Composers

Andy Akiho

Andy Akiho is a “trailblazing” (Los Angeles Times) GRAMMY nominated composer whose bold works unravel intricate and unexpected patterns while surpassing preconceived boundaries of classical music. Known as “an increasingly in-demand composer” (The New York Times), Akiho has earned international acclaim for his large-scale works that emphasize the natural theatricality of live performance.

The 2021-2022 season features the NYC premiere of Akiho’s double GRAMMY nominated work Seven Pillars for Sandbox Percussion and the world-premiere of a new commission for Imani Winds. Equally at home writing chamber music and symphonies, Akiho is the Oregon Symphony Orchestra’s 2022-2023 composer-in-residence.

Recent engagements include commissioned premieres by the New York Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony, China Philharmonic, Guangzhou Symphony, Oregon Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra Music@Menlo, LA Dance Project and The Industry.

Akiho has been recognized with many prestigious awards and organizations including the Rome Prize, Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize, Harvard University Fromm Commission, Barlow Endowment, New Music USA, and Chamber Music America. His compositions have been featured by organizations such as Bang on a Can, American Composers Forum, The Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong, and the Heidelberg Festival.

An active steel pannist, Akiho has performed his works with the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series, the Berlin Philharmonic’s Scharoun Ensemble, the International Drum Festival in Taiwan, and more. Akiho’s recordings No One To Know One and The War Below features brilliantly crafted compositions inspired by his primary instrument, the steel pan.

The physicality of playing that Akiho experiences as a steel pannist is an embedded aspect of his musical practice and naturally extends itself into his compositional output. Music making is inextricably linked to shared human experience for Akiho from inception to performance. Akiho’s compositional trajectory has been an untraditional one, he spent most of his 20s playing steel pan by ear in Trinidad and began composing at 28, and these social roots laid the foundation for his current practice. He can frequently be found composing into the wee hours of the morning at coffee shops, nightclubs, bars and restaurants, taking breaks to get to know those around him. Similarly, Akiho develops relationships with his collaborators as he writes for people, not instruments.

Akiho was born in 1979 in Columbia, SC, and is currently based in Portland, OR and New York City.

Viet Cuong

Called “alluring” and “wildly inventive” by The New York Times, the “irresistible” (San Francisco Chronicle) music of American composer Viet Cuong (b. 1990) has been commissioned and performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Eighth Blackbird, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Atlanta Symphony, Sandbox Percussion, Albany Symphony, PRISM Quartet, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Dallas Winds, among many others. Viet’s music has been featured in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, National Gallery of Art, and Library of Congress, and his works for wind ensemble have amassed hundreds of performances worldwide, including at Midwest, WASBE, and CBDNA conferences. He was recently featured in The Washington Post‘s “21 for ’21: Composers and performers who sound like tomorrow.”

In his music Viet enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying. His recent works thus include a percussion quartet concerto, tuba concerto, snare drum solo, and, most recently, a concerto for two oboes. This eclecticism extends to the range of musical groups he writes for, and he has worked with ensembles ranging from middle school bands to Grammy-winning orchestras and chamber groups. Viet is also passionate about bringing different facets of the contemporary music community together, and he will have opportunities to do so with an upcoming concerto for Eighth Blackbird with the United States Navy Band. He is the California Symphony’s 2020-2023 Young American Composer-in-Residence.

Viet is an Assistant Professor of Music Composition and Theory the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He holds degrees in music composition from Princeton University (MFA/PhD), the Curtis Institute of Music (Artist Diploma), and the Peabody Conservatory (BM/MM). His mentors include Jennifer Higdon, David Serkin Ludwig, Donnacha Dennehy, Steve Mackey, Dan Trueman, Dmitri Tymoczko, Kevin Puts, and Oscar Bettison. During his studies, he held the Daniel W. Dietrich II Composition Fellowship at Curtis, Naumburg and Roger Sessions Fellowships at Princeton, and Evergreen House Foundation scholarship at Peabody, where he was also awarded the Peabody Alumni Award (the Valedictorian honor) and Gustav Klemm Award.

A scholarship student at the Aspen, Bowdoin, and Lake Champlain music festivals, Viet has been a fellow at the Orchestra of St. Luke’s DeGaetano Institute, Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute, Mizzou International Composers Festival, Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, Cabrillo Festival’s Young Composer Workshop, Cortona Sessions, and Copland House’s CULTIVATE workshop. Viet has held artist residencies at Copland House, Yaddo, Ucross, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and at Dumbarton Oaks, where he served as the 2020 Early-Career Musician-in-Residence. His music has been awarded the Barlow Endowment Commission, ASCAP Morton Gould Composers Award, Theodore Presser Foundation Award, Suzanne and Lee Ettelson Composers Award, Cortona Prize, New York Youth Symphony First Music Commission, Boston GuitarFest Composition Prize, and Walter Beeler Memorial Prize.

Ayanna Woods

aYANNA WOODS is a Grammy-nominated performer, composer and bandleader from Chicago. Her music explores the spaces between acoustic and electronic, traditional and esoteric, wildly improvisational and mathematically rigorous. A collaborator across genres and forms, her work spans new music, theater, film scoring, arranging, songwriting, and improvisation. She earned her B.A. in music from Yale University.

Woods has been commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, Chanticleer, The Crossing, the Percussive Arts Society, Manual Cinema, Lorelei ensemble, the Chicago Children’s Choir, Boston Children’s Choir, and Chicago Chamber Choir.

