Click on a Name to View Artist Bio
(Names are listed alphabetically by last or group name):

• NEEL KANT AGRAWAL, tabla and doumbek

• ARIOSE SINGERS, chorus
• AKINDELE ‘AKIVA’ OLANREWAJU BANKOLE, tenor
• TANDY BEAL, choreographer and dancer
• LINDA BURMAN-HALL, harpsichord
• LUCIANO CHESSA, Vietnamese dan bau
• COLLEEN DONOVAN, Soprano
• DENISE GALLANT, video
• DAVID GRISMAN, mandolin
• TIMBA HARRIS, violin and trumpet
• SHOKO HIKAGE, koto
• LUDI HINRICHS, trombone and didgeridoo
• JIM KASSIS, timpani
• DAN LANDRY, tenor
• MIKE MARSHALL, mandolin
• MICHAEL MCGUSHIN, director of Ariose Singers
• TAIT REED, electric guitar
• THOMAS SCHULTZ, piano
• DAG WEISER AND LESLIE MURRAY, visual artists
• WILLIAM WINANT, percussion
• THE HAPPINESS CHOIR, directed by LORI RIVERA

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• NEEL KANT AGRAWAL, tabla and doumbek, was born in East Lansing, Michigan in 1983. He has been playing music since he was a child. Neel was the section leader of the Michigan State University Drumline, where he received two tenor drum awards from Percussive Arts Society. Neel enjoys fusing his own experimental style with diasporic rhythms. He holds a J.D. from Michigan State, where he focused on human rights, and now works at the National ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project. You can find him gardening and riding his beach cruiser around town. He dedicates his music to his brother and family.




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• ARIOSE SINGERS, is an a capella chorus that performs a varied repertoire of vocal music.They are located in Santa Cruz, California, drawing skilled singers from the community and nearby universities. Their repertoire focuses on master works for small groups from the ancient to the modern. Ariose was started in 2002 by Leta Miller of the University of California at Santa Cruz, and our director starting in the 2006-7 season is Michael McGushin.

  
  For more info, please visit: ariosesingers.org




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AKINDELE ‘AKIVA’ OLANREWAJU BANKOLE, a German-born Nigerian-American, was introduced to Music theory under the teaching of his uncle Ayo Bankole (1935 - 1976) in the 1970s in Lagos. The unfortunate death of his uncle in 1976 brought his musical learning to a stop. However, in his early 20s, he studied Music formally at Sacramento State University in California, under Professor Luis Clayson (Dramatic Tenor). As a Tenor himself, Bankole began formal singing with the Sacramento State University Opera Workshop where he had his Opera debut in the lead role of ‘Smiley’ in the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, a story by Mark Twain. Bankole later joined Sacramento City Opera and thereafter, Opera San Jose. As a composer, Bankole writes his vocal lyrics in several languages, including Yoruba (his native language). He has written several arts songs; piano, vocal, choral, and orchestral works; and is currently working on an Opera Lola’s Wedding. In 2010, Bankole composed four new orchestral works, including ‘HaMakom’ a five-movement piece, dedicated to his mother Dr (Mrs.) Agnes Yetunde Bankole, who died on the 21st of December, 2009. As part of his compositional repertoire, Bankole combines his traditional Yoruba tribe tonal and rhythmic melodies with western classical genre, which he calls “Classical Fusion”.




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• TANDY BEAL is a local dancer, instructor, and choreographer. She has organized a number of productions over the years with Tandy Beal & Company, including regular performances of a contemporary dance version of the Nutcracker, which originally premiered in 1982. She currently is also Creative Director of the Pickle Family Circus and StarStuff Productions. In the past she has worked with Bobby McFerrin, she choreographed 65 life-sized puppets for Frank Zappa, produced tailor-made corporate events for Pixar, SF Symphony and Carl Sagan (NASA). She also choreographed all the major characters in Tim Burton's “Nightmare Before Christmas”.

