Ruth Anderson (1928 – 2019, USA) studied flute, composition with Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud, and electronic music with Vladimir Ussachevsky and Pril Smiley. The groundbreaking composer began composing for tape as early as 1958. Anderson’s best-known works span a wide range from the collages of Dump (1970) and SUM (State Of The Union Message) (1973, revised 1997) to the peaceful sine waves of Points (1974) and spoken vowel sounds I come out of your sleep (1979, revised 1997). She was recipient of two Fulbright scholarships, next to a multitude of awards and grants, and taught at Hunter College (1966-1989, City University of New York). There she became founding director of the Electronic Music Studio in 1968 – one of the first studios in the USA to be founded and directed by a woman. Her lifetime companion was Annea Lockwood. Ruth Anderson passed away on November 29th, aged 91.

Malin Bång’s music is an exploration of movement and energy. She defines her musical material according to their amount of friction to create a spectrum of unpredictable and contrasting actions, ranging from the intimate and barely audible to the harsh and obstinate. In her work she often incorporates acoustic objects to explore a rich sound world and to suggest that a musical content can be shaped by anything valuable to the artistic purpose.
Malin Bång is residing in Stockholm, Sweden and is the composer in residence and a founding member of the Curious Chamber Players. Her work includes music for instrumental ensembles, orchestra, electronic music based on field recordings, and instrumental performance pieces. Lately she has specifically explored the mixed, amplified instrumental ensemble extended with acoustic objects in collaboration with the members of Curious Chamber Players.
Her works are performed worldwide and some recent projects include the music documentary drama kudzu /the sixth phase/, at Deutschlandfunk in Köln, Huddersfield Festival and Klang Festival in Copenhagen, the large orchestral work splinters of ebullient rebellion for Donaueschinger Musiktage 2018, the portrait concert how long is now at Ultraschall Festival 2014 performed by the CCP, Klangforum Wien at Eclat Festival, Ensemble Recherche at the Wittener Tage für Neue Musik, Ensemble Nikel at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Nadar Ensemble for the Darmstadt Ferienkurse and Faint Noise at the Huddersfield Festival. During 2015 she composed ripost for the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR at the celebratory concert of Lachenmann’s 80th birthday. During 2010 she was awarded the Kranichsteiner Stipendienpreis, in 2014 she received the Malmlöf-Forssling Composition Prize and in 2018 she was awardd the Donaueschinger Tage Orchesterpreis. 2012 she pursued the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm’s one year residency.
Malin Bång is a regular visiting professor at academies in Sweden and abroad and from the autumn 2018 senior lecturer at the composition department at Göteborg Academy of Music and Drama. In 2020 she is one of the lecturers at Darmstädter Ferienkurse.

Johanna Magdalena Beyer (1888-1944) was a pianist and composer born in Leipzig. She presumably immigrated to the United States in 1923. She played an important role in the American ultra-modernist circle. Her teachers, mentors and friends, who include Ruth Crawford Seeger, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, Dane Rudhyar, and Percy Grainger, had a clear influence on her compositions. Polyrhythmic structures and a dissonant countrapuntal technique characterize her works. Although Johanna Beyer achieved a certain degree of fame during her lifetime and some of her pieces received public performances – notably, Three Movements for Percussion (1939) which was performed at least six times by John Cage with the Cage Percussion Players – her pieces were forgotten for a long time after her early death.

Using open-source software like SuperCollider and TidalCycles, her work is focused on the exploration of the musicality of code and the algorithmic behavior of music. An important part of this exploration consists of the practice of live coding. Having an intense activity as a teacher and performer of live coding, Alexandra is among the pioneers of live coding inelectroacoustic music and part of the forefront of the Algorave scene. Currently, she lives in Berlin, Germany, where she completed her Masters in Sound Studies at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Dorit Chrysler has been dubbed asuperior wizard of the theremin. An Austrian-born, New York based composer and performer, Chrysler is the co-founder of the New York Theremin Society and has started the first international school for Theremin, Kid Cool Theremin School and L’Ecole Theremine with branches in New York and Paris. As much as the Theremin is a tool in Chrysler’s electronic instrument arsenal, she is also one of the most visible Thereminists spreading the gospel of this mysterious sounding instrument. Most recently she finished her analog soundtrack for a remake of M by Fritz Lang and was featured on the soundtrack of the HBO documentary Going Clear. Chrysler received her master’s degree of musicology in Vienna and has notably collaborated with Anders Trentemøller, Cluster, Adult., CERN, Carsten Nicolai, Elliot Sharp and Laurie Spiegel. She has performed with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, had her work commissioned by MoMA and theVenice Biennale, and is the founder of Dame Electric, a festival dedicated to female pioneers in Analog Music. As the director of the New York Theremin Society, Chrysler is promoting the application of theremin in different art disciplines and has produced the THEREMIN100 compilation release, commemorating the 100th birthday of the Theremin in 2020.

