Biographies

 


Sara Bakker

Sara Bakker is an Assistant Professor of Music at Utah State University. She studies rhythm and meter in music since 1900, focusing on issues of pattern-construction, formal organization, and text-setting. Her work on the piano music of György Ligeti shows how subtle changes in rhythmic patterns result in pieces with drastically different formal and aesthetic outcomes. Her chapters in Form and Process in Music (Cambridge) and György Ligeti Symposium (forthcoming, University of Rochester) expand on this research. She is a reviewer for Oxford University Press and currently serves on the Society for Music Theory’s Committee on the Status of Women.

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Amy Bauer

Amy Bauer is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches courses on music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, popular music and music aesthetics. She has published articles and book chap­ters on the music of Ligeti, Messiaen, Carlos Chávez, David Lang, spectral music, and the philosophy and reception of modernist music and opera. Her monographs include Ligeti’s Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (Ashgate, 2011) , and György Ligeti’s Cultural Identities (Routledge: 2017), co-edited with Márton Kerékfy, and The Oxford Handbook of Spectral and Post-Spectral Music, co-edited with Liam Cagney and Will Mason (Oxford, forthcoming).

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Joseph Cadagin

Joseph Cadagin is a doctoral candidate in musicology at Stanford University, where his research focuses on opera after 1960 and the works of György Ligeti. Currently, he is completing a dissertation that examines settings of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books by Ligeti and his student, Korean composer Unsuk Chin. He is an avid harpsichordist as well as a music critic whose reviews appear regularly in Opera News, San Francisco Classical Voice, and Fanfare. He holds a B.A. in music from the University of Michigan in his hometown of Ann Arbor.

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Clifton Callender

Clifton Callender is Professor of Composition at Florida State University, teaching composition, music theory, and programming and computation. In Fall 2018 he will be in residence at the Copland House, composing an orchestral setting of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poem for the 2014 United Nations Climate Summit, Dear Matafele Peinam. His works are recorded on the Capstone, New Ariel, and Navona labels. Callender has published in Science, Perspectives of New Music, Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Online, and Intégral and serves on the editorial boards of Perspectives of New Music and the Journal of Mathematics and Music, for which he served as Co-Editor-in-Chief.

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Anthony Cheung

Anthony Cheung is a composer and pianist. His music reveals an interest in the ambiguity of sound sources and the subtle transformation and manipulation of timbre allied with harmony. It is also strongly stimulated by improvised traditions. Representations of space and place are common themes in his work, achieved through innovations in spatialization, orchestration, allusion, and recorded sound. His work has been featured by ensembles and festivals worldwide, and he was most recently the Composer Fellow of the Cleveland Orchestra. Formerly a Junior Fellow at Harvard, he received a DMA at Columbia, and has been teaching at the University of Chicago since 2013.

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Berthold Hoeckner

Berthold Hoeckner is a music historian specializing in 19th- and 20th-century music. Research interests include aesthetics, Adorno, music and literature, film music and visual culture, the psychology and neuroscience of music. Awards and fellowships include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1998), a Humboldt Research Fellowship (2001/2), a Mellon New Directions Fellowship (2006/7), and a Faculty Fellowship at the Franke Institute of the Humanities (2012/13). He is also a Lead Researcher in a three-year research project on somatic wisdom at the Center of Social and Cognitive Neuroscience. Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment, was published by Princeton University Press in 2002; Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music by Routledge in 2006. He has taught at Chicago since 1994.

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Jennifer Iverson

Jennifer Iverson is an Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is a scholar of twentieth-century music, with a special emphasis on electronic music, avant-gardism, sound studies, and disability studies. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and previously taught at the University of Iowa. During the 2015-16 year she was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Her book, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

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Noah Kahrs

Noah Kahrs is an MA student in Composition at the Eastman School of Music. He received his BA in Music and Mathematics from the University of Chicago, visiting all 77 Chicago Community Areas in the process. As a composer, he is interested in alternate tuning systems and their collisions with equal temperament, as mediated via various psychoacoustic phenomena. As a scholar, he is interested in the tension between formal planning and intuition in post-serial music.

