Music

Majel Connery

ARC Fellow, Scholar, Vocalist, and Composer

Majel Connery is an unclassifiable artist who rarely says no to anything. Her music ranges from the guttural to the sublime, appearing in punk rock clubs at night and by day at major destinations from The Kennedy Center to The Kitchen.

A vocalist and composer, Connery combines Classical influences with electronic mentality. Her singing has been called “superb” by the New York Times and her composition “thoroughly Schubertian” by the Wall Street Journal.

Connery is the host and producer of...

Yao Chen

Composer, Professor of Composition at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing

In works of various dimensions, Yao Chen seeks paths toward transcendence. His music, always ritual in nature, eschews contemporary vogues and instead aims at a timelessness and an otherness that exists beyond the standard categories – music for the moment, but also music for then and music for what lies ahead. Whether his work is brittle or forceful, or often both in coexistence, melancholy and a sense of wonder are recurring characteristics, as is an internationalist orientation grounded in a quest for maximal musical meaning. His perceptions on musical time, timbre,...

Chris Chafe

Musician, Scientist, Director of the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics

Chris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). In 2019, he was International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies The University of British Columbia, Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Torino, and Edgard-Varèse Guest Professor at the Technical University of Berlin. At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he has pursued methods for digital synthesis and...

Delia Casadei

ARC Fellow, Scholar, Critic, and Translator

Delia Casadei is a scholar, critic, and translator. She was Assistant Professor of Musicology at UC Berkeley from 2017-2023, and is now based in Pisa, Italy, where she works as a freelance music critic, lecturer, and translator. She obtained her PhD in Musicology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 with a thesis entitled The Crowded Voice: Speech, Music and Community in Milan, 1955-1974. Between 2015-17 she was a junior research fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 2021/2022 she was a...

Edmund Campion

Composer, Performer, Collaborating Artist, and Professor of Music Composition and Director at the Center for New Music & Audio Technologies at UC Berkeley

Edmund Campion (b. 1957) is Professor of Music Composition and Director at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley. An internationally recognized composer, performer, and collaborating artist for over 30 years, he continues to produce highly personal music that often mixes emerging technologies with acoustic instruments and electronic sounds. In March of 2024, Professor Campion was a guest composer at the Festival Electrocution in Brest, France, where David Milnes and the Ensemble Sillages premiered Le Sillage(WAKE...

Jindong Cai

Director of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, Professor of Music and Arts at Bard College

Conductor Jindong Cai is director of the US-China Music Institute, professor of music and arts at Bard College, and associate conductor of The Orchestra Now. Over his 30-year career in the United States, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, scholar of Western classical music in China, and leading advocate of music from across Asia. Born in Beijing, Cai received his early musical training in China, where he learned to play violin and piano. He came to the United States for his graduate studies at the New England Conservatory and the College-...

Sarah Cahill

Pianist, Radio Host, Writer, Producer

Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times and “a brilliant and charismatic advocate for modern and contemporary composers” by Time Out New York, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. ...

Lisa Bielawa

Composer, Producer, and Performer

Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition, who takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. In 1997, Bielawa co-...

Tarek Atoui

Artist, Composer

Tarek Atoui is an artist and composer working within the realm of sound performance and composition. His work challenges traditional ways of perceiving sound and focuses on the medium’s ability to act as a catalyst for human interaction, while exploring its relation to current social, historical and political realities. Atoui’s work often revolves around large-scale, collaborative performances that stem from extensive research into music history and anthropology. He engineers complex and inventive instruments, arranges and curates concerts, performances, listening...

Kim Addonizio

Writer, Music-Maker, and Maquisard

Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/music CDS: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, the companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a...