Daniela Fantechi(*1984, Florence) is a composer and researcher. She studied composition at Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence and at University of Music and Performing Arts Graz with Beat Furrer, Clemens Gadenstätter and Georg Friedrich Haas. Her work focuses on the exploration of the sonic possibilities of acoustic instruments.Since 2010, she is founder and member of the ensemble Blutwurst, and since 2017 she collaborates with the ensemble Azione_Improvvisa. She was for artist-in-residence-programmes at KulturKontakt Austria in Vienna (2016) and for St.A.i.R. in Graz (2017). She is currently working as a doctoral researcher within the research cluster »Music, Thought and Technology« at The Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium. She lives in Florence.

The Ensemble Garage was founded in 2009 at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz K ln. Composer Brigitta Muntendorf, together with Rodrigo Lopez Klingenfuss, established Ensemble Garage as a platform for musicians, composers and other artists to explore and display new ideas, concepts, and pieces. Since its creation, the ensemble has focused on bringing the works of younger composers to life through the process of collective and cooperative rehearsing. Through its work, the ensemble seeks to answer questions about ‘our’ generation: Who does it consist of? Where does it congregate or belong? What does it think and do? What does it use and create, and, most importantly, hear and want others to hear? Ensemble Garage’s intent in presenting works is embedded in a transmedial understanding of contemporary music and joyful engagement with the interaction between content and performance situations of individual works.

Midori Hirano is a Japanese musician, composer, and producer from Kyoto who crossovers a wide range of genres and cultures. She studied piano at the university, but after finishing her study began to compose her own music on the computer and living in Berlin since 2008.
Her productions are based on the use of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings or guitars, but yet experimental and an eclectic mixture of modern digital sounds with subtle electronic processing and field recordings.
Midori deals with beat-oriented electronic music under her other moniker MimiCof. During her stay at EMS Elektronmusikstudion in 2015, she recorded sound materials for her album “Moon Synch” with a Buchla Synthesizer System.
She has released nine solo albums so far, and her latest record “Invisible Island” has been released on Sonic Pieces in February 2020.

Cat Hope is an accomplished Perth based musician, composer, songwriter, sound and performance artist whose practice is an interdisciplinary one that crosses over into film, video, performance and installation.
Hope’s music is conceptually driven, using mostly graphic scores, acoustic / electronic combinations and new score reading technologies. It often features aleatoric elements, drone, noise, glissandi and an ongoing fascination with low frequency sound. Her composed music ranges from works for laptop duet to orchestra, with a focus on chamber works, and in 2013 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to develop her work, as well as Civitella Ranieri (Italy) and Visby International Composers residency (Sweden) fellowships. Her practice explores the physicality of sound in different media, and has been discussed in books such as Loading the Silence (Kouvaris, 2013), Women of Note (Appleby, 2012), Sounding Postmodernism (Bennett, 2011) as well as periodicals such as The Wire, Limelight,and Neu Zeitschrift Fur Musik Shaft. Her works have been recorded for Australian, German and Austrian national radio, and her work has been awarded a range of prizes including the APRA|AMC Award for Excellence in Experimental Music in 2011, 2014 and the Peggy Glanville Hicks composer residency in 2014. She has founded a number of groups, most recently Decibel new music ensemble, noise improv duo Candied Limbs, the Abe Sada and Australian Bass Orchestra bass projects. She has also founded and written pop songs for Gata Negra (1999-2006). Cat Hope is currently Professor of Music at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia where she is Head of Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music.

