Welcome to the Music Department

Kedarnath Awati (India) is doing his PhD under David Felder. Currently on study leave from his position as Professor of Music at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, he has composed and produced music for several feature length Indian films for the big screen as well as for numerous shorter films and exercises made by student film-directors. At UB he’s bent on ‘absorbing’ as much of the world of occidental art music as he can. His works in progress include a set of piano miniatures embracing a variety of styles and a work for strings that seeks a common ground between Indian and Western music. He also has degrees in Pure Mathematics, enjoys teaching, takes long walks, writes allegedly otiose prose, and is a diehard cruciverbalist.

Trevor Christian Bjorklund (USA) has his Bachelor's of Music, Composition, from San Francisco State University. He graduated as an exchange student in the music conservatory in Trossingen, Germany, then stayed in Germany for 3 years as a freelance composer, trombonist, conductor, and English teacher.

His music is performed in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, France, the Czech Republic, and the USA.

He has studied with Josh Levine, Mark Randall Osborn, Frank Cox, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Younghi Pagh-Paan, and Jeffrey Stadelman and also with Chaya Czernowin and Brian Ferneyhough at Darmstadt. He currently studies with David Felder at SUNY Buffalo.

In addition to his work as a composer and trombonist, he is also the bass/player/drummer/song writer for Blind-Ass Chicken, an international funk band based in Bremen, Germany.

Aubrey Byerly (USA) is just beginning work toward her Ph.D in Composition with Jeff Stadelman. She is a recent graduate of University of California San Diego. Where she has studied with Chaya Czernowin, Steven Takasugi, Philippe Manoury, and Chinary Ung. She was also a two-time recipient of the Robert Erickson Prize for excellence in research.

Paolo Cavallone (Sulmona, Italy) After a decade devoted to improvisation, at the age of seventeen Mr. Cavallone began to study composition at the State Conservatory, Alfredo Casella, in L’Aquila, Italy with Mauro Cardi, Guido Baggiani and Alessandro Sbordoni and received in 2001 his diploma in Composition with the highest mark. At the same institute he also earned degrees in Piano and Instrumentation for band. In addition, in 2001 he earned his degree in Literature, completing a dissertation on the History of Music on Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the State University of L'Aquila. In 2002, 2003 and 2004 while on scholarship, he attended summer courses in Composition at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena with Azio Corghi, earning a merit diploma. Over a period of three years, he also obtained his Diploma of High Specialization (the highest academic Italian recognition) in Composition at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome, Italy with the highest marks under Azio Corghi. He studied Piano with Giovanni Carmassi in Rome and in Pisa. Mr. Cavallone’s works, edited by RAI Trade and Domani Musica (Rome), were well received in Italy and abroad and broadcasted by RAI (ItaIian broadcasting corporation) and Radio Capodistria. In 2002 Mr. Cavallone’s works were released on monographic CD, Contrasto (Domani Musica), where he shows himself as a composer and pianist. In 2004, the score and recording of the string quartet, Contrasto, were featured in the Italian Magazine, Suono Sonda. Since 2005 he has been a member of Nuova Consonanza (Rome). His music has been performed in Rome Auditorium, Siena Accademia Chigiana, L’Aquila among others by musicians such as Maurizio Ben Omar, Sonia Bergamasco, Laura Catrani, the Freon Ensemble and Marco Ortolani among others. As a pianist he played both as a soloist and as part of chamber ensembles, performing classical and contemporary repertoire as well as his own works. He also played in modern and contemporary improvisation ensembles. As a musicologist, he has presented at various conferences on such subjects as Franco Mannino’s opera “Anno Domini 3000”, which premiered at the Teatro Marrucino in Chieti, Italy. He is now writing for cultural publications and on-line magazines such as www.biblio-net.com. He is a member of the Istituto Abruzzese di Storia Musicale (IASM). Having earned a Presidential Fellowship, Mr. Cavallone currently studies Composition with David Felder, Ph. D at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Joshua DeScherer (USA): Composer, Contrabassist
Josh has been fascinated with sound from an early age: many of his earliest memories involve making a lot of noise, as well as seeing and hearing loud things such as cannons, foghorns, and jackhammers. To this day, he continues to find music in unexpected places, enjoying both the sounds of a cityscape (droning engines, rhythmic hammering) and that of a mountain path (distant humming bee tree, rhythmic walking).

