“When you meet a master swordsman,
show him your sword.
When you meet a man that is not a poet,
do not show him your poem”
Rinzai (9th Century) '

eric moe

Eric Moe, composer of what the NY Times calls "music of winning exuberance", has received numerous grants and awards for his work, including the Lakond Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship; commissions from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, and Meet-the-Composer USA; fellowships from the Wellesley Composer's Conference and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bellagio, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Montana Artists Refuge, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, and the American Dance Festival. He is the recipient of a 2008 Individual Creative Artist Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Ezra Sims has already contributed an outstanding body of works, many of which have explored with singular imagination, conviction and success the beautiful but elusive world of microtonal music. -- American Academy of Arts and Letters citiation

frederick franck

an artist, a man of no status or rank, an image-maker, creator of a spiritual oasis, now/here, away from the "tyranny of heartlessness, where people are tolerated only as auxilaries of industrial enterprise".

harry partch

"I am first and last a composer. I have been provoked into becoming a musical theorist, and instrument builder, a musical apostate, and a musical idealist, simply because I have been a demanding composer. I hold no wish for the obsolescence of the widely heard instruments and music. My devotion to our musical heritage is great -- and critical. I feel that more ferment is necessary for a healthy musical culture. I am endeavoring to instill more ferment." --Harry Partch 1942".

john schneider

John Schneider is an internationally recognized guitarist, composer, author and broadcaster whose weekly television and radio programs have brought the sound of the guitar into millions of homes for the past thirty years. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics & Music from the University of Wales, music degrees from the University of California and the Royal College of Music [London], and is past President of the Guitar Foundation of America. A specialist in contemporary music, Schneider's The Contemporary Guitar (University of California Press) has become the standard text in the field.

For the past two decades, the artist has performed almost exclusively on the Well-Tempered Guitar which uses different patterns of fretting according to the key or tuning system required. Recitals include Renaissance and Baroque repertoire in their original temperaments, as well as contemporary music in alternative tunings by such composers as Lou Harrison, Ben Johnston, Terry Riley & others. Since 1991, Schneider's concerts also include vocal works of the maverick American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974), which he sings while accompanying himself on replicas of Partch's Adapted Guitars [steel stringed instruments refretted in just intonation] & the Adapted Viola. The 1990's also saw the creation of his chamber group Just Strings, which is devoted to the performance of music in alternative tunings. In 1995, they were invited by the Japanese Embassy to present a series of lectures and concerts throughout Japan under the auspices of the prestigious Interlink Festival which annually selects one American ensemble to represent new trends in American Music. Since 2000, Schneider has recreated many of Partch’s unique instruments to perform the composer’s singular chamber music, and in 2002 he commissioned the first Just National Steel Guitar, and now regularly performs & records the works by Lou Harrison, Terry Riley & others written for the instrument.

stephen kalm

Stephen Kalm has sung with many of America’s leading regional opera companies including the Houston Grand Opera, Chautauqua Opera, Lake George Opera Festival, Minnesota Opera, Connecticut Opera, Cincinnati Opera, and The Pennsylvania Opera Theatre. Internationally, He received critical acclaim for his solo’s in Orff’s Carmina Burana with the Filarmonica de Bogota, and in the role of Franco Hartmann in Meredith Monk’s Atlas in Berlin, Paris and London. He has recorded that work for ECM, as well as Ben Johnston’s Five Fragments for New World Records, and the premiere recording of Harry Partch’s Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po for Tzadik Records.
Other engagements include Meredith Monk’s opera,The Politics of Quiet, for which he received a New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award . He has also been a featured soloist at The Next Wave Festival at BAM, The Lincoln Center Festival, The Knitting Factory, The European Cultural Capital Festival in Copenhagen, the Avignon Festival, the Spoleto USA Festival, and the Encontros Arcarte Festival in Lisbon. In the Northwest he has performed with the Billings, Bozeman, Butte, Helena and Missoula Symphony Orchestras, as well as the String Orchestra of the Rockies, the Missoula Childrens Theater and sang the role of Sumatsi in Poia in Great Falls for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration. His other commercial recordings include Harry Partch’s The Wayward on Wergo Records, William Harper’s Snow Leopard, in which he plays role of the Potter, on CafePress Records, and the title role of Benjamin Franklin in John Carbon’s Benjamin on Zimbel Records. Recently,he gave perfomances of the Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po at the Bern Biennale in Switzerland and the Beyond Baroque concert series in Los Angeles.
Dr. Kalm has a B.M. in vocal performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, an M.A. from Queens College, and a D.M.A from The City University of New York. He currently serves as the Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Montana.

annea lockwood

photo 2011 by stefan falke
a composer of such all-encompassing musicality that the earth, all its sounds, conscience and consciousness itself are integral to her instrumentarium
annealockwood.com

thomas buckner

photo 2011 Stefan Falke
a musician, advocate and humanitarian, he has single-handedly transformed the art of making living music.

daniel rothman

Daniel Rothman’s musical and visual preoccupations wander beyond the concert hall into eccentric spaces and timescales both smaller and larger than life, such as the miniature The Dandelion Clock (with Andrea Loselle, Ted Mook, and Daniel Tiffany), the immense Sense Absence (with Paul Tzanetopoulos and the Quatuor Bozzini), the pedestrian The Garden Party (with Zebra), or the virtual Cézanne’s Doubt (with Elliot Anderson, Jim Campbell, Tom Buckner, Kent Clelland, Ted Mook, David Smeyers, and Wadada Leo Smith). Yes, Philip, Androids Dream Electric Sheep, for a clarinet he modified to control signal processing makes contingent its acoustic life form, with a music incarnated through acoustic feedback tapping the ecology of biofeedback as a clarinet-organism manifests its environment: an aria for the man-machine

george neikrug

Cellist George Neikrug (1919-1019), student of Emanuel Feuermann, D.C. Dounis, a master of the cello and a teacher whose understanding of the Golden Age of string playing was bottomless.

leonard shure

Pianist (1910-1995), student of Artur Schnabel, pretty much forged my understanding of Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Mendelssohn. Shure, of the bellowed "It's not a pickup", glass ashtray on the sostenuto pedal for Beethoven Sonata....

luis batlle

Beethoven, Rudolf Serkin, chamber music, bottomless repertoire, and Don Quixote - "in last year's nests there are no birds this year"

coleman barks

Back in a troubled time, the dharma talks from the San Francisco Zen Center included The Guest House, and the path, eventually,s led to Coleman Barks.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.