  
  

  For more info, please visit: starstuffproductions.com




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• LINDA BURMAN-HALL, the American harpsichordist, cultural musicologist and early music producer, studied at the College of Letters and Science of University of California in Los Angeles (B.A. in Music with Honors), Princeton University (M.F.A. Music in Theory and Musicology, and Ph.D. Music in Theory and Musicology). She had postdoctoral research at the Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of Amsterdam. While approaching early keyboard literature from an independent perspective, she has studied with Alan Curtis and Dutch scholar-performer Gustav Leonhardt.

  Linda Burman-Hall is active in research on performance practices, improvisation and in the history of music. As a scholar-performer and Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she relates regional styles and fashions in music to cultural context, and describes, analyzes, and performs historically- and culturally- informed realizations of musical materials. Her academic appointments included: Instructor (world music) at the Foothill College, Los Altos, California; Lecturer in Music (theory and ethnomusicology) at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is now Professor of Music (theory, ethnomusicology, early music) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her teaching areas are: Early keyboards (harpsichord, chamber organ, fortepiano), figured bass and chamber music; Asian and Indonesian musics (introductory course and and graduate seminars in ethnomusicology); Indonesian Gamelan (faculty coordinator for the entire program and director, Balinese Gamelan Angklung); western theory and musicianship (all levels) and seminar in analysis; graduate thesis guidance; supervised teaching.

  Linda Burman-Hall has performed a wide range of music, from works of the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen to world premieres of multi-cultural, experimental and computer music. In early music she has specialized in solo and ensemble music for 17th and 18th century keyboards (harpsichord, organ, and fortepiano). She has performed throughout the USA and in Canada, Holland, Germany and Indonesia, with delayed broadcast on NPR and local media stations. Her festival appearances include the Carmel Bach Festival, E. Nakamichi Baroque Festival, Berkeley Early Music Festival, Aston Magna, and American Musicological Society. For performance research and recordings, she has also received individual and team grants from National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship (1982), and University of California Pacific Rim Research Program. She has performed on the East coast and in Jakarta, Indonesia, during her 14th musicological research session abroad.

  Linda Burman-Hall has been featured in concerts at the Getty, de Young, and Huntington Museums, on local and national radio. She has performed and recorded with celebrated performers of early music and California artists, including Judith Nelson, Max van Egmond, Randall Wong, Elizabeth Blumenstock, Leta Miller, Anner Bylsma, Amy Brodo, John Dornenburg, Roland Hutchinson, and Nicole Paiement, and appeared with groups such as Philharmonia Baroque, Chanticleer, America's premiere vocal ensemble, American Baroque Ensemble, Musica Pacifica, and the recently-formed group Lux Musica of which she is a founder. In contemporary music, she has performed with artists as diverse as Steve Reich and Meredith Monk, and has commissioned, premiered and recorded new music by contemporary Indonesian composers and by her colleagues at UC-Santa Cruz (David Jones, David Cope - EMI, and Robert Strizich).

  Linda Burman-Hall is founder and Artistic Director of the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival. Under her direction, the Baroque Festival has presented more than 175 concerts in twenty-two years, and has received numerous grants, including National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Council funds. For this contribution to the local community, the Santa Cruz, County Arts Commission has recently named her 1994 'Artist of the Year'.

  Linda Burman-Hall's Baroque chamber music recordings are available on Sonic Arts, Musical Heritage Society, Centaur, Helicon, Wildboar and Golden Horn labels. Her first solo release, the complete harpsichord music of Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, was released in July, 1986 by Musical Heritage. Recent recordings of chamber music include three volumes of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach sonatas for flute and continuo and works for solo and multiple flutes by Boismortier (Centaur and Musical Heritage CD's with Leta Miller), and Geminiani's sonatas for violoncello and continuo (with Anner Bylsma). Albums devoted to 17th century French harpsichord and organ music by Jacques Hardel, Etienne Richard, and Joseph de la Barre have also been recorded for release on Wildboar.