Neo Hülcker studied composition with Dieter Mack and Harald Muenz at the Musikhochschule Lübeck and with Manos Tsangaris and Franz Martin Olbrisch at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber in Dresden. Hülcker is a composer-performer whose work focuses on music as anthropological research in everyday life environments. Their compositions evolve as situations, performance-installations, actions and interventions, and deal with digital subculture (like ASMR), childhood, human-animal- relations, queer practice and cultural hacking. They are a member of the Y-E-S collective, which deals with sound as a physical experience and the cultural frames of concerts. Their compositions have been performed at the London Contemporary Music Festival, the Darmstadt Summer course, the Dark Music Days in Iceland, etc. Neo Hülcker lives in Berlin.

Ensemble KNM Berlin is an important part of the lively contemporary music scene in Berlin, Germany. Since its foundation in 1988, the ensemble has presented programs across the world that reflect a curiosity to explore the unknown and the willingness to confront the most pressing themes of our times. The ensemble presents compositions, concert installations, and concert projects created in close cooperation with artists from around the world. KNM Berlin has earned an international reputation with repeated guest appearances at important music festivals as well as with its own productions. Since 2014, KNM has been increasingly committed to musical, multi-perspective networking with intercultural collaborations worldwide. KNM was awarded the German Record Critics’ Award (2009 and 2010) for its collaboration with the composer Beat Furrer.

Georgia Koumará, born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1991 studied Composition (M.Mus.) in Thessaloniki (A.U.TH) and Cologne (HfMT), Music Theory and Piano in Thessaloniki (S.C.TH) with among others Johannes Schöllhorn, Michalis Lapidakis,Kostas Siempis, Lenio Liatsou and Lilia Vaseiliadou. Master classes with a.o. G. Aperghis, F. Bedrossian, Ph. Manoury, A. Posadas, O. Neuwirth, W. Rihm, B. Ferneyhough, B. Furrer, R. Cendo, J.S. Chiong, M. Tsangaris, P.Kokkoras, J. Walsche, J.M. Lopez Lopez complete her musical education. Her works have been performed on stage in Greece, Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland and Great Britain and have been broadcast on Greek and German radio.
Her music has been played by among others WDR Sinfonieorchester, Orchester der Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln, IEMA Ensemble, DissonArt Ensemble, Ensemble hand werk, Ensemble Platypus, Lucerne Academy Alumni Ensemble, Greek Contemporary Musik Ensemble, Lynx Quartet, Schlagzeug Ensemble der TSSO, Taller Sonoro Ensemble as part of festivals such as Acht Brücken Festival -Musik für Köln 2015, Wittener Tage für Kammermusik 2016, New Talents Biennale Cologne 2016, Lucerne Academy Festival 2016, Musica Festival Strasbourg 2016. Since 2010 she is a member of the improvisation ensemble 6daExit which is based in Thessaloniki and as a performer and improviser she has collaborated with many artists based in Greece.
In her music she is interested in exploring the relationships that occur between conceptual, perceptual and actual measurable time, as it is formulated thought different ontological interpretations, from the process of performance and listening. Thus, by creating, developing and combining different sonic processes, she strives to achieve continuous flux and energy and intricate multi layered textures.

Anda Kryeziu (*1993, Kosovo) completed her master’s degree in piano and composition, and then studied composition in Basel with Caspar Johannes Walter and in Berlin with Daniel Ott, as well as electroacoustic music at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin with Wolfgang Heiniger. Her works encompass a wide spectrum of genres, ranging from music theater to multimedia works and sound installations to instrumental music with and without live electronics. Kryeziu‘s music has been performed at various festivals including ECLAT, the Munich Biennale, Festival Rümlingen in Switzerland, and Mostra Sonora Sueca in Spain. She received first prize at the Balkan Composer Competition in Prishtina (BCCP) in 2019, and has received a number of grants from institutions such as the Contemporary Arts Alliance Berlin and most recently the Basler Orchester-Gesellschaft. She lives in Berlin.

