Artists

Inspired by concepts of place and the human experience, composer Christina Rusnak works at the intersection of nature, culture, history, landscape, and art to integrate context into her music from the world around her. Rusnak composes for diverse instrumentations with lyrical lines, and organic rhythms and textures. Her pieces range from elementary to professional levels and includes chamber ensemble, orchestra, wind band, choral and solo works, as well as flex band pieces, jazz, electro-acoustic works, and film. 

Tadd Russo (b. 1976, Parma, Ohio) received his master's degree in composition from The Ohio State University, where his principal instructor was Thomas Wells. Critic Ralph O'Dette has praised his lyrical gift, hailing his music for the theatre as memorable.

Roberta Rust has concertized to critical acclaim around the globe, with performances at such venues as Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall, New York's Merkin Concert Hall, Rio de Janeiro's Sala Cecília Meireles, Washington's Corcoran Gallery, Havana’s Basilica, and Seoul's KNUA Hall. Hailed for her recordings on PARMA (Navona), Centaur, and Protone labels, Rust has appeared with the Lark, Ying, Serafin, Amernet, and Fine Arts String Quartets and at Miami's Mainly Mozart Festival, the Philippines Opusfest, the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, Festival Miami, Long Island's Beethoven Festival, and France's La Gesse.

Composer Alejandro Rutty is best-known for his distinctive mix of South American styles, lyrical melodies, meticulous rhythmic detail, and textures suggested by modern recording processing techniques.

Since beginning her musical career as a cellist, Samantha Sack has been exploring the full range of musical expressions. Performing was only the beginning of her journey, as she quickly understood the greatest expression of music was creation. After receiving private composition lessons with Mara Gibson in secondary school, Samantha entered Missouri State University under the John Prescott Composition Scholarship and the Claude T. Smith Composition Scholarship. Graduating with a Bachelor of Music Composition further led her to Dublin, Ireland, to earn a Master of Arts in Scoring for Film and Visual Media from Dublin Institute of Technology.

London-born Nicholas Sackman (b. 1950) studied music at Nottingham University and then at Leeds University with Alexander Goehr. He spent fifteen years teaching music in schools before returning to the Music Department at Nottingham as a Lecturer in Composition.

Just as the English language makes use of foreign words to augment its own expressive power, Los Angeles-based composer Jonathan Sacks (b. 1950) draws from a wide range of styles and techniques to create music in an idiom that's entirely his own.

Lionel Sainsbury began to play the piano at an early age and soon started to compose his own music. Born in Wiltshire, England, in 1958, he studied composition with Patric Standford at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. At the age of 21 he was awarded a Mendelssohn Scholarship, which brought him into contact with composers as diverse as Edmund Rubbra, John McCabe and Henri Dutilleux.

R. David Salvage (b. 1978, Boston MA) is a composer and pianist whose piano, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works have been performed by many of America's most gifted musicians, including the Arcturus Chamber Ensemble, the Rosetta String Trio, the Monticello String Quartet, the Cygnus Ensemble, Miranda Cuckson (violinist), Christopher Swanson (tenor), Thomas Meglioranza (baritone), David Thomas (clarinetist), and the Newark-Granville Symphony Orchestra (OH).

Praised as “strikingly original” (NY Times) and “new voice from whom we will surely be hearing more” (LA Times), Kamala Sankaram writes highly theatrical music that defies categorization. Recent commissions include the Glimmerglass Festival, Washington National Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and Opera on Tap, among others. Awards, grants and residencies include: Jonathan Larson Award, NEA ArtWorks, MAP Fund, Opera America, NY IT Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical, the Civilians, HERE, the MacDowell Colony, and the Watermill Center. Known for her work with emerging technologies, her recent genre-defying hit Looking at You (with collaborators Rob Handel and Kristin Marting) featured live data mining of the audience and a chorus of 25 singing tablet computers.