  Linda Burman-Hall received the following awards: Student Alumni Council 'Favorite Teacher' Award; Community Service Recognition Award, UC Affiliates; Artist-of-the Year' Award, Santa Cruz County Arts Commission. She is a member of: Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for Balinese Studies, Phi Beta Kappa.




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• LUCIANO CHESSA, as a composer, pianist, and musical saw / Vietnamese dan bau soloists, has been active in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. Luciano Chessa received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California at Davis. Previously, at the Conservatory of Bologna, he earned a D.M.A. in piano and a M.A. in composition. His areas of research interest include 20th-century music, experimental music and late 14th-century music, and he has been interviewed at the CBS (KPIX/KBHK) television channel as an expert on Italian hip-hop and by the British BBC as Luigi Russolo's foremost scholar. His scholarly writings can be found in MIT Press' Leonardo and Musica e Storia, the Journal of the Levi Foundation, Venice. He is currently working on the first English monograph dedicated to Luigi Russolo, to be published by the University of California Press. Dr. Chessa is also active as a composer and performer. His scores (including a large work for orchestra and double children choir, and a piano and three turntables duo) are published by RAI TRADE, and many are produced with visual artist Terry Berlier. Since 1999 he has been musical program coordinator for the Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco, where he produces concerts of Italian contemporary music.

  Furthermore, Chessa has been performing Futurist sound poetry for well over 10 years. His reading of Italian poetry to accompany a performance of the Grammy Award Nominated New Century Chamber Orchestra in San Francisco's Herbst Theatre in 2000 was granted with excellent reviews in the San Francisco press.

  His research on Italian Futurism, which he has presented and published internationally, has shown for the first time the occult relationship between Luigi Russolo's intonarumori and Leonardo da Vinci's musical machines. He is currently working on Luigi Russolo Futurista. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult the first monograph dedicated to Russolo and his Art of Noises, to be published by the University of California Press in Spring 2010.

  Chessa has taught and lectured at St. John's College of Oxford, Columbia University, Sydney's and Melbourne's Conservatories and Universities, the Conservatory of Music in Bologna, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, EMPAC (RPI), among others. He currently teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and collaborates with SF's Italian Cultural Institute. His music is published by RAI TRADE, the Italian National Broadcast Channels' music publishing company.




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• COLLEEN DONOVAN, Soprano
  For info, please contact New Music Works at: publicity@newmusicworks.org




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• DENISE GALLANT, video, is a national award- winning video artist with 35+ years experience in video creation and editing, live video production, and graphic design for video. Graduated UCLA Film School, Cum Laude, and UCSC in Communication, Denise has worked as a video artist in both the commercial and fine art worlds: editing with NBC and CBS, graphic design with ABC. Awards include an American Film Institute Grant and Billboard Music Award for Best Independent Video.




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  DAVID GRISMAN, mandolinist, has been a guiding force in the evolving world of acoustic music for nearly half a century. His musical range is wide and deep - embracing many styles, genres and traditions.

  An acoustic pioneer and innovator, David forged a unique personal artistic path, skillfully combining elements of the great American music/art forms - jazz and bluegrass with many international flavors and sensibilities to create his own distinctive idiom - “Dawg” music (the nickname given him by Jerry Garcia.)  In doing so, he's inspired new generations of acoustic string musicians, while creating his own niche in contemporary music.

  Grisman discovered the mandolin as a teenager growing up in New Jersey, where he met and became a disciple of mandolinist/folklorist Ralph Rinzler. Despite warnings from his piano teacher that it wasn't a “real” instrument, David learned to play the mandolin in the style of Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music. He took it to Greenwich Village where he studied English at NYU, while immersed in the proliferating folk music scene of the early 1960s.

  In 1963 Grisman made his first recordings both as an artist (Even Dozen Jug Band - Elektra) and producer (Red Allen, Frank Wakefield and the Kentuckians - Folkways.) In 1966 Red Allen offered David his first job with an authentic bluegrass band, the Kentuckians. Grisman began composing original tunes and playing with other urban bluegrass contemporaries like Peter Rowan and Jerry Garcia, with whom he would later form Old & in the Way.