Lin Liao, part of a young and upcoming generation of conductors, has distinguished herself with a wide repertoire spanning classical to contemporary works, an openness to new art forms as well as an intense engagement with unconventional and interdisciplinary programmes.

An esteemed interpreter of contemporary music, Lin Liao regularly works with leading European ensembles such as the Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Collegium Novum Zürich or the Basel Sinfonietta. Since 2007 she has enjoyed a close relationship with the Lucerne Festival Academy. In addition, she has also given guest performances at renowned festivals including Holland Festival, ManiFeste in Paris, Ultraschall Berlin and the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik.

In Taiwan, Lin Liao leads the Weiwuying Academy as part of the Contemporary Music Platform at the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, which trains young talented Taiwanese instrumentalists in the performance of contemporary music.
Lin Liao developed a multifaceted operatic and music-theatre repertoire through her position as 1st Kapellmeister at the Landestheater in Schleswig-Holstein as well as through engagements at the Wiener Operntheater, Deutsche Oper am Rhein and the Theater Chemnitz, among others. She is also experienced in symphonic repertoire, having made guest appearances with orchestras such as the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra, Beethoven Orchester Bonn, Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal, Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra and the Taipei Symphony Orchestra.

The conductor’s talent was recognised early on by Pierre Boulez and Peter Eötvös, who entrusted Lin Liao with the conductor’s role in Stockhausen’s Gruppen at the Lucerne Festival 2007. Since then she has continued working closely with Peter Eötvös, who became an important mentor and supporter.

Lin Liao studied composition and piano at the Taipei National University of the Arts and completed her conducting studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna with honours. She received further artistic guidance in masterclasses from conductors including Bernard Haitink and Leif Segerstam.

The Liz is a power trio.

She/they are improvising musicians working together to cross over boundaries of media, gender, genre, culture, and species: using hybrids to spawn a single vision. The Liz formed in 2014 as an experimental constellation for the KIM collective series, and went on to produce ”Book of Birds”, a multimedia work which explores the search for identity and purpose through a collage of myths and texts, sewn together with strange visuals and raw improvisation, presented at Moers Festival, Urban Acoustic Tribes, KIM- FEST 2016, and Borusan Music House in Istanbul. As an improvising trio of exceptional unity, they have been invited to perform at Ausland, Sowieso, and Spektrum. They/She premiered their/her 2019 production Dipper at All Ears Festival in Oslo, Norway, and later performed it at XJazz Festival in Berlin.

They are all Berliners, in that they are trans-plants, enjoying the cross fertilization of the city.

Born in New Zealand in 1939 and living in the US since 1973, Annea Lockwood is known for her explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments, in works ranging from sound art and installations, through text-sound and performance art to concert music. Her music has been performed in many venues and festivals including: the Possibility of Action exhibition at MACBA Barcelona, De Ijsbreker, the Other Minds Festival-San Francisco, the Walker Art Center, the American Century: 1950 – 2000 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, CNMAT Berkeley, the Asia-Pacific Festival, Donaufest 2006 Ulm, the Donau Festival Krems, the 7th Totally Huge New Music Festival Perth, Ear To The Earth Festival – New York and Sonic Acts XIII.

Her sound installation, A Sound Map of the Danube, has been presented in Germany, Austria and the USA. This is a surround ‘sound map’ of the entire Danube River, incorporating a wide variety of water, animal and underwater insect sounds, rocks from the riverbed and the voices of those whose lives are intimately connected to the river. Other recent projects include Ceci n’est pas un piano, for piano, video and electronics commissioned by Jennifer Hymer; Jitterbug, commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, a six channel soundscape with two improvising musicians; and In Our Name, a collaboration with Thomas Buckner based on poems by prisoners in Guantánamo. She was a recipient of the 2007 Henry Cowell Award. Her music has been issued on CD and online on the Lovely Music, Ambitus, EM, XI, Rattle, Lorelt, and Pogus labels.

