Jacob Cooper’s compositions and multimedia works have gained recognition in both North America and Europe, with performances by the JACK Quartet, the Calder Quartet, Ensemble ACJW, the NOW Ensemble, and the Minnesota Orchestra. His work has recently appeared at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the MATA Festival, the Wordless Music concert series, and Bargemusic. Upcoming projects include commissions for eighth blackbird, the Albany Symphony, and The Living Earth Show.

Lauded as “richly talented” by the New York Times, Cooper has earned awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, and the American Music Center, and was the winner of the 2011 Carlsbad Music Festival competition. He has attended the Bang on a Can Summer Institute and the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, and he has held residences at the Ucross Foundation, the Banff Centre, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Cooper is also a member of the composers collective Sleeping Giant with labelmate Timo Andres and others. Cooper works in visual media as well, and his video Commencer une autre mort was shortlisted for the 2010 YouTube/Guggenheim Biennial of Creative Video. Also dedicated to teaching and scholarship, Cooper has served on the faculty at Amherst College and recently completed the requirements for his doctorate in composition at the Yale School of Music.

Hailed by The New York Times as “a versatile, charismatic soprano endowed with brilliant technique and superlative stage instincts…indispensable to New York’s new-music ecosystem” MELLISSA HUGHES enjoys a busy international career in both contemporary and early music. A dedicated interpreter of living composers, Hughes has worked closely with Julia Wolfe, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Steve Reich, Neil Rolnick, and has premiered works by David T. Little, Missy Mazzoli, Ted Hearne, Caleb Burhans, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, and Frederick Rzewski, among others. In the classical concert hall she has performed Mozart’s Vespers and Requiem under the baton of Sir Neville Marriner, Handel’s Dixit Dominus with Sir David Willcocks, and the role of Dido under the direction of Andrew Lawrence King. Equally at home in front of a rock band, Hughes has received widespread acclaim in her role as lead vocalist of Newspeak, an amplified alt-classical band, and for her work with Missy Mazzoli’s Victoire. Based in Brooklyn, Mellissa Hughes holds degrees from Westminster Choir College and Yale University.
 
Mellissa Hughes official site

Corey Dargel is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-based composer and singer-songwriter whose gentle assault on pop and classical idioms creates a tension that pervades his music. According to the New York Times, “Dargel [is] one of the more original and consistently provocative artists pushing at the margins of modern classical music and adventurous pop.” New York magazine says, “His ghostly baritone, precise delivery, and transfixing stage presence transform his performances into intimate plumbings of the audience’s psyche.” The New Yorker calls Dargel “a baroquely unclassifiable” composer “of ingenious nouveau art songs.”
 
Dargel’s most recent commercial album, Someone Will Take Care of Me (2010, New Amsterdam Records), is a double-CD set of song cycles adapted from his critically acclaimed music-theater pieces about hypochondria and voluntary amputation. WNYC’s New Sounds deems the album “a brilliant collection,” and in New Music Box, Frank J. Oteri writes, “Dargel is doing much more than writing extremely well-crafted songs. He is creating larger arcs of meaning, both musically and lyrically.”
 
Dargel studied composition at Oberlin Conservatory with John Luther Adams, Pauline Oliveros, and Brenda Hutchinson. His music has been the subject of international radio broadcasts including PRI’s Studio 360 and NPR’s Weekend Edition. He earned a tweet from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for his art-song settings of the remarks of Condoleezza Rice.
 
Dargel is a performer with, and founding member of, the Brooklyn-based experimental theater company, Laboratory Theater. He’s on twitter @dargel and on the web at www.automaticheartbreak.com.
 
Photo by Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler of New Catalogue

James Moore is a versatile guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he has been immersed in New York’s creative music community since 2006, earning the titles of “local electric guitar hero” by Time Out New York and “model new music citizen” by the New York Times. James is is a founding member of the electric guitar quartet Dither, and performs internationally as a soloist and ensemble player. He has worked with Bang on a Can, Alarm Will Sound, Clogs, and members of the National. Current projects include concerts and recording of John Zorn’s Book of Heads for solo guitar, performances as an onstage musician and actor in Richard Maxwell’s Neutral Hero, and a new collaborative piece for BAM with composer David Lang and choreographer Susan Marshall.
 
http://www.jamesmooreguitar.com/
 
photo credit: Isabelle Selby

Bassist Eleonore Oppenheim is quickly gaining a reputation as both a valued ensemble player and an engaging soloist. She has been called “…quietly virtuosic” by New York Times critic Alan Kozinn, who also noted that she “…played with subtle expressivity.” Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle observed that her performance was “…delivered…with particular eloquence,” and Steve Smith of the New York Times has alternately described her playing as “…warm, round…” and “…plaintive, flutelike…” A tireless champion of new music, Eleonore has built a rich repertoire of solo pieces commissioned from some of the most talented of today’s young composers. Equally at home in a variety of genres, she has performed with a wide range of groups including the Philip Glass Ensemble, “all-star, all-female quintet” (Time Out NY) Victoire, Tyondai Braxton, the Wordless Music Orchestra, Signal Ensemble, Meredith Monk, the pioneering indie rock band the Instruments, and others. Eleonore was a Bang on a Can Fellow in 2006, where she met many of the musicians and composers she now collaborates with. She is currently pursuing a Doctoral degree at SUNY Stony Brook, where she also teaches applied double bass to undergraduate students. She is an alumna of the Yale School of Music and the Juilliard School.
 

www.eleonoreoppenheim.com

Wil Smith is a Brooklyn-based composer and performer who plays piano, keyboards, pipe organ, and Hammond B3 organ, and is a founding member of the experimental rock band Passenger Fish. Called an “intrepid keyboardist” by the New York Times, Smith is active as a performer on the new music scene. He recently played piano in Cynthia Hopkins’s This Clement World at St. Ann’s Warehouse, performed on keyboards in Corey Dargel’s Hold Yourself Together in the American Composer Orchestra’s Sonic Festival and on the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s Music off the Walls concert, and performed on Hammond B3 organ with Present Music in Milwaukee premiering Jerome Kitzke’s new large-scale theatrical work, Buffalo Nation. In early 2012, he commissioned new works for pipe organ by composers Paula Matthusen, Orlando Jacinto Garcia, Corey Dargel, Eric km Clark, Irene Buckley, and Omar Surillo, which he will soon record and release as a commercial album.
 
wilsmithmusic.com