Josh has played the contrabass for two decades now, the product of an excellent public school music program in Tenafly, NJ, and supplemented by studies in the preparatory division at the Manhattan School of Music. He has studied bass with Linda McKnight, Lou Kosma, Lynn Hannings, and Pascale Delache-Feldman. Josh has performed with the Colby Symphony Orchestra (Waterville, ME), the Bangor Symphony Orchestra (Bangor, ME), the Tufts University Symphony Orchestra, the Civic Symphony Orchestra of Boston, and the Sage City Symphony Orchestra (Bennington, VT). An adept improviser, Josh has performed with new music groups in both the Boston, MA and Buffalo, NY areas.

While a student at Colby College (Waterville, ME), Josh began his work as a composer. After earning a BA in Music from Colby, he continued on to Tufts University (Medford, MA) earning a MA in Music Composition in 2001. During these years, Josh studied composition with Jonathan Hallstrom, Steve Nuss, Phil Carlsen, and John McDonald. After earning his MA, Josh taught Aural Skills and Fundamentals of Music at Bennington College. Many of his pieces from this time, such as For The Wild Forests (2003) draw their inspiration from Josh's love of the New England wilderness. As a composer, Josh is especially fond of writing for chamber ensembles, and with few exceptions, his pieces are for small ensembles. Among his works are numerous settings of poetry from the Beat Generation, particularly settings of the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Much of his work over the past several years has been for contrabass solo, or for small ensembles including contrabass. Among these works are Sonata for Contrabass and Piano (2001), Incantation - Canon - Purification (Cycle for Imbolc) (2003), and Contra (2004).

Josh is enrolled as a Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo where he
studies composition with Cort Lippe.

Adrienne Elisha (USA) holds degrees in composition from Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana) where she studied with John Eaton, and Donald Erb, Bernhard Heiden, Juan Orrego-Salas, and Leonard Bernstein. She also received her diploma in viola performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she was an assistant to Heidi Castleman. She is currently a Presidential Doctoral Fellow in Composition at the University of Buffalo where she works with David Felder.

Ms. Elisha has received numerous grants and commissions including those from Meet the Composer, the National Music Teachers' Association (which named her "Ohio Composer of the Year 1997"), The Fortnightly club of Cleveland, Cleveland Chamber Music Society, newEar Ensemble (Kansas City) and the American Music Center. Her works have been featured nationally and internationally at numerous concerts and music festivals, including, June in Buffalo, The Colorado Springs New Music Symposium, the Chintimini Chamber Music Festival, and the International Bartok Festival in Szombathely, Hungary where she has performed her own solo and chamber works as well as premiering those of other composers.

Ms. Elisha was featured as soloist and composer on Polish Radio during the 1996 Warsaw Autumn festival, where she performed unaccompanied new works for solo viola in addition to a broadcast of her own compositions. Her orchestral work Passages, premiered in 1995 by the Ohio Chamber Orchestra under the direction of David Lockington was recently chosen for performance
/reading by the Buffalo Philharmonic in 2004. Her cello concerto, Cry of the Dove, which was written for and performed by solo cellist, Steven Elisha was commissioned and premiered by The Cleveland Chamber Symphony in 2000 and perfomed by the Grand Rapids Symphony in 2004.

Other recent performances and commissions of her compositions include those by The American Chamber Ensemble, The Denali Ensemble, New York New Music Ensemble, the Arditti String Quartet and The Chamber Orchestra of Boston.

Performances of his music by known ensembles like the Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Aventure, Ensemble Sur Plus etc.

Currently enrolled in his second year of the PhD program in Buffalo in the class of David Felder.

The pieces he composed so far during his time Buffalo are written for Brass Quintet, Organ, Two Pianos, Ensemble in 4 Groups and Organ, and the piece “Names and Games”, commissioned by Buffalo’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, for Youth Choir, Tpt., Trbn., Pno., Perc., and Organ.