In 2018, she originated her role as a vocalist in Place,a new oratorio about gentrification and displacement co-conceived by Pulitzer finalist Ted Hearne, director Patricia McGregor and poet/librettist Saul Williams.

Her music appears in a range of film and theater projects. Two of her songs are featured in the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls. In 2017, she and her sister Jamila Woods co-composed the score for No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, a live film created by writers Eve Ewing, Nate Marshall, and Emmy-winning performance collective Manual Cinema. She continues to tour the U.S. and Canada with Manual Cinema as a bassist and music director.

As a gigging musician, she is a sought-after bassist and improvisor. She toured the west coast and performed at Pitchfork Music Festival in 2019 as bassist for TASHA. She’s currently recording a debut album with her own band, Yadda Yadda.

Woods is a recipient of Third Coast Percussion's 2017 Emerging Composers Partnership, a 2017 3Arts Make A Wave grant, and a 2020 DCASE Individual Artist Program grant.

Chris P. Thompson

I compose music and play percussion. The influence of a childhood in California’s Silicon Valley of the 80s and 90s, as well as in the New York City contemporary music scene of the ‘00s and ‘10s led me to develop work that draws equally from electronic music, marching percussion, and contemporary classical music.

I released my third solo album True Stories & Rational Numbers in October 2020. A nine-movement work sequenced as electronic music but also fully scored for four keyboardists, it represents my investigation of just intonation and the natural mathematics of rhythm and harmony, my search for a performance practice to incorporate these into live contemporary music, and my personal fan-fiction about Hermann and Anna von Helmholtz. True Stories will receive its world premiere live performance at the Barbican Centre, London in November 2021.

Early 2021 brought the release of Red Folder, a collaboration with playwright Rajiv Joseph for the Steppenwolf Theater’s STEPPENWOLF NOW series.

My first two records, the LP Everything Imaginable Comes True (2019) and EP Lot Hero (2017), draw heavily on the high-energy sound world of modern drum & bugle corps while incorporating luminaries of the New York City contemporary classical music scene in both familiar and unexpected capacities.

I’ve also been member of Alarm Will Sound for the past 15 years, which has given me the opportunity to work both as a performing percussionist and arranger on a wide variety of projects.

As a Percussionist:
Long-time member of the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, toured internationally as a performer with Tyondai Braxton’s HIVE, participated in the world premieres of over a hundred new works, and can be heard on 40 studio albums. Frequent performer in the pits of many NYC Broadway show productions including The Phantom of the Opera and Wicked.

Collaborations, Appearances, Recordings:
Björk, Dirty Projectors, James McVinnie, Medeski Martin & Wood, the Metropolitan Opera, Nico Muhly, Brian Reitzell, They Might Be Giants, and Valgeir Siggurðsson.

Education: UCLA ‘01, The Juilliard School ‘03. Student of Mitchell Peters and Daniel Druckman.
Interests: Click tracks, experimental animation, graph paper, libraries, math, Japan, your dog.

Deeper dive into my world at The Fifteen Questions.
Full Discography as a composer, performer, and arranger.

Christopher Cerrone

Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Balancing lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact, and interiority, Cerrone’s multi-GRAMMY-nominated music is utterly compelling and uniquely his own.

Cerrone’s recent opera, In a Grove (libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann),jointly produced by LA Opera and Pittsburgh Opera, was called “stunning” (Opera News) and “outstanding” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) in its sold-out premiere run in March 2022. Other recent projects include A Body, Moving, a brass concerto for the Cincinnati Symphony; Breaks and Breaks, a violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony; The Insects Became Magnetic, an orchestral work with electronics for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; The Air Suspended, a piano concerto for Shai Wosner; and Meander, Spiral, Explode, a percussion quartet concerto co-commissioned by Third Coast Percussion, the Chicago Civic Orchestra of the Chicago Symphony and the Britt Festival.

Upcoming projects include The Year of Silence, based on the story of the same name by Kevin Brockmeier, for the Louisville Symphony and baritone Dashon Burton; Beaufort Scales, an oratorio for voices, electronics, and video commissioned by Lorelei Ensemble; and Nervous Systems, a new clarinet quintet that will be toured throughout the US and Australia.

Cerrone’s first opera, Invisible Cities, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist, was praised by the Los Angeles Times as “A delicate and beautiful opera…[which] could be, and should be, done anywhere.” Invisible Citiesreceived its fully-staged world premiere in a wildly popular production by The Industry, directed by Yuval Sharon, in Los Angeles’ Union Station. Both the film and opera are available as CDs, DVDs, and digital downloads. In July 2019, New Amsterdam Records released his GRAMMY-nominated sophomore effort, The Pieces that Fall to Earth, a collaboration with the LA-based chamber orchestra, Wild Up, to widespread acclaim. His most recent release, The Arching Path (In a Circle Records), features performances by Timo Andres, Ian Rosenbaum, Lindsay Kesselman, and Mingzhe Wang and was nominated for a 2022 GRAMMY. Cerrone is the winner of the 2015-2016 Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition and is currently a fellow at the Laurenz Haus Foundation in Basel, Switzerland in 2022–2023.

Christopher Cerrone holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. He is published by Schott NY and Project Schott New York and in 2021 he joined the composition faculty at Mannes School of Music. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Carrie Sun. christophercerrone.com.