  David's interests spread to jazz in 1967, while playing in a folk-rock group, Earth Opera. A failed attempt at learning to play alto sax turned him into a student of jazz musicianship and theory. His burgeoning career as a session musician gave him experience playing many types of music and opportunities to stretch the boundaries of the mandolin. His discography is filled with notables including Jerry Garcia, Stephane Grappelli, the Grateful Dead, John Hartford, Del McCoury, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, Earl Scruggs, James Taylor and Doc Watson.

  Dawg's instrumental style found a home in 1974 when he formed the Great American Music Band with fiddler Richard Greene. “Nothing against singers,” said David, “but it became apparent to me that I could play 90 minutes without one. Besides, Elvis never called.” Within a year, David met guitar wizard Tony Rice, who moved to California where they started rehearsing a new group, the David Grisman Quintet (DGQ,) which also included violinist Darol Anger and bassist/mandolinist Todd Phillips. Since then the DGQ has featured such stellar notables as Svend Asmussen, Hal Blaine, Vassar Clements, Stephane Grappelli, Mike Marshall, Andy Statman and Frank Vignola. The current lineup includes bassist Jim Kerwin, flutist Matt Eakle, percussionist George Marsh, guitarist Grant Gordy and fiddler Mike Barnett (DGQ+).

  After recording for major and independent labels, David founded Acoustic Disc in 1990 and entered the most prolific period of his career, producing 67 critically acclaimed CDs (five of which were Grammy-nominated.) In 2010 he launched AcousticOasis.com, the first download website devoted to acoustic music.

  Recently Grisman has revisited his roots with the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience (DGBX). This very traditional group includes Keith Little on 5-string banjo, guitar and vocals, Jim Nunally on guitar and vocals, Chad Manning on fiddle, Samson Grisman on bass, with David on mandolin and vocals. Dawg also plays blues and old-time music with his old jugband-mate John Sebastian.

  David Grisman has always been a revolutionary. He has deeply influenced contemporary acoustic practicioners through his own musical explorations and with the continuing success of Acoustic Disc and Acoustic Oasis, has helped make artist-owned independent labels a viable force in today's music business.




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• TIMBA HARRIS is a violinist/violist, trumpet player, and composer. His professional musical interests span from contemporary chamber music to grinding death metal. He records and tours internationally with the groups Secret Chiefs 3, Master Musicians of Bukkake, and the Gyan Riley Trio (with Gyan and Scott Amendola/Ches Smith) and performs with various temporary and permanent New Music ensembles. He also contributes composition, arranging, recording, and/or performance for artists such as Sunno))), John Zorn and company, Grails, Eyvind Kang, and many others, including musical appearances on video games and independent films. Timba has also been fortunate to travel in Romania and other faraway lands to pursue his fascination with Eastern European folk music. He currently lives in Seattle, Washington where he enjoys the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest, cooking, and spending time with his lovely wife. (photo credit: Kris Arnold)




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• SHOKO HIKAGE, koto, began her koto playing at the age of three, studying with Chizuga Kimura of the Ikuta-ryu Sokyoku Seigen Kai. With this foundation of Japanese traditional music, Shoko has expanded the repertoire and performance of the koto by incorporating components of Korean and Western experimental music. She has recorded extensively, both in her native country and in the US. She currently resides in San Francisco, where she keeps a busy schedule of teaching and performing.




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• LUDI HINRICHS, trombone and didgeridoo, has been assimilating sounds since he was two. A diverse musician, he works as a recording artist, educator, choir director, arranger, as well as leading his own jazz groups.

  Recent collaborations include the performance duo, “Night Messengers” with Terry Riley, and a music/poetry venture with Beat poet Gary Snyder performed at the prestigious Tokyo Summer Festival, in a read of his classic, “Mountains and Rivers without End.” His quintet has played for numerous Music in the Mountains concerts in the past, premiering new works.