Born in Rome in 1990, Giulia Lorusso studied piano and composition at the Conservatory “Giuseppe Verdi” in Milanand in Paris where she attended the Cursus IRCAM andcompleted a Master’s degree at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP). Lorusso received commissions by The FondazioneSpinola Banna per l’Arte (Turin, Italy) in co-production withIRCAM-Centre Pompidou, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik (Bludenz, Austria), Radio France and ProQuartet. Her music has been performed in Italy and abroad, such as atthe Festival Milano Musica, Festival Manifeste-IRCAM, Tzlil Meudcan Festival (Tel Aviv), Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, TactusYoung Composers’ Forum (Bruxelles) by ensembles such asDistractfold Ensemble, Quartetto Prometeo, Divertimento Ensemble, Ensemble Nikel, Brussels Philharmonic, Orchestra and Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Lange//Berweck//Lorenz is a Berlin-based trio for live played electroacoustic music. Projects entail realizations of electronic scores, the restoration and (re-)performance of electronic works from the past and the collaboration on new pieces with today’s composers. Their ever growing instrument collection comprises a wide array of analogue and digital synthesizers, effect units and studio tools from the past and the present. Combining passion, curiosity, virtuoso instrumental technique and technological knowledge Lange//Berweck//Lorenz present themselves as one of the leading ensembles for live performance of electroacoustic music today.

Svetlana Maraš (1985) is composer and sound artist from Serbia. She works at the intersection of experimental music, sound art and new media. Her musical work is finding adequate form of expression in different media, genres and representational contexts and encompasses live electronic music performance, electro-acoustic composition, radiophonic art, sound and media installations. She has been musically educated from an early age. Graduated at the renowned Aalto University (Helsinki) where she worked as a research assistant, she also received training in composition and art at places like Bang on a Can Summer Institute (MASSMoCA), Columbia University – School of the Arts, Mozarteum Summer Academy, KlangKunstBuhne at UDK (Berlin), The Berklee Summer School, Darmstadt International Summer Course and many other places.
Maraš has presented her work internationally, at venues, festivals and events such as CTM (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), House of Electronic Arts (Basel), Espace Multimedia Gantner (Bourogne), Onassis Cultural Centre (Athens), Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade), Ausland (Berlin), Izlog Suvremenog Zvuka (Zagreb), ICMC (New York), International Rostrum of Composers (Wroclaw), ISEA (Dubai), International Music Institute (Darmstadt), Orpheus Institute (Ghent) and National radios of Austria, Australia, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Croatia, Slovenia and many other countries.
​Maraš was awarded Vitomir Bogić prize by Radio Belgrade, for best, young radiophonic composer. Her composition Dirty thoughts was recommended work at the International Rostrum of composers in Wroclaw in, and her radiophonic piece Jezik (premiered at ORF) was shortlisted for Prix Italia award. Maraš was jury member for Media Art Prize at Bauhaus University and keynote speaker at Audio paper symposium at Inter Arts Center in Malmo. Her article “Thingification of compositional process – emergence and autonomy of extra-musical object in Western Art Music”​ was published as a book chapter. Maraš is co-curator at 4fakultät concert series in Hamburg.
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Svetlana Maraš is composer-in-residence and artistic director at Radio Belgrade’s Electronic Studio.

Laura Mello studied Communications Studies and Composition in Curitiba, Brazil and Electroacoustic Composition (with Dieter Kaufmann) in Vienna. Her work is a continuous search for parallels between the human perception of spoken language and music. She composes, sings, plays traditional and electronic instruments, eavesdrops the world and processes the impressions into audiovisual performances, sound installations, interventions, instrumental, electroacoustic music and DJ-sets. Laura Mello was a participant in the Heroines of Sound Mentoring Programme in 2019- 2020 and is currently a scholarship holder at the prestigious Tarabya Cultural Academy in Istanbul. She is part of the Berlin based sound art project space Errant Sound and lives in Berlin.

Johann Merrich (1981) is an Italian experimental musician and independent researcher. Her interests focus on the creation of an equal history of electronic music, with an emphasis on the effort of women. Her first book “Le Pioniere della Musica Elettronica” (“Women Pioneers of Electronic Music”) has been published in 2012 (Auditorium Edizioni, Milan), followed by “A Short History of Electronic Music and Its Women Protagonists” published in Italian in 2019 and now available in English thanks to the Mariann-Steegmann Foundation and Heroines of Sound Festival. Her current research topics include a multicultural history of electronic music and audience development strategies for the so-called difficult music. With her monthly column “Brevi Storie/Short Stories”, Merrich isan author for musicaelettronica.it, the official blog by Tempo Reale, one of the main European reference points for research, production and educational activities in the field of new musicaltechnologies and electronic music. Her articles appeared on Red Bull Music Academy Daily and Thomann International’s blog. She’s also part of the scientific committee of CRIR, Interdepartmental Research Centre for Radiophonic Studies by Usmaradio, San Marino University.