Kevin McFadden (USA) is in his first year of a doctoral degree in composition at UB where his primary teacher is Jeff Stadelman. For the last seven years he has been working as a dance accompanist, improvising on piano and/or drums for both modern and ballet classes. Currently, he works with both the Nichols School and Buffalo Contemporary Dance in this capacity. Compositionally, his interest lies in filtering the influence of contemporary European composers through a distinctly American perspective. His extra-musical influences include the writings of John Cage, Flann O'Brien, and Samuel Beckett. Kevin has written music for films, choreography, and in his spare time is an avid performer of "popular" oriented music.

Kevin received his MM from Florida State University where his primary teacher was Ladislav Kubik, and his BA from Kenyon College, where he majored in music and English.

Chikashi Miyama(Japan) is a first-year phD student, studying with
Cort Lippe. He began studying composition and computer music with
Takayuki Rai in 1998 at Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo, Japan and
received his BA and MA. In 2004, he moved to Switzerland to study as
a Nachdiplom (postgraduate) student at the Electroniches Studio,
Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel in Switzerland. His works, especially
his interactive multimedia works, have been performed in various
international festivals such as June in Buffalo 2001 in New york,USA,
Mix'02 in Arfus,denmark, Musica Viva'03 in Coimbra,Portugal, Realtime/
non-realtime electronic music festival in Basel,Switzerland, Next
generation'05 in Karlsruhe, Germany as well as in Japan. His papers
about his works and realtime visual processing software "DIPS" are
also accepted by ICMC, and often presented in SIGMUS conferences. His
compositions have received mention in the Residence Prize section of
the 30th International Electroacoustic Music Competition Bourges and
accepeted for performance by International Computer Music Conference
2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. Several works of him are included in a DVD
of Computer Music Journal Vol.28 by MIT press and ICMC 2005 official CD.

Leah Muir (USA) born 1978 from Bennington, Vermont, is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in music composition from the University at Buffalo, where she is the recipient of a University Presidential Fellowship to help complete her degree. She is currently studying composition with David Felder and computer music with Cort Lippe, as well as teaching courses such as Electronic Music and Music and Society and the undergraduate Composition Seminar. She also studied voice with Tony Arnold, performs on the piano and sings with the Open Music Ensemble and as a guest artist in many locations around the Buffalo area, Montreal and Boston. She received her master of music in music composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2002, where she studied with Chen Yi, James Mobberley and Paul Rudy. During her master’s degree, she was assistant conductor to the new music ensemble at UMKC, Musica Nova and also she taught high school students music appreciation with a Composer’s in the Schools grant. She received a Bachelor of Art’s degree in music composition and mathematics, where her focus was on Dynamic Systems Theory (otherwise known as Chaos Theory or Complexity Theory) at Bennington College in 2000 where her primary teachers were Stephen Siegel, Allen Shawn, Jerry Bope and Ruben Puentadora.

Muir’s music has been performed in many national as well as international venues. Some of the ensembles that have performed and read her work include the Ensemble SurPlus, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the Ives Quartet, the Atlantic Brass Quintet, the California Ear Unit, the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra and the Daedalus Quartet.

Muir is the winner of the 2001 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award, and also the 2001 University of Missouri-Kansas City Chamber Music Composition Competition. Muir has participated in many prestigious summer programs like Akademie Schloss Solitude (2005), June in Buffalo (2003), La Schola Cantorum (2001), and the Aspen Music Festival (2000).

She is a founder and co-president of the Open Music Foundation. The Open Music Foundation is a not-for-profit, grant-supported organization of (and for composers and artists dedicated to the promotion of artistic expression based on unconventional, experimental, open-form, and especially graphical, forms of communicating musical ideas. For more information about the OMF, see http://www.openmusic.us. The Open Music Foundation sponsors the Open Music Ensemble and OpenLab at SoundLab in Buffalo, NY. Muir also was a founding member of Augenmusik. From Fall 2002-Spring 2003 Augenmusik performed at Brandeis University, the Tea Room in Boston, HallWalls in Buffalo, the Wandelweiser conference in Montreal, June in Buffalo, and various events at the University at Buffalo.