  In 2007 Ludi was commissioned to write and perform the music for a one-hour NPR documentary, “Saving the Sierra” which is currently being aired over 158 radio stations.

  Hinrichs' most recent CD, “Kairos Kronos,” features meditations on piano, large gong, didjeridu, trombone and voice, and includes the tabla skills of Joe Fajen.

  He works with his wife, Karen, on many projects, and celebrates the beauty and intelligence of nature as the ultimate teacher.

  For more info, please visit: ludihinrichs.com




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• JIM KASSIS, Percussion, has been performing with New Music Works since he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1987 to study with San Francisco Symphony percussionist Anthony Cirone, Jim has been teaching and performing both drum set and classical percussion throughout northern California. Jim serves on the faculty at Santa Clara University and the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View. He has played with New Music Works Ensemble since 2002.




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• DAN LANDRY, tenor (photo & bio forthcoming)




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• MICHAEL MCGUSHIN, Director of Ariose Singers, is a professor of music at Cabrillo College and the coach/accompanist for the Music Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the conductor of the chamber choir Ariose and of Cabrillo's Westside Choir. From 2002-2004 he served as the director of the Full Spectrum Chorus of Santa Cruz. He has served as music director for a number of theater and opera productions in the Santa Cruz area. Some of these include Shakespeare Santa Cruz's productions of Princess and the Pea, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty; Cabrillo Stage's productions of The Fantasticks and The Music Man; to name a few. As a pianist, Michael is a long-time member of the New Music Works Ensemble for which he also serves as an artistic advisor, and has appeared with many performing groups in the Santa Cruz and Monterey County areas. He is a featured performer on recordings of chamber music by Paul Bowles, Lou Harrison and Germaine Tailleferre.

  
  For more info, please visit: ariosesingers.org

• TAIT REED, electric guitar, is a Santa Cruz native who has been active in bands and as a solo artist for the last 20 years. Recently relocating back to the USA after 4 years in Japan where Tait played with original Boredoms member Tabata Mitsuru founding the noise-rock band Noise Clinic and with Hide Fujiwara, Reo, and Donald The Nut in the band Oh My Cow!. He has also toured Japan and California, USA, with Steve Davis’ international hardcore noise band +DOG+. Now, back in Santa Cruz, Tait has re-formed Noise Clinic and is also a member of Sayaka Starlite and Power Strip.




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• MIKE MARSHALL, mandolin, is one of the world's most accomplished and versatile acoustic musicians, a master of mandolin, guitar and violin whose playing is as imaginative and adventurous as it is technically thrilling. Able to swing gracefully from jazz to classical to bluegrass to Latin styles, he puts his stamp on everything he plays with an unusually potent blend intellect and emotion ¨ a combination of musical skill and instinct rare in the world of American vernacular instrumentalists.

  Now living in Oakland, California, Mike grew up in Central Florida, where throughout his teens he played and taught bluegrass mandolin, fiddle and guitar. In 1979, at the age of 19, he was invited to join the original David Grisman Quintet. Mike has since been at the forefront of the acoustic music scene, playing on hundreds of acoustic-music recordings both as lead artist and ensemble performer. His 1982 Cd, Gator Strut, is a classic example of a new generation of bluegrass virtuoso instrumentalists forging new directions in this vital musical style.

  Throughout his career, Mike has performed and recorded with some of the top acoustic string instrumentalists in the world, including jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli, fiddle virtuoso Mark O'Connor, five-string banjo phenom Bela Fleck, bassist and MacArthur Fellowship winner Edgar Meyer, and classical violinist Joshua Bell.

  Mike and violinist Darol Anger formed a partnership in 1983, together they formed the band Montreux with pianist Barbara Higbie, bassist Michael Manring, and steel-drum virtuoso Andy Narell. The group released five recordings on the Windham Hill label and toured extensively throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe and Japan from 1984 to 1990.

