On My Feet Again

David Wolfson is currently enrolled in the PhD program in composition at Rutgers University. He is enjoying an eclectic career, having composed opera, musical theatre, touring children’s musicals, and incidental music for plays; choral music, band music, orchestral music, chamber music, art songs, and music for solo piano; comedy songs, cabaret songs and one memorable score for an amusement park big-headed-costumed-character show. His CD Seventeen Windows, featuring the solo piano suite Seventeen Windows and the Sonata for Cello and Piano, is available from Albany Records, iTunes and Amazon.com.

Lauren McCall is a composer and from Atlanta, Georgia. She studied music education and science education receiving her master’s degrees from the University of Georgia in 2010. Currently Lauren is a member of the Southeastern Composers League, the American Composers Forum, and the International Clarinet Association.

She has had compositions performed in Morehead, Kentucky at a Contemporary Piano Festival, in Eugene, Oregon at the Oregon Bach Festival Composers’ Symposium, and in Lakeland Florida at Florida Southern College for the Grady Rayam Prize in Sacred Music. She has also participated in the Atlanta 24 hour Opera Project twice, and her composition Feathers was read by the Marian Anderson String Quartet. Recently Lauren was a composer in residence for the Grady Rayam Prize in Sacred Music, and this past year she was commissioned by Karen Slack to write a new collection of art songs titled The Amending Life of a Resolute Spirit.

Many of Lauren's compositions draw influence from literary works, visual arts, nature, folktales, history, various cultural music, and travels. She enjoys writing music that tells stories and brings to life history.

David Evan Thomas has been honored with two McKnight Foundation Fellowships, an Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and commissions from the Minnesota Orchestra and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Born in Rochester, New York in 1958, Thomas studied at Northwestern University, Eastman School of Music, and with Dominick Argento at the University of Minnesota. His music is published by ECS, MorningStar, Augsburg Fortress and many others.

Thomas lives in Minneapolis.

Composer and songwriter Jonathan Russ is dedicated to exploring the space between contemporary classical music, indie rock, and musical theater. Jonathan was recently featured in a portrait concert by the American Chamber Ensemble, with whom he is currently Composer-In-Residence. He has worked with the Ludovico Ensemble, Quartetto Apeiron, and members of the JACK Quartet and International Contemporary Ensemble, as well as clarinetist Stanley Drucker, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Beattie, and pianists Amir Khosrowpour and Marilyn Lehman. Jonathan has participated in the New Music On The Point Festival, Cortona Sessions, soundSCAPE Festival, and highSCORE Festival.

He is the 2014 winner of the MA-ASTA Composition Competition and a winner of the Boston Conservatory Choral Composers' Competition.

A Long Island native, Jonathan holds a BA from Brown University in music and international relations and an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in musical theater writing. He has studied composition with Dalit Warshaw and Andy Vores and has had lessons with Christopher Theofanidis, Dmitri Tymoczko, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Marcela Pavia, Gabriela Lena Frank, Forrest Pierce, and Chester Biscardi.

Jonathan is currently studying with Curtis Hughes at The Boston Conservatory, where he is pursuing a master’s in composition.

Mary Ann Joyce-Walter was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and received her B.A. from Fontbonne University, St. Louis, and her M.A. and PhD in theory and composition from Washington University, St. Louis. After graduate school, she moved to the New York City area where she has remained.

She is an active composer of instrumental, choral and vocal music, and retired as Professor Emerita in 2013 at Manhattanville College.

Her works have been performed at international festivals and concerts through the United States, Europe, and Russia. Mary Ann’s works are published by Pioneer Drama, Ars Nova, Scribner & Sons, and Gold Branch; her pieces are available on CDs from Ravello Records, Capstone and Pioneer Drama. Her recent recordings are Cantata for the Children of Terezin (2012), and Immortal Diamond (2015), both released by Parma Recordings. She is a member of ASCAP, NACUSA, American Music Center, Society of Composers, and New York Women Composers.

Art songs by Norman Mathews have been performed at the Kennedy Center.

Ye Are Many—They Are Few, Cantata for a Just World, for four singers and piano, received a Puffin Foundation grant and was premiered at The Chicago Cultural Center by Vox3 in May 2014. Sonnet No. 61 (part of a 3-sonnet cycle to Shakespeare, entitled Love’s Not Time’s Fool) for mixed choir, piano, and oboe obbligato won the American Composers’ Forum 2011 VocalEssence Award.

As composer-in-residence at Shorter University, Mathews was commissioned to write a chamber opera, Flights of the Heart, which was performed by faculty members on a concert devoted exclusively to his music.

Songs of the Poet, to Walt Whitman poetry, was premiered in Germany by Munich Opera’s Gregory Wiest, who recorded the work for Capstone Records (CPS 8646). The cycle was featured on an American Composers Orchestra program entitled Whitman and Music.

Mathews’ one-woman musical play about Dorothy Parker, You Might as Well Live, has been performed by Michele Pawk (Tony Award) and Broadway star Karen Mason (Drama-Desk Award).

He is currently writing both the libretto and music for a full-length opera based on the Giovanni Verga story La Lupa, initially slated to be composed by Puccini.

Mathews earned a B.A. in music from Hunter College and an M.A. Degree in music from New York University.

Carrie Magin traverses a wide emotional range with her fresh and universal voice. This “wonderful emerging composer” (conductor Brett Scott) creates music described as having “an appealing lyrical quality” (mezzo-soprano Lynne McMurtry) and “playful and fun, ...then filled with such a sad sense of longing and deep contemplation...so beautiful,” (poet Shannon Rayne).

Though her past work focused mainly on instrumental music (commissions by the Akron Youth Symphony, percussionist Kenyon Williams, and the Promethean Saxophone Quartet), Carrie Magin’s recent interests revolve around the relationship between sung or spoken text and music (recent commissions by the University of Cincinnati CCM Chorale, the UC Women’s Chorus, bass trombonist Russ Zokaites, and the Immanuel Presbyterian Choir in Cincinnati, OH).

Past honors include a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship and a Strategic Opportunity Stipend from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In June of 2014, Ms. Magin was a Composer-in-Residence with The Fiati 5 (Chamber Music Campania in Italy).

Carrie Magin holds degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at Houghton College in upstate NY.