Robert Phillips (USA) is an active musician and composer living in Buffalo, New York, U.S.A. Throughout his career he has explored the relationship of language to sound to text to music to expressivity. In his music, the semantic meaning of the words and phrases often takes a subordinate role to the expressive power of the means of communication, similar to listening to the sound of someone's voice and not necessarily what they're saying. Playful freedom from linguistic purpose is pursued alongside a devoted study of sound
relationships and musical connections; meanwhile Truth itself oscillates between text and music, escaping to one while we are
situated in the other.

Recently, he has been working on a series of short solo pieces "Dialogue of the Savior, Marsanes" that incorporate text from the
Gnostic scriptures found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, earlier this century. The performer's mouth and instrument become the playing field
for "competitive episodes of mimicry", while the music itself suggests a diverse and fragmented vocabulary with which it builds multiple and even antagonistic vehicles of expression.

His pieces have been performed (often repeatedly) by Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble Chronophonie, The New York New Music Ensemble, and The Open Music Ensemble throughout the U.S. and Germany.

During his life as a composer, Robert Phillips has studied West African music in Ghana, and has fed his investigation of words and sounds with a variety of different musics, cultures and experiences. His original teachers were Chaya Czernowin and Steve Takasugi in San Diego, California. He now studies as a Ph.D. student with David Felder at SUNY Buffalo.

Nora Ponte (Argentina) attended the School of Musical Arts and Sciences of the Argentine Catholic University and obtained a Master’s Degree in Music with a Major in Composition. She attended numerous seminars and workshops related to different aspects of composition in Argentina and abroad.

In 1997 she was granted a scholarship by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura (Argentina) to take courses in Music Composition with the Italian composers Franco Donatoni and Giacomo Manzoni. In 1998 and 1999 she won the Scholarship for Studies Abroad in the Scholarship Competition organized by the Fundación Antorchas of Argentina and she obtained the Scholarship for Studies granted by the Italian Government. These scholarships supported her composition studies with Giacomo Manzoni in Florence and Riccardo Bianchini (Electronic Music, Santa Cecilia Conservatory) in Rome. In 2001 Fundacion Antorchas granted Nora Ponte the “Subsidy for artistic creation” and she received a commission for a six instruments piece.

Nora Ponte’s pieces were awarded in The Sinfonietta Omega Competition for Young Composers in 1993 and 1994, The 1993 Buenos Aires Young Art Biennial, The 1995 Scherzo Strings Orchestra Young Composers Competition, The 1999 Christoph Delz International Composition Competition (Basel, Switzerland) and The 2002 Argentine Catholic University Chamber Music Composition Competition.

Since her graduation, she became a faculty member at the School of Musical Arts and Sciences of the Argentine Catholic University.

She has addressed all musical genres in her pieces and they have been performed in Argentina, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, USA and Germany.

As a chamber music performer and accompanying pianist, she has played several times with different performers and ensembles. Her repertoire includes several romantic and classical operas, lieder, pieces for flute and piano and trios and quartets. She also played contemporary music as a member of the “Uqbar” Ensemble between 1991 and 1995.

Currently, Nora Ponte is a student, TA and, Dean’s Fellow in the Ph. D. program in Composition at The State University of New York at Buffalo.

Nora is invited as a guest composer by the Borealis Festival of Contemporary Music (Bergen, Norway; March 9th-16th) where she will have the performance of her string quartet "Portrait" and the premiere of her solo cello piece "Fra cielo e terra".

Jennifer Recht (USA) is a first-year MA student at UB, studying with Jeff Stadelman. She received her BA in music from Smith College, where she studied with Donald Wheelock and Salvatore Macchia. During her time at Smith, she was awarded the Settie Lehman Fatman prize for musical composition (2003, 2004, 2005, 2006), the Sarah H. Hamilton Prize for an essay on music (2004), and the Harriet Dey Barnum Prize for best all-around student of music in the senior class (2006). Graduating magna cum laude, she also received the designation of highest honors for her thesis composition, Septet.

