Author: gfilinta

Brian Current studied music at McGill University and UC Berkeley. His music, lauded and broadcast in over 35 countries, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barlow Prize for Orchestral Music (USA), the Italian Premio Fedora for Chamber Opera and a Selected Work (under 30) at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. Brian Current’s pieces have been programmed by all major symphony orchestras in Canada and by dozens of professional orchestras, ensembles and opera companies world-wide. He is in demand as a guest conductor and regularly leads orchestral programs of contemporary music.

Brandon Farnsworth is a music curator and scholar based in Zurich and Berlin. He completed his MA in Transdisciplinary Studies at the Zurich University of the Arts in 2015, and his BA in Music Performance in 2013. His dissertation in musicology with the title “Curating Festivals for Contemporary Music” will be completed at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden in 2019. 

Valentina Bertolani is a musicologist specialized in experimental and electronic music, collective improvisation, and cultural diplomacy. She is also interested in cultural policy and tensions between transnational and local cultural networks. She is one of the co-editors of the book Live-Electronic Music: Composition, Performance, Study (Routledge 2018). Her work has been published in miscellaneous volumes and in Music Theory Online and presented at numerous international conferences. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Calgary (Canada) where she was the recipient of various awards and scholarships, such as the prestigious Izaak Killam Walton Scholarship. She pursued master and bachelor degrees from the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage at the University of Pavia. She received the Deep Listening® certificate from the Deep Listening Institute created by Pauline Oliveros. She taught undergraduate courses and seminars at the University of Calgary (Canada) and University of Birmingham (UK).

Theresa Beyer has studied ethnomusicology in Bern and works as a journalist and editor with Swiss Public Radio SRF 2 Kultur. She covers topics such as contemporary music, digital culture, gender and electronic music between pop and avant-garde for one-hour programmes (a.o. „Kontext“, „Musik unserer Zeit“) and for shorter daily formats. Since 2011, Theresa Beyer is core team member of the international music research network Norient.com, where she works as editor and curator, publishes books about underground music worldwide, co-curates exhibitions and concerts and is involved with the Norient Music Film Festival. In 2016, she received the Reinhard-Schulz-Prize for Contemporary Music Journalism, awarded by the International Music Institute Darmstadt (IMD).

Susanne van Els (1963) is one of the leading musicians of her generation. She performed as a soloist and a chamber musician, and she ran a most entrepreneurial life in music; combining her own ensembles and projects, like a series of artistically fresh solo CDs, with traveling the world with the Schönberg Ensemble, doing advisory and policy development work whilst undertaking adventurous collaborations with the other arts. Significant composers like Louis Andriessen wrote new viola works for Susanne. Her recording of Ligeti’s viola sonata for Harmonia Mundi won both the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis in 2009.

After this truly satisfying international career, she started to work in higher education. She was the head of classical music department of the Royal Conservatoire The Hague. She was responsible for the interdisciplinary projects and joint curriculum at ZUYD Faculty of the Arts. For these institutions, she developed relations with international higher education partners, a.o. in China. She led the European Opera Academy and is currently working in a Strategic Partnership project for new opera making and training. She is a member of the board for innovative initiatives in the arts and she does policy advise coaching and accreditation work.

Susanne is a member of the Learning & Teaching working group of the Strengthening Music in Society project of the Association Européenne Conservatoires. She performed forward-thinking work on assessment and curriculum development in higher music education – recently she presented a keynote speech at the Centre of Excellence in Music Performance Education: ‘How (not) to teach’.

Stellan Veloce is a sardinian composer, performer and cellist living and working in Berlin. They compose pieces for acoustic instrumental ensembles as well as working  on installations or performance pieces focusing on timbre, repetition and density. Together with Kaj Duncan David, Andreas Dzialocha, Laure M. Hiendl and Neo Hülcker they are co-founder of the collective and online platform Y-E-S.org.

Veloce works or has worked with collaborators from different disciplines like composer Neo Hülcker, dancer/choreographers Sheena McGrandles and Julian Weber, visual artist Kyle Bellucci Johanson among others. Occasionally they work as a touring band member or in the studio in the pop music sphere. Collaborations include Peaches, Dear Reader, Kenichi, Kat Frankie and Raz O´hara among others. They are a member of the band Danso Key. 

After completing a degree in cello performance, Veloce studied composition at the Universität der Künste Berlin with Elena Mendoza, Mauro Lanza and Daniel Ott and at the California Institute of the Arts with Ulrich Krieger.

They performed or their work has been performed at London Contemporary Music Festival (UK), Signal Festival (IT), Neue Musik Festival Rummlingen (CH), Dark Music Days and Cycle Festival (IS), CTM Festival (DE), Sound Acts (GR), Inact Festival (FR), BAM! Festival Berlin (DE) and at HAU Berlin (DE), Münchener Kammerspiele (DE), Ufer Studios Berlin (DE), the Place (UK), Akademie der Kunste Berlin (DE) and elsewhere.

Sophie Vögele is a research associate at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) where she also holds teaching assignments. She pursues research in the field of Higher Art Education with a focus on diversity, intersectionality, and politics of participation. She has co-directed the research project “Art.School.Differences. Researching Inequalities and Normativities in Higher Art Education” in which an ethnography of the selection process to Swiss art schools was conducted, providing pertinent results also for the field of music. She studied in Geneva, Basel, Heidelberg, and Toronto, and conducted research in India.

Currently, she pursues a Ph.D. at the Academy of fine arts in Vienna. She has varied teaching experience and delivered talks and workshops widely. A major publication “Reader Art.School.Differences” is forthcoming with Peter Lang Verlag. It features an educational debate on core themes of Higher Art Education and theories of social inequality in five volumes and is complemented with extensive introductions, a glossary, and didactical questions.

Sandeep Bhagwati is a composer, conductor, poet, theatre-maker, and researcher. Born in India, he has lived in several European countries before coming to Montréal in 2006 as a Canada Research Chair in Inter-x Art at Concordia University, where he founded and directs the matralab – a lab for research-creation in performing arts. His compositions and comprovisations, among them several experimental operas and large scale orchestral works, but also many chambers and vocal compositions for musicians of many cultures are performed worldwide by leading performers and at prestigious festivals and venues. He leads ensembles of trans-traditional music in Montréal, Berlin, and Pune and has published widely on transcultural music. He is also a leading researcher and developer of music technologies, especially new score formats that allow musicians to interact with their environment and audiences in real time.

Rosanna Gunnarsson (SE) is a composer and sound artist based in Stockholm. Her main fields of work are contemporary music, both chamber, and larger ensembles/orchestras, as well as electronic music and sound installations. One of her latest works is an audiovisual installation at Stockholm Arlanda airport, chronicling a Swedish surfer’s experiences of riding waves in the Baltic Sea.

Since 2018 she is the chair of Konstmusiksystrar (Sisters in Contemporary Music).

Rosanna Lovell is a musician, educator, performer, and radio maker from Australia who has been living and working in Berlin since 2009. In 2018 she completed a Masters at the Institute for Art in Context, Berlin University of the Arts. Her practice focuses on feminist and postcolonial perspectives in classical and new music which she explores through performance, intervention, sound and research. She develops workshops and projects and teaches music. She is part of Freien Radio Berlin-Brandenburg, where she focuses on topics such as music, gender, and accessibility in and through radio.