Composers

Rae Howell is an award-winning Australian composer and multi-instrumentalist. She is founding director of Sunwrae, a music performance and production enterprise, and works across a vast range of music concert hall and multi-artform projects. She has studied music in Melbourne, London, and New York; she lectures in music and creative industry subjects; and has worked professionally in many places across the globe, producing a large catalog of original music albums, publications, and collaborative recordings.

David Colson (b. 1957) is an American educator, administrator, percussionist, conductor, and composer of classical music. He is Professor of Music at the Western Michigan University (WMU) Irving S. Gilmore School of Music, where he has taught composition, music theory, and leads the new music ensemble Birds on a Wire. He served as Director of the School of Music from 2007 to 2014 and Director of the Gwen Frostic School of Art at WMU from 2017 to 2021. He came to WMU from California State University–Chico, where he taught composition and music theory, chaired the Department of Music, and was the David W. and Helen E.F. Lantis University Professor, the University's first endowed professorship.

Dr. Joseph T. Spaniola is a composer on a passionate quest to engage the hearts and minds of audiences and performers through the communicative powers of music. Spaniola is active as a composer, arranger, educator, conductor, lecturer, producer, clinician, and adjudicator. He has composed works for band, orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, voice, choir, and electronic tape.

Matthew Hetz (b. 1957) is a native to Los Angeles where he still resides. His formal music studies began at age 16 with piano lessons, and composing has always been in the forefront. He began playing the violin in his 20s, and joined local orchestras, an experience of tremendous importance and influence for composing. His study of composition and music at California State University, Dominguez Hills in the 1980’s was at the height of atonality, with the dissolution of harmony as the accepted compositional practices.

Scott Brickman (b. 1963, Oak Park IL) is passionate about sport and his Baltic and Slavic ancestry and culture. A cancer survivor, he has run 5k and 10k races in both the United States and Canada and anticipates adding Europe to that list. Starting in 2018, he has attended summer school at the University of Latvia in Riga, studying Latvian Language and Culture.

Nan Avant’s music embraces thematic and rhythmic intentions often reflecting her Latin heritage, encompassing her passion for classical, jazz, world, and ethnic music. Avant has won numerous awards including two Global Music Awards Silver Medals in 2022, was named a Finalist for The American Prize in orchestral composition and is a four-time nominee in the Hollywood Music in Media Awards. Avant’s Tributum for Celtic Bagpipes and Orchestra, recorded by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, is on the ballot for first-round voting in the 65th Grammy Awards. Tributum enjoys airplay around the world, from Ireland’s Public Radio in the United Kingdom to Hawaii’s Maui Celtic Radio in the United States, and already boasts a Best Instrumental Song Award at the 13th Annual Independent Music Vox Populi Awards.

Storytelling is an important aspect in much of the music of American composer Christine Jancarz. Her recognizable melodies and rhythms are similar to the main characters of a novel, and along with aspects such as orchestration attempt to convey a narrative. Recurring melodies and rhythms are easily identifiable; like characters in a book, they become familiar. Much of her music is influenced by rock, jazz, and classical styles. She also frequently uses counterpoint, and mathematical concepts in her works, such as her Melodic Matrix series for solo instruments.

Peter Paulsen is an active performer on the Philadelphia jazz scene as well as Assistant Principal Bass of the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra and Principal Bass of the Allentown Symphony Orchestra. He has received three PA Council on the Arts composition grants and was recognized with a PEW Fellowship in Composition. Paulsen has released five critically acclaimed CDs of his compositions: Three-Stranded Cord by Peter Paulsen Quintet; Tri-Cycle by Peter Paulsen Trio; Peter Paulsen Change of Scenery Sextet; Goes Without Saying by Peter Paulsen Quintet; and A Few Thoughts by Peter Paulsen Trio.

I have been fortunate in my life to have had three overlapping but distinct careers in music. As a younger woman I enjoyed freelancing as a pianist and singer; performing chamber music, solo and duo recitals, coaching, and doing some part time college teaching. Later I took a full time position as music professor at Los Medanos Community College, where I headed the piano, theory, and recital programs. Now, retired from teaching, I am turning my focus to composing, a long-neglected love. 