Will Redman (USA) is in his second year of doctoral studies at UB. He is a founding and current member of the ensemble Augenmusik and does a little bit of performing with free improvisation ensembles here and there. Will's recent composition projects include a large scale "drama" for solo piano, Wilderness (in progress), from solitude for solo flute (premiered by Elizabeth McNutt in November '03), duch/widmo for solo vibraphone (which, with any luck, will be premiered by the composer at the UB Composers' Concert in February '04), and a series of studio recordings featuring a beat-up Aries modular synthesizer. In addition, Will and his wife Joanna Raczynska have just completed their first video/music collaboration, The End of Curiosity, which is on display in the gallery at Hallwalls.

J.T. Rinker (USA) is a candidate for the Ph.D. degree in music composition. He writes acoustic music, electronic music and live interactive music and works in other media such as film, video, machine vision and robotic arts. His works often combine
elements from these various fields.

Recent performances include "hangnail" for trumpet, electric guitar, electric cello and percussion (performed at UB), "petit mort" for piano (four performers) and percussion (performed at Brandeis University, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center and June in Buffalo),
"test for shepard tones and 2 electric guitars" (performed at the Birchfield-Penny Art Center) "imp" electronic music on recorded media (performed at SoundLab) and several performances of the Robot Rock Band www.robotrockband.com, a colloboration with
UB composer Bill Sack.

In addition to his composition studies, J.T. is also a Graduate Assistant to Marc Bohlen(http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~mrbohlen, faculty member in the Department of Media Study at UB. In addition to assisting with classes, J.T. also works on research projects with Professor Bohlen that have been presented at various international festivals. For the past 3 years, J.T. has been the assistant to the director of the annual June in Buffalo New Music Festival http://www.music.buffalo.edu/juneinbuffalo/Cover/JIB2004.htm
held at the University at Buffalo. He is also a strong supporter of the rich arts community in Buffalo, volunteering time at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center http://www.hallwalls.org, teaching digital audio workshops at Squeaky Wheel
http://www.squeaky.org and organizing events at Big Orbit's SoundLab http://www.bigorbitgallery.com/aboutsoundlab.html.

J.T. plays trumpet and has performed in several University ensembles including brass choir, contemporary ensemble, orchestra, Baird Wind Octet (BWO) and is an active member in Augenmusic. He also performs improvised music with other composers from UB as well as local musicians.

J.T. has just begun work on his disertation that will combine several areas of his studies and will include acoustic music, live interactive computer music, camera-less film and machine vision that generates real-time electroacoustic music.

Bill Sack (USA) is a Ph.D. candidate in Composition. His "Boite Noir" for trumpet, electric 'cello, electric guitar and percussion was performed by the UB Contemporary Ensemble at its concert in May, 2003; "luciphage" for piccolo, glockenspiel, and electronics was presented at the Music Department's Baird Hall in February, 2003. Robot Rock Band, an extendable platform for the algorithmic generation and spontaneous autonomous performance of rock music (developed in collaboration with composer and robotician J.T. Rinker), was presented at several events in Buffalo over the last year: most recently in November 2003 at UB's Center for the Arts.

Bill is also active as a performer, playing electric guitar in Augenmusik as well as in a total improvisation trio with multi-instrumentalist Todd Whitman and violinist Carter Williams.

His review of NoTAM's DSP: Digital Sound Processing was published in Computer Music Journal Vol. 27, No. 1.

Current projects include a Lisp implementation of Xenakis' Dynamic Stochastic Synthesis method (which is now included in the Common LISP Music distribution), and a robotic shadow puppet opera based on the story of Diana and Actaeon.

His interests include mechanical models of music-making, automated composition, gadgets and gizmos, extremes of recorded information, and non-idiomatic free improvisation.

He has a Master degree in composition and a Bachelor in guitar. In 2005 Correa was awarded with two scholarships, one from Fulbright and another from SUNY at Buffalo to do his PhD in Musical Composition. His works have been performed in Argentina, United States, Canada, Europe, and in the most important concert halls and Contemporary Music Festivals in Brazil. He has works recorded in CDs in Brazil and Canada, and broadcasted in Brazil, Canada, USA, France, Belgium, Yuguslavia and England.