The work of composer and video artist Leah Muir has been shown and performed in many international venues,such as the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Bruckner Orchester Linz with Dennis Russell Davies and David Friedman, the Münchener Biennale, Wien Modern, MärzMusik, Academy Schloss Solitude, Wiener Konzerthaus, Konzerthaus Berlin, the Aspen Music Festival, June in Buffalo, Ars Electronica, Soundtrack Cologne, with many established new music ensembles and soloists.She has received many international awards and prizes during her career including a an ASCAP (2001), a Fulbright to work with Chaya Czernowin (2006-7), the German Opera “New Scenes” Prize (2013) the Berliner Composition Stipend (2016), the German cultural exchange program for Venice (2019) to name a few.

Muir’s music theatre productions include “Von Sodom und Gomorra nach Berlin” premiered at the Münchener Biennale, the 40 min. mini opera, “Wie man findet, was man nicht sucht”. Her work as a video artist include “8 to 8” first shown at the Matera festival. She has been developing video projects with talented soloists, including the lmusic video filmed in Venice, “Private Sponsor I” and a video performance of Lorelei Dowling on Contraforte which will premiere with Klangforum Wien in the concert
season of 2020/21. “Lost Time” was composed in conjunction with Chihura Shiota’s installation at the Stadtmuseum Nikolaikirche in Berlin.

As a guest professor in the composition department at the Berlin University of the arts Muir serves as the Artistic Director andco-founder of Ensemble ilinx, Studio for New Music. She is also serving on the faculty at Stanford University, the Bing Overseas Program in Berlin.

Brigitta Muntendorf (*1982) studied composition with Younghi Pagh-Paan at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen and with Krzysztof Meyer, Rebecca Saunders, and Johannes Schöllhorn at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. In her compositional work and as artistic director of Ensemble Garage, she explores open experimental configurations in which music emerges not solely as a sonic art form, but as a social and aesthetic field of action in a society shaped by new media phenomena. Performances have brought the German-Austrian composer to international festivals such as Festival d’Automne Paris and Warsaw Autumn. She has received numerous prizes, such as the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Award, and curated the concert series FRAU MUSICA NOVA on Deutschlandfunk Cologne. Brigitta Muntendorf has been Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln since 2017. She lives in Cologne.

Mayke Nas enjoys creating music for musicians breathing simultaneously, for moving chairs, wired blackboards and open bridges. She considers herself lucky to work with Nieuw Amsterdams Peil, Ragazze Quartet, Nieuw Ensemble, Asko|Schönberg, Slagwerk Den Haag, het Koninklijk Concertgebouw Orkest, de Neue Vocalsolisten, Ensemble Klang, Calefax, Eklekto and other musical wizards.

Sarah Nemtsov was born in 1980 in Oldenburg and studied composition in Hanover and Berlin with Nigel Osborne, Johannes Schöllhornand Walter Zimmermann. She has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the Busoni Composition Prize of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the Deutsche Musikautorenpreis of the GEMA and won the international RicordiLAB composition competition. She collaborates with renowned ensembles and orchestras (HR Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Sinfonieorchester, ensemble modern, ensemble mosaik, Ensemble Adapter, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, ensemble recherche, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Basel Sinfonietta etc.) and her works are performed at internationally renowned festivals -such as the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Darmstadt Summer Course, Wien modern, ECLAT, Ultraschall, Holland Festival, Musica, Bregenz Festival, Munich Biennale and many more. Nemtsov’s music captivates through sensitively sounded setups, through complex and energetic textures, musical stratifications, interactions between acoustic instruments and electronics, as well as references to other arts and other media. In the summer semester of 2014, Sarah Nemtsov taught composition at Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Cologne, in 2018 she taught composition at Haifa University as a DAAD guest lecturer. In 2021 she will be tutor for composition at Darmstadt Summer Course. In 2020, she wasnominated for the Opus Klassik Prize in the category “Composer of the Year”. Her catalogue includes more than 100 compositions in almost all genres. Several of her works are published by Ricordi. DIE ZEITwrote about her opera SACRIFICE(premiered 2017 at the Opera HouseHalle): “Sound becomes space becomes time becomes reality”. Her new opera –OPHELIA(2020-2021) with a libretto by Mirko Bonné –will be premiered in 2023 at Saarländisches Staatstheater.

