Claire Chase, described by The New York Times as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists, and in 2013 launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its 10th year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature over a quarter-century through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org. Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble in 2001, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. She is currently professor of the practice of music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. She is also a creative associate at The Juilliard School, and a collaborative partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.

As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, a collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to creating collaborations built on equity and cultural responsiveness. She served as the ensemble’s artistic director until 2017, and as an ensemble member on performance and education projects on five continents, developing an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide.

From 2016 to 2019, Chase served as co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School College of Performing Arts.

Upcoming projects include performances of Felipe Lara’s new duo concerto for Chase and Esperanza Spalding with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic, conducted by Susanna Mälkki; and performances of Liza Lim’s Sex Magic, an evening-length solo for contrabass flute, electronics, and an installation of kinetic percussion.

Chase grew up in Leucadia, California, with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She now lives in Brooklyn.

Lisa E. Harris (aka “Li”) is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, creative soprano, performer-composer, improviser, researcher, educator, and cultural producer from Houston, Texas. Her work considers the energetic relationships between body, land, spirit, and place. While exploring intuition, (per)sonification, movement, dream, and psychic activations, Harris maintains a focused concentration on healing in performance. Her debut LP, Life and That, combines original art songs with transcendent studio-recorded improvised first takes. Harris appeared in the world premiere of The Nubian Word for Flowers, a Phantom Opera by Pauline Oliveros and IONE. She is the founder and creative director of Studio Enertia, an arts collective and production company in Houston, which recently produced Harris’s 10-year durational work, Cry of the Third Eye, that archives the effects of redevelopment and the displacing of Black people and culture in her Houston neighborhood. In 2018, Harris created and curated Houston’s inaugural Free Time Flow Festival at MacGregor Park, celebrating the intersections of basketball, electro-acoustic music, improvisation, and creative expression. She is also responsible for instating and curating Pauline Oliveros Day at Discovery Green Houston. Harris is the recipient of several honorable awards, including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is now a guest lecturer at Harvard University’s Department of Music and a research fellow at Harvard ArtLab. Harris would like to thank her mother, loved ones, and ancestors for their continuous inspiration and love. 

Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Much of her work focuses on conservation. With indigenous and traditional music cultures from the North and South Philippine islands, her sound research advocates the stewardship of glaciers and fresh waters; she also collaborates with Joudour Sahara in Morocco on initiatives in sustainable music and support for women and girls. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award and a US Artists Fellowship in Music, in addition to being named a National Geographic Explorer Storyteller, Asian Cultural Council Scholar, and TED Senior Fellow. Talking Gong—a trio album that features Claire Chase and Alex Peh—is inspired by Maguindanao kulintang and birdsongs. Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change is a collaboration with glaciologist Dr. Michele Koppes in which she creates compositions from recordings of five watersheds, including the Greenland ice sheet and the Himalayas. Ibarra’s work has been experienced at TED Countdown, Edinburgh; ARKO Art Center, Seoul; and Fridman Gallery, New York. Fragility Etudes, a commission for Asia Society Triennial 2021, premiered live at MASS MoCA in 2021. With Canadian composer and bassist Richard Reed Parry, Ibarra released the album Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields in 2022, focusing on heartbeats and breath cycles. Ibarra is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Zildjian artist. 

Alex Peh is a pianist, improviser, and scholar who explores the piano in classical, contemporary, and improvised practices. A 2021 Fulbright Global Scholar, Peh explores repertoire from parallel piano universes that exist alongside European classical-contemporary piano music, delving into different approaches to tuning, pedagogy, notation, and musical transmission. He has commissioned composers such as Susie Ibarra, Hafez Modirzadeh, Ne Myo Aung, Nikos Ordoulidis, Anna Clyne, Phyllis Chen, and Kyaw Kyaw Naing. As a 2019 Asian Cultural Council Fellow, Peh traveled to Myanmar to study Burmese piano—a classical style that the Burmese call sandaya—from legendary pianist Dr. U Yee Nwe. Peh began his studies in sandaya with internationally acclaimed percussionist Kyaw Kyaw Naing, and collaborated with him to create the first Burmese Saing Waing ensemble in America. In 2019, they made their debut performance at New York City’s Roulette Intermedium. Peh collaborated with visual anthropologist Lauren Meeker to document this work as an ethnographic film that explores the process of attunement in learning Burmese Saing Waing music. Peh is a member of Talking Gong, an improvising trio with Susie Ibarra and Claire Chase. Peh mentored with Arnaldo Cohen, Menahem Pressler, Sylvia Wang, and Evelyne Brancart. He attended the Banff, Aspen, and Tanglewood music festivals, where he worked with Emanuel Ax, Pamela Frank, Claude Frank, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, and Peter Serkin. He is an associate professor of piano at SUNY New Paltz.

Senem Pirler is a sound and intermedia artist, and educator. Her interdisciplinary work crosses over into sound engineering, sound art, performance, video art, movement, and installation. Born in Turkey, Pirler studied classical piano at the Hacettepe University Ankara State Conservatory, and sound engineering and design at Istanbul Technical University / MIAM. She earned her master’s in music technology from New York University and her PhD in electronic arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Pirler has exhibited and performed her work at international venues, such as EMPAC, Roulette Intermedium, The Kitchen, Southbank Centre (London), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Los Angeles Philharmonic, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Montalvo Arts Center, Mount Tremper Arts, and Collar Works. Her work has been recognized by grants and residencies, including honors from the Institute for Electronic Arts, PACT Zollverein, and Signal Culture. Pirler was awarded a 2022 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship and the 2018 Malcolm Morse Award to honor the work of Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening. She joined the faculty of Bennington College in 2018.