Correa was co-founder and the first director of NMC-POA (a centre for information and promotion of contemporary music in Porto Alegre-Brazil); Associated Composer in the CME (Electronic Music Centre at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil).

In 1999 James Correa was one of the 20 composers of all Americas selected by the ensemble North/South Consonance for the season 2000. In the year of 2001 he was one of the five chosen composers to represent Brazil in the festival Syntèse 2001 promoted by the Institut International Musique Electroacustique de Bourges, France. James Correa have been a guest composer in many contemporary music festivals in Brazil, he was also member of the artistic committee of ENCOMPOR (a biannual contemporary music festival in Porto Alegre, Brazil). Since 2003 he is working in collaboration with the visual artists Marcelo Gobatto (as in the video-sound installation The Forbidden Word - 2004, Porto Alegre) and Claudia Paim.

Together with his work as a composer, James Correa is developing a career as performer of contemporary music. Currently he lives in Buffalo, NY where he is working on his PhD in composition and playing in the snow with his son. His catalog includes works for soloists, chamber music, orchestra, electronics and multimedia.

Tom Stoll (USA), born and raised near Chicago, is in his third year of the PhD program, studying with Cort Lippe. He received his Bachelor's degree in music composition with a minor in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, where he studied with Guy Garnett, Rick Taube, Zach Browning, Ron Smith, and Scott Wyatt. Recent works include: A quintet for voice, violins, bass, and percussion premiered in spring of 2005, quadraphonic tape piece for the spring 2005 computer music concert. A percussion sextet, entitled The Hourglass Knows Nothing of the Time, was premiered Fall 2005 by the UB Percussion Ensemble. Work presently in progress include a collection of tape pieces that deal with granular synthesis, morphing from one sound to another, and vocal speech sounds. A collection of electronic and perrcussion gear is being built for performance and improvisation. Tom is presently a member of the UB Percussion Ensemble, and also performs in a local band. In the summer, when not composing, you might find him at a local baseball field.

Sundar Subramanian (Canada) is completing coursework for the PhD in music composition, studying with Prof Stadelman. He completed his undergraduate studies at Carleton University in Ottawa and his MA in composition at York University in Toronto. After working for years with lo-fi electronics, extended electric guitar techniques, improvisation, and non-traditional notation systems, Sundar is working on developing some more traditional compositional skills while he is here. In the process, he is struggling to reconcile his wildly disparate musical interests (which include but are not limited to South Indian classical music, jazz, popular musics, electronic music, minimalism, and classical guitar music) into a compositional voice. He is also studying classical guitar with Joanne Castellani. Sundar has had pieces performed by musicians including David Mott, Christina Petrowska-Quilico, Arraymusic, and the Madawaska String Quartet. In 2001 he had the unique opportunity to perform in the premiere of Glenn Branca's Symphony No 13 ("Hallucination City") for 80 electric guitars, 20 electric basses, and drums in New York City.

N. Andrew Walsh (USA) is active both as a performer of the contrabassoon and as a composer.

For the contrabassoon, his interests are mainly in extending the range of the instrument's repertoire away from the "low woodwind as orchestrational flatulence for comedic effect" school of contrabassoon writing. This includes extended and non-idiomatic techniques, work with real-time signal processing, extended sound resources, and improvisation. As a performer, he's also interested in exploring inherent electronic sound resources, such as speaker buzz, line static, and the sound of badly scratched records with nothing recorded on them.

As a composer, his interests are in pure intonation, extended and non-linear perceptions of time, extended sound resources, and very quiet dynamics. Potential models for temporal construction in his music are informed by geometric, synecdochical, and freely associated models of time, particularly as related to four-dimensional geometry, the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca, the fiction of Carlos Fuentes, superstring theory, Japanese woodblock prints from the Ukiyo-e genre, and astrophysics. His current listening interests include the works of Scelsi, Lachenmann, Takemitsu, and Berg. His works have been performed on public radio.

Andrew is one of the founding members of augenmusik, the resident ensemble for open music.