  While continuing to be an active member of Montreux, in 1986 Mike founded a classical string quartet of mandolin family instruments -- two mandolins, mandola and mandocello. The Modern Mandolin Quartet released four recordings for Windham Hill Records that redefined the mandolin in a classical-music setting. In 1995, the Quartet made its Carnegie Hall debut and, in 1996, received a "Meet The Composer" grant from the Lila Wallace Foundation.

  Meanwhile, Mike had traveled to Brazil and begun his love affair with choro, an indigenous music that is to Brazil what bluegrass is to the U.S. He embarked on an in-depth study of the style that resulted in the CD "Brasil (Duets)." This recording showcases Mike at the top of his form as a mandolinist in duet settings, and features top instrumentalists such as Andy Narell, Bela Fleck, Edgar Meyer, bassist Michael Manring, and keyboardist and flutist Jovino Santos Neto.

  Mike has continued to push the boundaries of acoustic instrumental music. After tapping Fleck and Meyer for the “Brasil (Duets)î roject, he collaborated with the two masters on a 1997 Sony Classical release titled "Uncommon Ritual." The album charted on the Billboard Top Ten Classical Chart, where it remained for more than three months. The follwing year, the ensemble opened the Chamber Music Series 1998 season at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. Mike worked with Meyer yet again on the 1999 "Short Trip Home," another Sony Classical recording with Joshua Bell and fiddle-and-mandolin player Sam Bush.

  Mike has two holiday recordings to his credit: In 1998, he released "Midnight Clear," a solo guitar recording, and in 2000 he recorded "A Christmas Heritage" with banjo player Alison Brown, Darol Anger, mandolinist Tim O'Brien, Todd Phillips and pianist-composer Phil Aaberg. That band, called New Grange, also released an eponymous CD on Compass Records.

  Today Mike can be heard on the Car Talk soundtrack recording every week on NPR along with Earl Scruggs, David Grisman and Tony Rice. In addition Mike composed and recorded the theme music for the San Francisco based radio program Forum heard daily on KQED radio.

  Darol Anger remains an important collaborator for Mike. To date, they have released 6 albums as a duo on Compass and Windham Hill Records. Together they have also recorded under the moniker Psychograss with guitarist David Grier, banjo player Tony Trischka and bassist Todd Phillips.

  Over the past several years, Mike has also been collaborating Chris Thile, of Nickel Creek. The two mandolinists began playing together at festivals, and their performing together eventually evolved into a duo, recording their first album in 2003. The cd, entitled Into the Cauldron, is a mandolin duet project performed entirely on mandolin and mandocello. Into the Cauldron was released on Sugar Hill records, and was listed in the top ten of Amazon.com's favorite recordings for 2003.

  As he does so engagingly in music, Mike also applies his adventurous aesthetic to his two principal hobbies: wine making and food. Already known as one of the best cooks in the music business, he has been trading guitar lessons for cooking lessons from Michael Peternell a chef at Berkeley's Chez Panisse. “Cooking is quite a passion for me,î he told Bluegrass Now in a 2003 interview. “When I moved from Florida to join David Grisman's band here in California, it became very evident that I was too broke to afford the food I'd grown up on! So I'd call Mom: Hey, how do you make those roasted peppers? What's the deal with the sauce?' Now I make all my own pastas by hand-ravioli, gnocchi, all that stuff.î

  Back in the realm of music, Mike is currently working on further collaborations with Darol Anger, performs intermittently with Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile and has just released a CD project with pianist Jovino Santos Neto entitled Serenata featuring the music of Hermeto Pascoal Brazil's most important musician/composers living today. The Cd has been released on Mikeπs own label called, appropriately, Adventure Music.

