Composition

Hongchan Choi is a musician, an engineer, and a creator. With the deepest passion on the web technology, he is on a mission to make the web better for music making.

Douglas McCausland is a composer / performer who is fascinated with new sonic territories and processes for creating music, and whose work engages with the extremes of sound and the digital medium. In particular, his current compositions / research explore the intersections of real-time performance of electronic music using handmade interfaces, higher-order ambisonics, interactive systems and performer agency, musical applications of machine learning, experimental sound design, and DIY electronics / hardware-hacking.

François Rose received his Bachelor and Master degrees in composition from McGill University, and his Ph.D. from the University of California-San Diego. He also studied with Tristan Murail, at the Institut de Recherche Coordination Acoustique et Musique (IRCAM), and with Gérard Grisey at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris.

Erik Ulman studied composition at UCSD, working principally with Brian Ferneyhough, as well as with Helmut Lachenmann at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule on a DAAD grant. He has taught music at UCSD and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano enjoys building things, fixing them when they don't work, and improving them even if they seem to work just fine. The scope of the word "things" is very wide and includes computer hardware and software, controllers, music composition, performance, and sound. His music blurs the line between technology and art, and is as much about form and sound processing, synthesis, and spatialization, as about algorithms and the custom software he writes for each piece.

Composer, pianist, and intermedia artist.

Studied with Wlodzimierz Kotonski, Jan Ekier, Bronislawa Kawalla, Rand Steiger, Miller Puckette, Roger Reynolds, Brian Ferneyhough, and Joji Yuasa; additional courses with Iannis Xenakis, Louis Andriessen, Tristan Murail, François-Bernard Mâche, and George Lewis.

Selected prizes: UNESCO Film sur l’Art Festival in Paris (1992), VideoArt Festival in Locarno (1993), Manifestation Internationale Vidéo et Art Électronique in Montréal (1994), and International Festival of New Cinema and New Media in Montréal (2000).

Studies with Ton de Leeuw, Amsterdam Conservatory, and Klaus Huber, Basel Conservatory.

Special fields: composition, contemporary music performance, musical signal analysis and modeling, computer networks for audio, new instrument design.

Articles published in various technical journals including Journal of New Music Research, Computer Music Journal, Contemporary Music Review, Proceedings of ICMC, IEEE conferences.

Recordings available on compact disc.

Described as “gripping” by both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, “poignant”, “richly evocative” (San Francisco Chronicle), “taut, and hauntingly beautiful” (NY Times), Jonathan Berger’s recent works deal with both consciousness and conscience. His chamber operas, Theotokia and The War Reporter explore hallucination and haunting memories, while his monodrama, My Lai portrays the ethical dilemmas of an individual placed in an impossible situation.