Considered by the international press as one of the most active and recognized composers of the musical scene, Felipe Perez Santiago has received several prizes and recognitions in Europe, United States and Latin America. His compositions have been played and commissioned in more than 40 countries by internationally renowned orchestras and ensembles and has been invited as resident composer to conservatories, universities and institutions all over the world.

Jonathan Santore is composer in residence with the New Hampshire Master Chorale, and professor of music at Plymouth State University. He has won prizes and awards for his work including The American Prize in Composition (Choral Division), the American Composers Forum Welcome Christmas! Carol Contest, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.

Portuguese violist Anibal Dos Santos was born in born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1963. He began his musical studies at an early age in his native city with Gianfranco Farina and Mario Mescoli. At age 18, he traveled to Philadelphia PA to study with renowned violist Joseph de Pasquale, obtaining his degree in 1988 at the Curtis Institute of Music. Since then, he has dedicated his career to perform viola repertoire with many orchestras in the Americas, as well as recitals and chamber music appearances.

Charles M. Savage (b. 1958) born in Coshocton, Ohio and a longtime resident of Muskingum County, Ohio. He graduated from Ohio Valley University, Harding University with a B.A. in Music Education, and Ohio University Athens with masters degrees in Music Theory and Composition, and in Music Education. He studied theory and orchestration with William Holloway, and composition with Mark Phillips, voice with Erle. T. Moore and Ira Zook, and conducting with Kenneth Davis, Jr. and Peter Jarjisian.

Heather Niemi Savage’s music explores universal questions of essence and finding beauty and joy in the midst of suffering, resulting in evocative pieces that take listeners on a journey which nourishes the soul, stimulates healing, and builds empathy. Savage draws on her own experiences, her love of the natural world, literature, and faith; her compositional style is informed by her training in classical, jazz, musical theater, sacred music, and life-long interest in world music.

Like many composers, I have a hard time classifying my music. My unconscious influences undoubtedly include the 20th c. Russian composers that I so enjoyed as a young trumpet player, the vocal music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance I discovered when I started singing, and the 20th c. French and American music I came to love in college. That aside, I often draw inspiration from visual sources, including the Pre-Raphaelites, Japanese animation, and abstract expressionism, as well as literary sources, such as poetry and the genres of fantasy and science fiction. I am fascinated with how these art forms make the normal seem strange and the strange seem normal.

Daniel Schlosberg leads a kaleidoscopic musical life. He has appeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in numerous chamber music concerts and new music concerts, and was a featured soloist in subscription performances of Messiaen’s Trois Petites Liturgies. He has a passion for contemporary music, collaborating frequently with Eighth Blackbird and Third Coast Percussion.

Marvin Schluger (1923-2004) was born into a poor immigrant Jewish family in Philadelphia PA. His father had been a coppersmith in the Old World but found it difficult to make a living in America, so Schluger's mother worked to sustain the family. It seemed, however, that there was always an extra dollar-and-a-half for Schluger and his sister to take weekly music lessons. Piano studies with Joseph Levine, and subsequently with Maria Carreras, were the focus of this early music education, while Schluger's explorations in composition were largely self-taught.

Martin Schlumpf (b. 1947) was born in the Swiss town of Aarau, where he was raised and educated through his high school graduation in 1966. During these years, he played double bass in various jazz groups, along with studying classical cello. Schlumpf also began writing essays on composition during this time, beginning with his discovery of the music of Austrian composer Anton Webern.

Christopher Alan Schmitz composes solo, chamber, and ensemble music that has been described as “sublimely gorgeous” (Fanfare) and “pensive…hard-driving…and whimsical” (American Record Guide). His compositions have been performed and recorded internationally, featuring a broad range of musicians and styles from the London Symphony Orchestra to the USAF Airmen of Note, in venues ranging from New York City (Carnegie Hall) to Alaska (Denali National Park) and London (St. Luke’s Church). Schmitz’s educational music has appeared in concert programs at all levels of development and his recent solo and chamber works have been performed by artists such as the Cortona Trio, Svyati Duo, Terell Stafford, Amy Schwartz Moretti, and Denson Paul Pollard, among others.