Bettison’s music lives, thrillingly, on a razor’s edge between unpredictability and a groove wrought of full-bodied play. Born on the United Kingdom’s Channel Islands to Spanish and British parents, Bettison was fascinated from an early age by the interplay between the “weird, hazy, tenuous aural image” in his imagination and the wild effort to wrestle it onto the page. After studying in Amsterdam with Louis Andriessen and Martijn Padding, he learned to embrace this creative discomfort, crashing through challenges with fantastic, imaginative twists. As Bettison has said: “It’s not that refinement is a bad thing. But there are times when it can get in the way.” Watershed ensemble works like O Death and B&E (with aggravated assault) drew attention from press and audiences for their free-spirited play and integration of popular musical styles. Bettison was recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Bettison continues to find inspiration in experimenting with different forms of music, composing more for orchestra in recent years: Remaking a Forest for Oregon Symphony premiered in 2019; Pale Icons of Night—his first violin concerto—for Courtney Orlando and Alarm Will Sound debuted in 2018; and Lights in Ashes (an orchestral reimagination of a movement from O Death) was premiered by the New World Symphony in 2017. Bettison’s first opera, The Light of Lesser Days, premiered in September 2021 in the Netherlands with the Asko|Schönberg ensemble. Bettison currently lives in New Jersey and is chair of the Composition Department of John Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute.

oscarbettison.com

Described by The New York Times as a “social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway,” Vijay Iyer has carved out a unique path as an influential, prolific, shape-shifting presence in twenty-first-century music. A composer and pianist active across multiple musical communities, Iyer has created a consistently innovative, emotionally resonant body of work over the last twenty-five years, earning him a place as one of the leading music-makers of his generation. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artist Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and two German “Echo” awards, and was voted Downbeat’s “Jazz Artist of the Year” four times in the last decade. Iyer’s musical language is grounded in the rhythmic traditions of South Asia and West Africa, the African American creative music movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the lineage of composer-pianists from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk to Alice Coltrane and Geri Allen. He has released twenty-four albums of his music, most recently UnEasy (ECM Records, 2021), a trio session with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh; The Transitory Poems (ECM, 2019), a live duo recording with pianist Craig Taborn; Far From Over (ECM, 2017) with the award-winning Vijay Iyer Sextet; and A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) a suite of duets with visionary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith. Iyer is also an active composer for classical ensembles and soloists. His works have been commissioned and premiered by the Brentano Quartet, Bang on a Can All-Stars, International Contemporary Ensemble, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, and virtuosi Matt Haimowitz, Claire Chase, Shai Wosner, and Jennifer Koh, among others. He recently served as composer-in-residence at London’s Wigmore Hall, music director of the Ojai Music Festival, and artist-in-residence at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A tireless collaborator, he has written big-band music for Arturo O’Farrill and Darcy James Argue, remixed classic recordings of Talvin Singh and Meredith Monk, joined forces with legendary musicians Henry Threadgill, Reggie Workman, Zakir Hussain, and L. Subramanian, and developed interdisciplinary work with Teju Cole, Carrie Mae Weems, Mike Ladd, Prashant Bhargava, and Karole Armitage. A longtime New Yorker, Iyer lives in central Harlem with his wife and daughter. He teaches at Harvard University in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a Steinway artist.

vijay-iyer.com

Kate Soper is a composer, performer, and writer whose work explores the integration of drama and rhetoric into musical structure, the slippery continuums of expressivity, intelligibility and sense, and the wonderfully treacherous landscape of the human voice. She has been hailed by The Boston Globe as "a composer of trenchant, sometimes discomfiting, power" and by The New Yorker for her "limpid, exacting vocalism, impetuous theatricality, and mastery of modernist style." A Pulitzer Prize finalist, she has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Koussevitzky Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. Praised by The New York Times for her "lithe voice and riveting presence," she performs frequently as a new music soprano and has been featured as a composer/vocalist on the MATA Festival, Miller Theatre Composer Portraits series, Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNOW series, and the LA Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series. As a writer of fiction and non-fiction, she has been published by McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Massachusetts Review, and PAJ. She is the Iva Dee Hiatt Professor of music at Smith College and a co-director of Wet Ink, a new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries.

katesoper.com