ABOUT THE COMPOSERS
Carson Cooman is an American composer with a catalogue of works in many forms, ranging from solo instrumental pieces to operas, and from orchestral works to hymn tunes. His music has been performed on all six inhabited continents. Cooman’s music appears on over thirty-five recordings, including fifteen complete CDs on the Naxos, Albany, Artek, Altarus, MSR Classics, Raven, and Zimbel labels. Cooman’s primary composition studies have been with Bernard Rands, Judith Weir, Alan Fletcher, and James Willey. As an active concert organist, Cooman specializes exclusively in the performance of new music. Over 130 new works have been composed for him by composers from around the world, and his performances of the work of contemporary composers can be heard on a number of CD recordings.
www.carsoncooman.com
Canadian composer and conductor Leonard Enns is on the music faculty of Ontario's University of Waterloo at Conrad Grebel University College. Among various recordings including his music is the Canadian Music Centre Centrediscs recording of Enns' choral works entitled NorthWord, performed by the Elora Festival Singers under Noel Edison. His Nocturne for a cappella choir was a 2010 JUNO nomination for Classical Composition of the Year. As conductor, Enns is the founding director of the DaCapo Chamber Choir, dedicated to the performance of contemporary choral music, and winners of the 2010 Outstanding Choral Recording award of the Association of Canadian Choral Communities for the CD ShadowLand.
Elizabeth Brookie Haskins was born in Chillicothe, Ohio in 1951. She earned a Bachelor of Arts with majors in Music and English from Wilmington College of Ohio and a Master of Music in Vocal Performance from Miami University of Ohio. Currently Ms. Haskins is a member of the music faculty at Wilmington College, where she directs the College Community Chorus and the Collegium Musicum. She resides with her husband of 38 years, Robert J. Haskins, Professor Emeritus of Music at Wilmington College.
Born in London in 1978, Tarik O'Regan was educated at Oxford University and subsequently at Cambridge. His work has garnered two 2009 GRAMMY® nominations (including Best Classical Album) and two British Composer Awards. He has held the Fulbright Chester Schirmer Fellowship at Columbia University and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard. Other appointments in recent years include positions at Trinity and Corpus Christi Colleges in Cambridge, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Yale University. 2011 sees the opening of Heart of Darkness, his opera based on Joseph Conrad’s novel of the same name, at the Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre and the release of Acallam Na Senórach¸ his third album on the Harmonia Mundi label.
Donald Waxman (b. 1925) has written for almost every genre, and has been awarded the Gustav Lemm Composition Prize (twice), the RCA Composition Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a gold medal in the Kang Nung Music Festival (Korea), and the Delius Society's Grand Prize for American chamber music compositions. He is also well known for his contributions to the field of piano pedagogy.
Richard Wilson (b.1941) is the composer of over one hundred works in many genres. His opera Aethelred the Unready was given its first staged production at Symphony Space, New York City, in January, 2011. From the American Academy of Arts and Letters he has received both an Academy Award in Music and the Hinrichsen Award; from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, he received the Stoeger Prize. Additional awards have included a Cleveland Arts Prize, the Burge/Eastman Prize, a Frank Huntington Beebe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and numerous ASCAP awards. His works have been commissioned by the Naumburg, Koussevitsky, and Fromm Foundations, as well as by the Library of Congress, Chicago Chamber Musicians, and the San Francisco Symphony. Richard Wilson is Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Music at Vassar College and Composer-in-Residence with The American Symphony Orchestra.