  
  For more info, please visit: mikemarshall.net




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• THOMAS SCHULTZ, piano, has established an international reputation both as an interpreter of music from the classical tradition – particularly Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt – and as one of the leading exponents of the music of our time. Among his recent engagements are solo recitals in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Ghent, Seoul, Taipei and Kyoto, and at the Schoenberg Festival in Vienna, the Piano Spheres series in Los Angeles, Korea's Tongyoung Festival, the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento and the April in Santa Cruz Festival. He has also appeared as a soloist at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, and in chamber music performances with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Da Camera Society of Houston, Robert Craft’s 20th Century Classics Ensemble and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. In 2005 he gave a series of masterclasses on the piano music of the Second Viennese school at the SchoenbergCenter in Vienna.

  His recitals are notable for programming that celebrates the continuing vitality of the piano repertoire, juxtaposing the old and the new or focusing solely on new works. He has worked closely with such eminent composers as Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Rzewski, Earle Brown, Jonathan Harvey and Elliott Carter (in performances of the Double Concerto at the Colorado Music Festival and at Alice Tully Hall in New York).

  Since 2002, Schultz has included in his recitals works written especially for him by Frederic Rzewski (The Babble, 2003), Christian Wolff (Touch, 2002; Long Piano, 2005), Hyo-shin Na (Rain Study, 1999; Walking, Walking, 2003), Walter Zimmermann (AIMIDE, 2001/02), Boudewijn Buckinx (The Floating World, 2004) and Yuji Takahashi (For Thomas Schultz, 2001).

  His recording of Stravinsky's Concerto for Two Solo Pianos is on the MusicMasters label; he can be heard in chamber works of Earle Brown on a Newport Classics recording and his recordings of works by the Korean composer Hyo-shin Na on CDs from the Seoul and TopArt labels have received special recognition. His solo CDs, (a double cd of the Goldberg Variations of Bach and Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated and a cd of works written for him by Takahashi, Buckinx and Wolff) are on the Wooden Fish label.

  Schultz's musical studies were with John Perry, Leonard Stein and Philip Lillestol. He has been a member of the piano faculty at Stanford University since 1994.

  
  For more info, please visit: thomasschultzpianist.com




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• DAG WEISER and LESLIE MURRAY, Santa Cruz artists, have collaborated on art installations for over 20 years. They have created installations at the MAH: a three-storey hanging mobile, “Bait Ball,” for the Surf Art show in 2010, and for its annual Stars event 2007-2009. Worked on many productions with Moving and Storage Performance Company/Crash, Burn and Die Dance Company creating sets and props. This will be the first in 25 years without the beloved annual Halloween art display in their Eastside front yard.

  Dag works almost exclusively in cardboard. He is the creator of several pieces currently on display in front of the Rio Theatre: the large cardboard mural above the ticket booth, and the anamorphic faces in the poster-display windows. He also works in a variety of media including oil painting on canvas, pastel, ink, bronze, and found-object assemblage. His creative work also includes music and sound collage, and he is a graphic designer. Dag received a Gail Rich award in 2009.

  Leslie is a designer and graphic artist, oil painter, and photographer. She does commercial photo-retouch work, and teaches in the Digital Media program at Cabrillo College. She has exhibited her oil paintings locally, including at the MAH as part of a modern dance production. Her artwork will be seen this November-December as part of the Cabrillo Arts faculty's “Without Art” exhibit at the Cabrillo Gallery. Photo Caption: It is a 21 foot long by 8 foot tall cardboard cityscape mural for the lobby of the theatre, as well as a façade for the entrance. (Photo Copyright © 2011 by Dag Weiser and Leslie Murray)




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• WILLIAM WINANT, percussion, is described as “one of the best avant-garde percussionists working today” according to Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times. William has collaborated with some of the most innovative and creative musicians of our time, including John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Keith Jarrett, Anthony Braxton, James Tenney, Cecil Taylor, Steve Reich, the Kronos String Quartet, and Frank Zappa, among others. He has made over 100 recordings, covering a wide variety of genres, and many important composers have written works for him. He has appeared as percussion soloist with major orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony Mavericks series. He teaches at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and is an Artist-In-Residence at Mills College.




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• THE HAPPINESS CHOIR, directed by Lori Rivera
  For info, please contact New Music Works at: publicity@newmusicworks.org

  
  



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