Composers

Ashlee T. Busch is a composer, performer, remixer, arranger, and educator based in Grand Rapids MI. Busch most enjoys collaborating with other artists in poetry, dance, installation art, video, and more. Such collaborations have included residencies with East Coast and Midwest universities, as an artist with Grammy-award-winning PARMA Recordings, publishing with mixed ensemble music education publisher Leading Tones LLC, publishing with digital choral music company Zintzo LLC, and collaborations with ensembles premiering her works across the United States.

Daniel Burwasser, born in New Brunswick NJ, is an American composer who has been writing and playing music since the age of 5. Originally a student of the piano, he eventually progressed to other forms of percussion, including drum set and orchestral percussion. He received his Bachelor’s degree from Temple University, a Master of Arts degree from Rutgers University, and his Ph.D. in Composition from the Graduate School of CUNY. He is a recipient of grants from both The American Music Center and Meet the Composer.

Robert Burrell (b. 1956) composes music across a wide spectrum of genre and medium. Coming out of his foundational years in the improvisational genre of charismatic worship music, he has developed a distinctive voice across multiple disciplines.

Harlem NY-born Reynard Burns' (b. 1946) prolific career includes work as a composer, arranger, and educator, as well as a bassist and guest conductor for several orchestra festivals. His compositions for full and string orchestra, wind ensemble, concert band, jazz ensemble, improvising strings, and other combinations have been performed throughout the United States and abroad, with his orchestral works receiving national recognition, most notably Flying, which was performed by the Long Island Philharmonic in a program honoring American composers.

Svjetlana Bukvich first came to the attention of the European music world following her appearances as featured soloist with the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra, performing Beethoven’s 1st Piano Concerto at the age of 16, and the following year with Edinburgh George Heriot’s Symphony Orchestra with the 2nd Concerto. Driven by a need to express beyond interpretation, Bukvich studied at the Music Academy - University of Sarajevo, where she earned degrees in Composition and Musicology.

Liova Bueno's music is performed in concerts and music festivals internationally, from Europe to the United States and across Canada to countries in Central and South America. He has received commissions from and has collaborated with various ensembles, including Cuarteto de Bellas Artes (Mexico), Vox Humana Chamber Choir (Victoria, BC), the Victoria Choral Society (Victoria, BC), the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra (Czech Republic), Brno Contemporary Orchestra (Czech Republic), the Illinois Modern Ensemble (Illinois), the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional Juvenil and members of the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional (Dominican Republic), and members of the Victoria Symphony. He has worked with various conductors and soloists including Ovidiu Marinescu, Noreen Cassidy-Polera, Darwin Aquino, Stanislav Vavrinek, Pavel Šnajdr, Brian Wismath, Pierre Strauch, Mark McGregor, and the Dunn/Ward Duo. 

Richard E. Brown, a native of New York State and has been active as a composer-arranger and music educator for many years. His training includes M.M. and D.M. degrees in composition from Florida State University, as well as a B.A. in music education from Central College, which named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 1983. His principal composition studies were with Carlisle Floyd, John Boda, and Charles Carter.

Composer Whitman Brown has received awards and commissions from organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, the Yaddo and Millay artist colonies, the Bedford Springs and Stroud Festivals, and the Warebrook Festival of Contemporary Music. Ensembles such as the Arden, Everest, and Lydian String Quartets, Kalliope Trio, Arcadian Winds, Bala Brass, and the Master Singers have performed his compositions. He is currently Head of Theory and Composition at Walnut Hill School for the Arts and has taught at Brandeis University, Boston University, Longy School of Music, and the Powers School of Music.

Composer Gregory W. Brown’s works have been performed across the United States and Europe — most notably in Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City, Cadogan Hall in London, and the Kleine Zaal of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. His commissions for vocal ensemble New York Polyphony have been heard on American Public Media’s Performance Today, BBC Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, Kansas Public Radio, and Danish National Radio; his Missa Charles Darwin received its European debut in March 2013 at the Dinosaur Hall of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde.

