He is now chair of the piano department at New England Conservatory in Boston.