Mary Ocher has been persistently creating passionate, uncompromising work, raw, thought provoking, socially and creatively pushing against the current, dealing with subjects of authority, identity and conflict.

Her work is as enchanting as it is polarizing, ranging from traditional folk to raw 60s garage, ambient with ethereal vocals and abstract synths, to experimental pop with African and South American rhythms. She has released 4 studio albums on 5 labels in the past 6 years, as well as a double anthology of home recordings, 2 EPs and 2 collections of remixes. Her previous solo release was produced by Canadian Psych Rock&Roll guru King Khan.

The most recent, “The West Against The People” is out on Klangbad, Hans Joachim Irmler’s label of Faust. It features solo tracks, as well as tracks with her two drummers Your Government, and elusive legends Die Tödliche Doris and Felix Kubin. It also features an essay elaborating on the themes of the album and analyzing the current sociopolitical climate*.

*The essay can be read here: www.maryocher.com/essay.html

One of the most powerful voices of her generation, she was chosen by the Utopik Ensemble in France to represent her country in a concert dedicated to the Mexican contemporary music.

Some of her most representative works are her Concerto for Clarinet and orchestra Ascenso al Celeste (2018). Her Double Concerto for piano, flute and orchestra (2012) and her chamber opera La Creciente (2015).

Her catalog includes works for solos, duets, trios, string quartets, chamber ensembles and symphony orchestra.

Her works have been performed in countries such as France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Japan, Canada, Holland, and the USA.

She has had an extensive collaboration with Spanish interpreters, including Alberto Rosado, Clara Andrada, the SIGMA PROJECT saxophone quartet, the Brower Trio of Valencia and recently with the Trio Arbós of Madrid.

Awarded by the Sistema Nacional para Cultura y las Artes (National System for the Culture and the Art) for the fourth time, she serves as a teacher of composition, analysis and orchestration at the Superior School of Music of the INBA (Nacional Institute of the Fine Arts).

During her musical training she studied with Marta Garcia Renart and Ana Maria Tradatti (piano), and with Arturo Márquez and Ana Lara (composition), as well as  numerous courses in Europe with teachers such as Toshio Hosokawa, Klaus Huber, Mauricio Sotelo, José Manuel López López, Brian Ferneyhough, Chaya Czernowin, Theo Loevendie, etc.

Marta Śniady (*1986 in Pabianice, Poland) studied composition with Bronisław Kazimierz Przybylski at the Łódź Music Academy. Her works create multi-layered references and connections, at times to other art forms. The composer perceives new music as an important medium of social communication. Her works have been performed at several international contemporary music festivals such as Warsaw Autumn, Sacrum Profanum, Musica Electronica Nova, Pulsar Festival and KLANG Festival. She has been a board member of the Warsaw Autumn Music Festival since 2017. After completing a postgraduate diploma with Simon Steen-Andersen and Niels Rønsholdt at the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg (2019), she completed her doctorate at the Music Academy in Łódź, where she has been teaching since 2015. Marta Śniady lives in Łódź and Wroclaw.

