Ty Bouque writes about opera: its slippery histories, its sensual bodies, and what to do with the genre if the genre might be dead. They sing as one-fourth of the new music quartet Loadbang and can be found making noise with other ensembles around the world. They live in Detroit with an accordion that they do not know how to play but would very much like to. More writing can be found at VAN Magazine, and on Substack: @preposterousreading.
Edward Campbell is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Aberdeen. He has published widely on aspects of contemporary music and aesthetics, including historical, analytical and aesthetic approaches to European modernism, as well as the music and writings of Pierre Boulez, critical theory and contemporary European modernism. He is the author of Boulez, Music and Philosophy (CUP, 2010) and Music after Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2013), contributing co-editor and translator of Pierre Boulez Studies (CUP, 2016) and The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia (CUP, 2021) and is contributing editor of Pierre Boulez in Context (forthcoming CUP, 2025).
Christian Carey is Associate Professor of Music at Rider University, where he teaches in the Music Composition, History, and Theory Department of Westminster Choir College. He has composed eighty works and his research has been published in TEMPO, Perspectives of New Music, The Open Space, and Intégral. His chapter on narrativity in Elliott Carter is published in a proceedings by Editions Delatour.
Edward Cooper is a composer and musicologist based completing a PhD at the University of Leeds, supervised by Scott McLaughlin and Martin Iddon and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, through the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities. His practice considers the listening body as, simultaneously acting as both a boundary and transmitter to itself, exploring various musical liminalities. As such, his work is often very quiet and fragmentary.
Jonathan De Souza is an Associate Professor in the Don Wright Faculty of Music, an Associate Member of the Centre for Brain and Mind, and a Core Member of the Centre for Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His book, Music at Hand: Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition, received a 2020 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory and he is a co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music.
Max Erwin is a musicologist, composer, and lecturer at the University of Malta. He received his PhD from the University of Leeds, funded by a Leeds Anniversary Research Scholarship, in 2020. His research is primarily focused on musical avant-gardes and their institutional networks, and his writing has appeared in Twentieth-Century Music, Perspectives of New Music, Music & Literature, TEMPO, Revue belge de Musicologie, Nuove Musiche and Cacophony.
Roger Heaton is Emeritus Professor of Music at Bath Spa University. He performs with groups such as the Kreutzer Quartet and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble and was Music Director of Rambert Dance Company and Clarinet Professor at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik during the 1990s. Recent recordings include works by Trandafilovski, Radulescu and Boulez. He has contributed to the Cambridge History of Musical Performance and a chapter on Bryars’ music for dance is forthcoming.
Björn Heile is Professor of Music (post-1900) at the University of Glasgow. He has published widely on new music, experimental music theatre and jazz, focusing in particular on embodied cognition, global modernism and cosmopolitanism. His latest book is Musical Modernism in Global Perspective: Entangled Histories on a Shared Planet (Cambridge University Press). He was Principal Investigator of the research network ‘Towards a Somatic Music: Experimental Music Theatre and Theories of Embodied Cognition’, funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Alex Huddleston is a composer, graphic designer, and artist currently living in Buffalo, New York. His music occupies a liminal space in which serendipitous relationships emerge and collapse in a play of familiarity and otherness. Centred on themes of alienation, sorrow, anxiety, schizophrenia, and fear, his work embodies a singular affect - there is too much and too little, it is too fast and too slow, it is elegant and awkward, it makes too much sense and makes no sense.
Martin Iddon is a composer and musicologist. His research concentrates on post-war music in West Germany and North America. His books John Cage and David Tudor, John Cage and Peter Yates, New Music at Darmstadt, and the Cambridge Companion to Serialism are all published by Cambridge University Press, while John Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra, co-authored with Philip Thomas, is published by Oxford University Press. His music appears on three CDs on the Another Timbre label, pneuma, Sapindales, and Naiads. He is Professor of Music and Aesthetics at the University of Leeds.