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Benjamin Levy

Benjamin Levy is an Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary music, with a primary focus on György Ligeti and other avant-garde composers who use texture and timbre as structural elements in their music. He has published articles in journals including Perspectives of New Music, Twentieth-Century Music, and The Contemporary Music Review, and his book Metamorphosis in Music: The Compositions of György Ligeti in the 1950s and 1960s was published with Oxford University Press last fall.

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Joshua Banks Mailman

Joshua Banks Mailman has been teaching music at Columbia University, NYU, U.C. Santa Barbara, and University of Alabama, since earning his Ph.D. in Music Theory from the Eastman School in 2010. He researches form from flux: dynamic form. He creates interactive audio-visual computer music and writes on analysis of music of Schoenberg, Crawford Seeger, Carter, Babbitt, Ligeti, Lucier, Ashley, Grisey and others, as well as on issues of metaphor, narrative, computational modeling, improvisation, and phenomenology. His writings appear in Music Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of Sonic Studies, Tempo, Psychology of Music, Music Theory Online, Open Space Magazine, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and Perspectives of New Music. www.joshuabanksmailman.com.

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Sam Pluta

Sam Pluta is a composer and electronics performer whose work explores the intersections between instrumental forces, reactive computerized sound worlds, traditionally notated scores, improvisation, audio-visuals, psycho-acoustic phenomena, and installation-like soundscapes. He received his DMA from Columbia University and is now Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

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Max Silva

Max Silva is a PhD candidate in music theory at the University of Chicago. He thinks about late 20th and 21st century modernist music (especially Boulez, Ligeti, and spectralism) in relation to analytical methodology, phenomenology and perception, ethics and ideology, and pleasure. His dissertation draws on analytic philosophy of mind to extend Steven Rings’s qualia-oriented transformational techniques for post-tonal music. His article on Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain and ambivalence regarding political music is forthcoming in Twentieth Century Music, and upcoming talks explore analogies between Haas’s use of overtone qualia and sensation play in BDSM.

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Imri Talgam

A versatile performer of both contemporary and traditional repertoire, Imri Talgam has played throughout the world. Talgam is the winner of the 11th Concours International de Piano d’Orléans (2014) and a recent recipient of the Yvar Mikhashoff foundation award (2017). He performs as soloist and in collaboration with groups including Ensemble Modern and the Israeli Contemporary players.

His recent CD of works by Nancarrow, Kagel, Stockhausen and Furrer was released by Solstice (France) to critical acclaim. Talgam is a graduate of the Juilliard School, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.

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Bianca Ţiplea Temeş

Bianca Ţiplea Temeş is Reader Ph.D. of Music Theory at Gh. Dima Academy in Cluj/Romania, visiting professor at the Universities of Oviedo, Livorno, Poznan, Madrid, and Dublin. She also served as head of the Artistic Department of the Transylvania Philharmonic. She received her PhDs from both the University of Bucharest and Universidad de Oviedo/Spain, she has been awarded a research grant from the Paul Sacher Foundation and two DAAD grants (Berlin, Hamburg). She visited the Univiersity of Cambridge/U.K. on an Erasmus basis and in 2016 became the founder of the Festival “A Tribute to György Ligeti in his Native Transylvania”.

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Naomi Woo

Naomi Woo is a pianist, conductor, and researcher, with a particular interest in contemporary music. Performance highlights in 2017-2018 include conducting Holst’s chamber opera Savitri (ADC Theatre), performing Carnival of the Animals alongside pianist Tom Poster (West Road Concert Hall) and assisting conductors Sir Mark Elder and Jac Van Steen with the Cambridge University Orchestra. Currently a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD candidate in musicology at Clare College, Naomi also holds a BA in mathematics & philosophy from Yale University, and degrees in piano performance from the Yale School of Music and Université de Montréal.

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