Daniel Bayot

The One in Paradise

Daniel Bayot (b. 1995) is concert and film composer interested in creating works that satisfy the cerebral, visceral, and kinetic facets of a listener’s experience. As a ʻ kama aina from Hawaiʻi and an alumnus of the Interlochen Center for the Arts, Daniel is a recipient of the Interlochen Fine Arts Award for Composition in 2012 with works performed by a variety of ensembles including the LA-based collective wild Up, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the World Youth Wind Symphony, the Interlochen Philharmonic, members of the Toledo Symphony Orchestra, and members of the World Youth Symphony Orchestra. As a vocalist, Daniel is an active performer of choral and contemporary music and a third of the experimental trio, 3 dB Vocal Ensemble. He is currently pursuing a B.M. in composition at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Jennifer Griffith

Night

Jennifer Griffith moves between creative efforts as a composer, performer, and her work in jazz scholarship. She studied composition with Donald Wheelock, Thea Musgrave, David Del Tredici, and Tania León, earning her doctorate at the Graduate Center in New York.

Her chamber opera Dream President was presented in New York City Opera’s VOX 2004. Commissions include operas on transgender identity (The X-Dresser), extremism in the environmental movement (Beautiful Creatures), and an electroacoustic work for the Tempest Project (Who is Miranda?).

She has written on composer/bandleader/bassist Charles Mingus’s reanimations of early jazz and the legacies of vaudeville and minstrelsy (Jazz Perspectives, 2010; Black Music Research Journal, 2015).

Griffith also studied voice with renown free jazz vocalist, Jay Clayton. She sings jazz at NYC venues and is featured vocalist on saxophonist Steve Elson’s CD, Mott and Broome.

“Night,” by Louise Bogan (fromThe Blue Estuaries), reflects a New England scene. The poet was born and raised in New England, first in Maine, then in mill towns in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The ‘cold remote islands’ of the first line, perhaps depicts those offshore from Maine, but the poem also invokes the hardy spirit of New Englanders that the poet seems to applaud. But she also reminds us to look outside––to the land and sky––deeper into our experience on the planet.

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Cecila Livingston

The Dismantled Ship

Known across Canada and the US for intensely dramatic chamber and vocal music, Cecilia Livingston is a 2015-2017 Composers and the Voice Fellow at American Opera Projects in New York and a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London.

She looks forward to upcoming projects with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Kingston Symphony Orchestra, the Canadian Art Song Project, and the creation of a new full-length opera with TorQ Percussion Quartet and Opera 5, funded by the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.

She worked with Steve Reich as a 2014 Composition Fellow at Bang On a Can’s Summer Music Festival and at Soundstreams’ 2016 Emerging Composer Workshop. A winner in the 2014 SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers, her music has been heard at Eastman’s Women In Music Festival, Tapestry Opera, World Choral Games (Latvia), Canadian Contemporary Music Workshop, the 21C Music Festival, Vancouver International Song Institute, Hamilton Philharmonic’s “What Next” Festival, Scotia Festival of Music, on tour with The Bicycle Opera Project, with the Kingston Symphony, and with Toronto’s Thin Edge New Music Collective.

An associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre and a National Councillor of the Canadian League of Composers, her creative and research work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She holds a doctorate in Composition from the University of Toronto, supervised by Christos Hatzis, where she held the Theodoros Mirkopoulos Fellowship in Composition.

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Delvyn Case

Brutal Arithmetic

Delvyn Case is active as a composer, conductor, scholar, performer and educator. He serves as Associate Professor of Music at Wheaton College in Norton, Mass, where he conducts the Great Woods Symphony Orchestra.

His music has been performed by over 60 orchestras from Alaska to Florida, including the National Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Louisville Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony, and San Antonio Symphony. Other performers of his music have included the Grammy-winning quintet Chestnut Brass Company, the US Coast Guard Band, the Dallas Wind Symphony, mezzo-soprano D'Anna Fortunato, and Grammy-nominated pianist Charles Abramovic, The New York Virtuoso Singers, Rome's Freon Ensemble, the Hermitage Trio, and Ibis Camerata. His music has been heard at the Kennedy Center and on NPR's "Performance Today".

As a composer, he has received honors and fellowships from numerous organizations, including BMI, The Society of Composers, The MacDowell Colony, The New York Virtuoso Singers, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Composers Conference at Wellesley, the Orvis Foundation, The Chicago Ensemble, Audio Inversions, Sounds New, the National Association of Composers, and The College Music Society, among others.

He is the composer of The Prioress's Tale, a 75-minute chamber opera inspired by Chaucer, whose January 2008 premiere garnered feature articles in the Boston Globe and the South Shore Patriot Ledger. A parable about the power of forgiveness to heal the wounds of religious intolerance, the production toured throughout New England each winter, supported by institutions wishing to explore issues of interfaith dialogue and peace-making in a unique way.

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Samuel Beebe

The Woods

The dramatic possibilities of music and a desire to collaborate have led Samuel Beebe (b. 1986) to pursue opportunities in film, theatre, and opera. He holds a MM in Composition from Boston University, and a BS in Music Technology from Northeastern University. Composition instructors include Ketty Nez, Dennis H. Miller, Rodney Lister, Ronald Bruce Smith, Howard Frazin, Joshua Fineberg, and Peggy Seeger.

Rocking Chair Child, a song cycle for soprano, tenor, string quartet, and piano on poetry of Sonia Sanchez, was commissioned and premiered by Castle of our Skins. Riding on a Train at Rush Hour, a choral opera commissioned and premiered by Boston Choral Ensemble, was a semi- finalist for a 2015 American Prize. Bully Dance, produced by Argos Productions, featured soprano and electric chamber ensemble, and won a 2015 ArtsImpluse award.

David Kravitz and Linda Osbourne premiered a setting of Langston Hughes’ Harlem at Emmanuel College as part of a WordSong program in October 2016. Also in October of 2016, at the Boston Center for the Arts, The Fall River Axe Murders, produced by imaginary beasts, ran forthree weeks and featured original music and sound design.