Oli Jan is a composer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has degrees in both linguistics and music composition and his works have been performed at Japanese Shinto festivals, continental European film festivals and Scottish art festivals as well as in concert settings. In 2017 he received a recommendation from Sir James MacMillan and an endorsement from Arts Council England for his residence in the UK as an exceptional talent artist. Since 2018 he has held the LKAS PhD studentship at University of Glasgow, where he focuses on experimental music theatre and embodied cognitive research under the supervision of Björn Heile.
Evan Johnson is an American composer whose music focuses on extremes of density and of reticence, of difficulty and of sparsity, and on hiding itself. His work has been performed by leading ensembles and soloists throughout North America, Europe and beyond, at American and international festivals of contemporary music and at venues such as Miller Theatre and Wigmore Hall. The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships in composition, he is also active as a writer on music for both specialist and general audiences. http://www.evanjohnson.info.
Ben Lunn has forged himself a unique position within the new music landscape. As a composer, Lunn's music reflects the material world around him, connecting to his North-Eastern heritage or how disability impacts the world around him or his working-class upbringing. Alongside this, he has become renowned for his championship of others. He has won accolades from the Scottish Music Awards (2023 and 2020) and in 2024 his concerto History Needs… was shortlisted for an RPS award.
Kate Milligan is a Western Australian composer, designer, and musicologist currently based in London. With a background in feminist musicology, her work critically examines the entanglement of social and natural phenomena. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art, and an MMus and BA(Hons) from The University of Western Australia. Kate has been commissioned by electro-acoustic ensembles internationally, and her writing is published in both academic and popular contexts.
Adam Possener is a composer and researcher based in London. He is currently an MRes student in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, where he is supervised by Professor Georgina Born, and a Student Research Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. His research explores the materialisation of identity and peoplehood in contemporary Jewish music.
Tim Rutherford-Johnson is author of The Music of Liza Lim (Wildbird) and Music after the Fall (University of California Press), and co-author, with Stephen Graham, Tom Perchard and Holly Rogers, of Twentieth-Century Music in the West (Cambridge University Press).
Jane Stanley is an Australian-born, Glasgow-based composer. She received her PhD from the University of Sydney and was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. Her music has been performed at Tanglewood, ISCM World Music Days, and Gaudeamus Music Week. Her work has also been released by Delphian Records, ABC Classics, Tall Poppies and Karnatic Lab. In July 2024 Jane's first portrait CD, featuring performances by The Hermes Experiment and Red Note Ensemble, will be released on Delphian Records. She is a represented composer at the Australian Music Centre and her music is also published by Composers Edition and the Scottish Music Centre.
Joanna Ward is a composer, performer, and researcher from Newcastle upon Tyne. She is interested in experimenting with scores and with sound, and her practice ranges across genre and between media, usually in collaboration with other performers and artists. She is presently interested in ‘anti- work’ utopias and what they would mean for compositional ethics and aesthetics. She performs contemporary and experimental musics for voice, as well as exploring songwriting and improvisation; solo, with collaborators, and with experimental collective Musarc.
Alastair White is a Scottish composer and writer. His work has been described as ‘a whole new exciting genre of art’ (Radio 3), ‘ambitious, iconoclastic’ (The Stage) and an attempt ‘to challenge long-held assumptions about the material world and to illuminate the performative nature of matter itself’ (Opera Today). Recipient of the Tait Memorial Trust Award and shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music in 2019 and 2020, a Creative Edinburgh Award (2019), an Ivan Juritz Prize (2023) and The Stage Awards (2024), Alastair teaches musicology at the University of Surrey and holds a PhD from Goldsmiths. His scores are published by UMP.
Julie Zhu is a composer, artist, and carillonneur. She is the recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for her interdisciplinary work, visual and aural, that has since been exhibited and performed internationally. Zhu studied at Yale University (mathematics), the Royal Carillon School, Hunter College (MFA art), and is currently pursuing a DMA in composition at Stanford University.