Ensemble Connect is a two-year fellowship program for extraordinary young professional classical musicians residing in the US that prepares them for careers combining musical excellence with teaching, community engagement, advocacy, entrepreneurship, and leadership. It offers top-quality performance opportunities, intensive professional development, and partnerships throughout the fellowship with New York City public schools. On the concert stage and in schools and communities, Ensemble Connect has earned accolades from critics and audiences alike for the quality of the concerts, the fresh and open-minded approach to programming, and the ability to actively engage any audience. Moving on to the next stage of their careers, Ensemble Connect’s 135 alums are now making an impact on the national and international musical landscape in a wide variety of artistic and educational arenas. Continuing the strong bonds formed through the program, in 2011 alums formed the chamber music collective Decoda, which has been named an affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall. Exemplary performers, dedicated teachers, and passionate advocates of music throughout the community, the forward-looking musicians of Ensemble Connect are redefining what it means to be a musician in the 21st century.

The Select Choir is the top-tier choir at Brooklyn High School of the Arts. Under the baton of Kristy Jung, the ensemble explores an eclectic array of works from choral staples to world music. One of the primary focuses of the ensemble is to develop an authentic sound for each piece it performs by incorporating different characteristics that are stylistically innate to the genre or culture of the piece. In addition to growing as singers, students in this ensemble also learn the meaning of being responsible storytellers. By immersing themselves fully into the music and text, each and every singer in the ensemble has developed skills to make emotional connections between themselves and the world around them through their music. The success of this choir has earned it a gold-level adjudication from the New York State School of Music Association only one year after the pandemic.

Born and raised in Queens, Kristy Jung has devoted the majority of her life to music education and performance. After graduating as a performer from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School, she went on to receive her master’s degree in music education and performance from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College. As an educator, she has held many positions, including choir director, music director for musical theater, and the head of the music department at Edward Bleeker JHS. Throughout her time as an educator, she has also worked in various capacities with Carnegie Hall, served as the music coordinator and liaison to Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Connect program, and is now the principal conductor to NYC’s All-City High School Chorus and choral director of Brooklyn High School of the Arts.

IONE is an author, playwright, director, and text-sound artist. She has taught and performed around the world with her spouse and creative partner Pauline Oliveros. Together, they have created large music theater works, including Njinga the Queen King: The Return of a Warrior; Io and Her and the Trouble with Him; and The Lunar Opera: Deep Listening For_Tunes. IONE’s film, Dreams of the Jungfrau, was shown in the US, Spain, and Ireland. The Nubian Word for Flowers, a Phantom Opera premiered at Roulette Intermedium and The Nubian Word for Flowers: Pocket Edition premiered at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. IONE’s seminal memoir, Pride of Family; Four Generations of American Women of Color, was named a Notable Book by The New York Times. She was artistic director of the Deep Listening Institute for 15 years and is currently a consultant at the Center for Deep Listening^® in Troy, New York. As founding director of The Ministry of Maåt, IONE sponsors workshops and retreats, encouraging a vibrant international community of artists, and disseminating the work of Pauline Oliveros and others. She is a member of the Distinguished Mentors Council of Composers Now, whose most recent opera is Touch for Irish National Opera with composer Karen Power.

Eduardo Kohn is associate professor of anthropology at McGill University and directs its Anthropology for the Ecozoic initiative. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has held post-doctoral fellowships at UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan, and has taught at Cornell University and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is best known for his book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013, University of California Press), which is based on several years of research in the Ecuadorian Amazon and focuses on how the inhabitants of one of the world’s most complex ecosystems relate to the forest’s myriad beings. How Forests Think won the 2014 Gregory Bateson Award and has been translated into several languages. The book has inspired the planetary-ecological imagination in creative work ranging from an eponymous ensemble composition by Liza Lim to museum exhibits in Geneva, Paris, and Montreal. Kohn is currently writing a book titled Forest for the Trees, which focuses on how to find guidance from the living world that holds us—the world Amazonians call “forest”—in the context of the ecological crisis. It grows out of his ongoing collaboration with Amazonian indigenous leaders, environmental activists, human rights lawyers, architects, and performance and conceptual artists. 

Manari Ushigua is a traditional healer and leader of the Sapara Nation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Sapara Nation is recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Ushigua has been a key figure in the indigenous movement of Ecuador as vice president of CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) from 2013 to 2016, and as president of the Sapara Indigenous Federation from 1999 to 2012. He has participated in international events, like COP21 (United Nations Climate Change Conference) and the UN Universal Periodic Review of human rights, raising awareness about the threat to his homeland. As a defender of indigenous rights, he has managed to conserve more than 276,000 hectares of primary forest threatened by extractive industries. Ushigua is the co-founder of the Naku Center, creating a new economic model in the Amazon that is based around cultural and forest preservation.