Composer Gavin Brown’s musical journey began with The Sting. He took up piano so he could play the ragtime music of Scott Joplin which was featured in that movie. He studied music at DePauw University and composition with Panamanian composer Roque Cordero at Illinois State University. His music draws from a number of influences from classical to jazz and rock to pop.

Fred Broer (b.1942) is a native Oregonian. He received his Master of Music degree from Indiana University and his Doctorate from Boston University. Some of the composition teachers he studied with include Jack Goode, Bernard Heiden, and Joyce McKeel. He taught music in colleges for over 25 years, served in several churches as Music Director/Organist, performed as director of several community choruses, and was Director of the North Shore Conservatory of Music, a community music school at Endicott College in Beverly MA.

Sheila Bristow is a composer, church musician, and collaborative keyboardist living in Tacoma WA. Her approach to composition is informed by her performance experience in the worlds of opera, art song, and early music, by the study of world music and techniques of 20th-century composition, and by a lifelong immersion in sacred music. Bristow is particularly known for her skill in text setting, and her solo songs and choral works have been performed throughout the Pacific Northwest. Recent commissions include When Music Sounds, a work in three movements for chamber orchestra, chorus, and tenor solo for Seattle-based Harmonia Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by William C. White.

A native of New York City, Allen Brings received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude from Queens College and a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University, where he was a Mosenthal Fellow and a student of Otto Luening, and a doctorate in theory and composition from Boston University, where he was a teaching fellow and a student of Gardner Read.

Gregers Brinch was born in Denmark to a Danish father and American mother, but spent a substantial part of his childhood and, since returning from Germany in 1994, adulthood in the small village of Row in East Sussex, Great Brittain.

The music of composer and clarinetist David T. Bridges is often driven by motivic transformations and unifies extended techniques with classic and narrative structures to provoke a visceral response. Bridges’s compositions have been performed by ensembles including Del Sol Quartet, Contemporaneous, ensemble mise-en, Mivos, and Cadillac Moon Ensemble and featured at the New Music on the Bayou Festival in Louisiana, Reciprocity Collaborative at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Red Note Festival at Illinois State University, Hot Air Music Festival at San Francisco Conservatory, and Composers Now Festival in NYC. His string quartet This Fragmented Old Man was recorded by the Pedroia Quartet and released on Navona records.

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.

Composer Anthony Brandt’s catalogue includes three chamber operas, as well as orchestral, chamber, vocal, theater, dance, and television scores. Recordings of his music are available on the Albany, Crystal, and Navona labels. As co-founder and Artistic Director of the Houston-based new music ensemble Musiqa, Brandt has produced performances of the music of over 200 living composers, including over 70 world premieres. Musiqa’s innovative interdisciplinary concerts have earned two national awards for adventurous programming. Brandt and neuroscientist David Eagleman have co-authored The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, published in fourteen countries. Brandt has written extensively about music cognition and creativity, and is currently a co-investigator in an NEA research lab and several other studies. He is a Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.

In a career of over 50 years, award-winning composer, pianist, and recording artist Margaret Brandman has followed her passion to create appealing music with strong melodic content, sensitive harmonies, and rhythmic ingenuity. Her output includes works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, choir, solo voice, and solo instruments, composed across a wide range of genres from Contemporary Classical to Jazz and Latin-American. 

Christopher Brakel (b. 1977) is a Boston-based composer of acoustic and electroacoustic concert music, an educator/arts advocate, a music copyist/engraver, and a technology consultant. To date, his concert works have been commissioned and performed across the United States, in Canada, Colombia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, and Italy. These performances have included prominent regional, national, and international festivals, conferences, and concerts, including the L.A. Composers Project, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, SEAMUS, and SCI National Conferences, FSU Festival of New Music, June in Buffalo, Midwest Composers Symposium, and the Czech-American Summer Music Institute.

Lee Bradshaw is a Melbourne-born Australian composer, who’s music reveals an explicit and emotionally-charged truth. His works exhibit a profound intimacy with the craft of composition, compelling the performer to delve deeply into their own artistic and creative reservoirs. His sensuous yet muscular writing redefines the possibilities of expression for the modern musician, whilst the music — rare, uncompromising and arresting in its beauty — offers solace to the listener.