Santiago Kodela is an award-winning Classical Guitarist & Composer working in the areas of concert, solo instrument, chamber, and choral music. His works explore various aspects of sound and harmony, adventuring intensely into the areas of iso-rhythms, metric modulation, and chord harmonization. In 2022 the album PINNACLE VOL. 2 was awarded the 2nd Prize Silver Medal by North-American Global Music Awards in the classical category. Furthermore, his piece Delicate Soliloquies was shortlisted as a finalist in the 2nd Composition Competition by the Dutch Guitar Foundation by a jury integrated by Steve Goss, JacobTV, and Nikita Koshkin.

Sarah Wallin Huff is a music lecturer at California Polytechnic University of Pomona, teaching “History of Technology in Music,” for which she published an original textbook with Great River Learning in 2019. She received her M.A. in Music Composition at Claremont Graduate University in 2008, and was the Professor of Composition and Advanced Theory — as well as conductor of the Chamber Ensemble — at The Master’s University in Santa Clarita from 2012-2016.

Elizabeth Vercoe has been hailed by the Washington Post as "one of the most inventive composers working in America today." Active as a composer in the United States and abroad, she has been a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, the St. Petersburg Spring Music Festival in Russia, The Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, and the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Her music has been performed by the Memphis Chamber Symphony, the Women's Philharmonic, the Boston Musica Viva, Alea III, the Great Noise Ensemble, and counter) induction.

John Summers began his professional composing career in 1973, writing music for schools for a touring theater company, where he produced every type of production, from educational musicals for young kids to setting curriculum poetry (Shakespeare, Eliot, etc) to music. This continued until 1977, and in the process, he visited every small and large town in the Eastern states of Australia.

Dr. Andre’ E. Godsey, Sr., Ph.D. has found his voice in the contemporary classical music venue. Over the last 15 years, he reveals an ability to inspire and entertain audiences nationally and internationally. At Lake Clifton Senior High school in Baltimore MD, he was awarded the Musician of the Year for 1979. In more recent times, several musical events include the world premiere of Symphony Number One in C# Minor: Themes for Soren Kierkegaard, “Movement One,” at the Sao Paulo Contemporary Classical Music Festival, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2019.

Brian Field’s music is an eclectic fusion of lyricism and driving rhythm that brings together elements of post-romanticism, minimalism, and jazz. Field has received a host of awards, including the RMN Classical recording prize, the Benenti Foundation recording prize, Briar Cliff Choral Music Competition (first prize), the Victor Herbert ASCAP Young Composers’ Contest (first prize), among many others.

Applauded by Aaron Copland, inspired by Desmond Tutu, and mentored by Hugo Friedhofer and Earle Hagen, Bruce Babcock has spent his working life composing music for the musicians of Los Angeles. Successful in both film and television, and the concert hall, he is known for vibrant, sonorous, expressive pieces that immerse audience and performers alike in an inclusive and exuberant celebration of the musical art.

Tamas Szigyarto was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was schooled in classical piano from the age of 10 and progressed into drums & percussion from 17. For the following decade, he played in numerous alternative rock bands. Szigyarto studied Mathematics at St.Petersburg State University (graduated with MSc. in Math in 2006) and Commercial Music Performance at Tech Music School (BIMM Institute) in London. Here he met and played with London’s alt pop trio Fassine.

Shawn E. Okpebholo is a critically-acclaimed and award-winning composer whose music has been described as “devastatingly beautiful” and “fresh and new and fearless” (The Washington Post), “affecting” (The New York Times), “searing” (The Chicago Tribune), “staggering” (The New Yorker), “lyrical, complex, singular” (The Guardian), and “powerful” (BBC Music Magazine).

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. 

Composer, educator, and conductor Janice Macaulay received her D.M.A. in composition from Cornell University, where she studied with Karel Husa and Steven Stucky. Reviewers have said her music “creates an arresting playground of sounds and effects” (Gramophone) and features “dynamic, lyrical and playful interactions among the players” (Classical Music Review). She won the Alex Shapiro Prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music for Kaleidoscope for Wind Symphony, commissioned by the Cornell University Wind Symphony in memory of Karel Husa and recorded by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County Wind Ensemble on the Albany Records label.