Laurie Spiegel (*1945 in Chicago, USA) ist Komponistin und Pionierin der
Computermusik, die bereits 1969 mit analogen Synthesizern arbeitete. Nach einem Abschluss in Sozialwissenschaften studierte sie privat klassische Gitarre und Komposition in London, dann Barock- und Renaissance-Laute bei Jacob Druckman und Vincent Persichetti. Obwohl ihre Musik auf Algorithmen und komplexen computergestützten Texturen basiert, bleibt diese melodisch, intuitiv klingend – zwischen Form und Emotion. Interessiert an der kompositorischen Kontrolle durch digitale
Computer schrieb Spiegel von 1973 bis 1979 interaktive Kompositionssoftware bei Bell Labs und wurde später für ihre Musiksoftware, insbesondere MusicMouse, berühmt. Sie gründete
das Computer Music Studio der New York University, distanzierte sich in den frühen 1980er Jahren jedoch von der New Yorker Szene. Trotz ihrer herausragenden technischen Fähigkeiten stellte Spiegel als Komponistin stets ihre Intuition und Fantasie in den Vordergrund, was sich in der Lebendigkeit und Ausdrucksst rke ihrer Musik zeigt. Sie lebt in New York.

Åsa Stjerna is a Swedish installation artist who uses sound and listening as her artistic media of exploration.Through her site-specificsound installations, she explores the often hidden underlying historic, political and poetic phenomena connected to a place, making these perceivable.. In a number ofrecentprojects Stjerna hasspecifically addressed environmental issues and art’s capacity to transform information of global relevance to an embodied experience,approaching the global andthelocal as always mutually connected.Stjerna has participated in a number of exhibitions in Sweden and internationally. Herworks include several permanent site-specific sound installations,for exampleSky Brought Down(2017)at the Sahlgrenska university hospital in Sweden, which received a honorary mention at Prix Arts Electronica in Linz 2019. She has exhibited among other at Transmediale Media Festival, Berlin, Nordic Music Days, Stockholm, the Ultima Contemporary Music festival, Oslo and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.She holds a PhD in artistic researchfrom University of Gothenburg, Sweden 2018, the dissertation specifically investigatethe process of spatial transformation in site-specific sonic practice, i. e. what it actually means to renegotiate a place through sound—from the artistic practitioner’sperspective.

Ying Wang was born in Shanghai. She studied composition at the Shanghai Conservatory before moving to Germany in 2003, where she studied composition with York Höller and electronic composition with Michael Beil at the Hochschule for Music and Dance in Cologne. She has also been a pupil of Rebecca Saunders and JohannesSchöllhorn. In 2010, she completed a Masters Degree in Contemporary Music at the Hochschule for Music and Performing Arts in Frankfurt. In 2012, Ying Wang took part in the Cursus de Composition et d’informatique musicale at IRCAM in Paris.Ying Wang has collaborated with conductors such as Markus Stenz, Brad Lubman, and Marcus Creed, and with orchestras and ensembles such as the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, Gürzenich Orchestra, Brandenburger Symphoniker, Avanti Orchestra Helsinki, Ensemble Phoenix Basel, Ensemble Alternance, Lucerne Festival Ensemble, Cassatt Quartet, Norrbotten Neo Ensemble, Ensemble Resonanz, Ensemble UnitedBerlin, MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle Musik, Ensemble PHACE, Ensemble Kontrapunkt, and the International Ensemble Modern Academy Ensemble. Her compositions have been played in Paris, New York, Stockholm, Berlin, Beijing, and Lucerne, as well as at renowned festivals such as the Tage für Neue Musik Zürich, Acht Brücken Cologne, and Wien Modern. Ying Wang has received scholarships from organizations such as the International Ensemble Modern Academy, the Experimental Studio of the Southwest German Radio and, on the recommendation of Peter Eötvös, the Herrenhaus Edenkoben. She has also won numerous prizes, such as a Giga Hertz Prize, the composition prize at the 5thBrandenburg Biennale, the Irino Prize for Chamber Orchestra in Tokyo, and the Heidelberg Prize for Female Artists. In 2015, Wang was Composer in Residence at theDeutschlandfunk’s Forum Neuer Musik in Cologne. She has received commissions from, for example, the Southwest German Radio, Deutschlandfunk, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, the Lucerne Festival, the NOW Festival NRW, the NRW Arts Foundation, the Brandenburger Symphoniker, the Kassel Music Days, the Heidelberg Orchestra, and the Cologne Philharmonie. Since 2013, Ying Wang has taught composition at the Shanghai Conservatory. She lives in Berlin and Beijing.