Liam Moore

Liam Moore is easily entertained. He is fascinated by the evolution of our universe and life on Earth. He generally plays string instruments well and specifically plays trombone poorly. Liam lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Ted Hamilton

Ted Hamilton is a Vancouver based musician, multidisciplinary composer and sound artist working in contemporary dance, theater, film/TV and performance art. His music and collaborative creations have been produced and performed in Canada and internationally for over two decades.

Ted is also a songwriter, a musical theatre writer and has composed music for many ensembles including string trio, string orchestra, art song (voice and piano) and 50 voice SATB choir.

Ted is a member of the Canadian Musical Theatre Writers Collective and participated as a composer in their 2017-18 workshop series, led and mentored by Daniel Maté.

Michael Trew

Michael Trew has wide performing and composing experience in a variety of musical genres, including rock, classical, jazz, and the healing arts. He began studying Composition with Cortland Hultberg at UBC, graduating with a BMus in 1972. Subsequently he obtained a Professional Teaching Certificate (1976) before returning to obtain a Master's (1980) and Doctorate (1986) in Music Composition. His teachers included Stephen Chatman, Paul Reale, and Elaine Barkin. Currently Michael teaches piano, theory, history, and composition privately, is a performer, and accompanies vocal artists in Vancouver. Original works have most recently been performed by Adrian Verdejo, Tom Shorthouse, Michael Murray, The Erato Ensemble, Turning Point Ensemble, Jeremy Berkman and Dave Thomas, Nu:BC, and The Ad Mare Wind Quintet. In the summer of 2018 Michael co-wrote an art song with poet Janet Rogers which was performed by vocalist Dorothea Hayley and pianist Rachel Iwaasa.

Jonathan Newmark

Jonathan Newmark received his composition MM from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 2015, studying with Joel Hoffman, Douglas Knehans, and Michael Fiday. His work is published by TrevCo Varner and BrassArts. A CD of his chamber works was released in 2009. A 1974 graduate of Harvard College, he earned his MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1978. He is professor of neurology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, staff neurologist at the DC VA Medical Center, retired Colonel, US Army Medical Corps, and a recognized authority on medical response to chemical warfare and terrorism.

Cameron Catalano

The majority of Cameron’s musical output for 2017 - 18 was comprised primarily of seven 90 minute film scores which have been broadcast both domestically and internationally. He did find the time to consistently provide accompaniment on his guitar or double bass for a variety of live Vancouver Theatre Shows including Off Key (an improvised musical), Sin Peaks (a serialized improvised soap opera) and Shakespeare After Dark. In recent years he’s had a number of compositions performed by artists including NuBC, Marina Hasselberg and the Erato Ensemble. He’s a farmer in the summer and composer in the winter.
serafinosoundstudio.com
soundcloud.com/camcatalano

Wilhemina "Mina" Esary

Wilhelmina “Mina” Esary is a versatile composer of chamber, choral, and electronic music whose works have been performed by members of the Seattle Symphony, Women’s Works of Ithaca, and the American Creators Ensemble. Her compositions range in character from contemplative to whimsical, dark to ethereal, and are often inspired by emotional reactions stemming from perceptions of the physical world. She is currently pursuing her BM in Composition at the Eastman School of Music and is studying with Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. Some of her most savored moments are writing double bar lines, feeling a drizzle on gray days, and smelling old books.

Jessica Rudman

Jessica Rudman (http://www.jessicarudman.com) is an American composer whose recent works engage with contemporary social themes through realistic or fantastical frames. Her style blends melodic development and narrative structures with sensual harmony and vibrant color to create an intense emotional expression. Rudman’s music has been presented across the USA and abroad by performers including the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, and Hartford Opera Theater. Jessica is a  2019 Connecticut Artist Fellow, with support from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, which also receives funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Julia Soojin Cavallaro

Julia Soojin Cavallaro, composer and mezzo-soprano, enjoys a richly varied career in art song, choral music, oratorio, and opera. She has premiered several of her own works at Tufts University in collaboration with composer and pianist John McDonald. Born and raised in the Boston area, Ms. Cavallaro grew up in an Italian/Korean American household filled with music and art. A graduate of Harvard College and Boston University, she has performed with many leading ensembles in the U.S., including the Handel and Haydn Society, Boston Landmarks Orchestra, Boston Opera Collaborative, and most recently, New Camerata Opera in New York City.

Dara-Lyn Shrager

Dara-Lyn Shrager is an editor and poet in Princeton, NJ. Her poems have appeared in many journals and her first full-length poetry collection, "Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee", was published by Barrow Street Books in 2018. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Radar Poetry, an online poetry and art journal. She has taught poetry workshops in many settings and is currently the Poet-in-Residence at the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, NJ.

J.J. Lokshtanov

J.J. Lokshtanov (né Locke) is coordinator of the Frank Scott Poetry Day (August 1). Previously, he was coordinator of the 2008 Montreal International Public Poetry Festival, organizer of the O Canada rewrite contest, and director of the 2009 Leonard Cohen 75th birthday events . In addition, J.J. was VIA Rail's 2011 Destination's Magazine in-house poet. He has read his work in Canada, the US, and France. His latest work, The Snow In Nepal, was published in the anthology, Eternal Snow, Nirala Publications. In 2004, his first book of poetry, Freedom's Narrow Window, was published.

Christine Leviczky Riek

Christine Leviczky Riek is a poet and photographer from Surrey, BC. Her poetry has been published in The Capilano Review, and Pulp Literature. Her photographs have been shown in galleries throughout the Lower Mainland.

Athena Kildegaard

Athena Kildegaard is the author of five books of poetry. She holds an M.A.T./English from the University of Chicago and teaches in the English and Environmental Studies programs at the University of Minnesota Morris, where she also directs the Honors Program. Kildegaard's poems have appeared widely in such journals as Malahat Review, Ecotone, RHINO, Rattle, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been set as art song and for chorus by several Minnesota composers, including Libby Larsen. She is now collaborating with a Minnesota composer to create a longer choral and instrumental work on the theme of immigration.

Ariel Gordon

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Both her collections of poetry, Hump and Stowaways, won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. She recently co-edited GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac House, 2018) with Rosanna Deerchild and Tanis MacDonald. In 2019, she will publish two books: Treed, a book of urban-forest essays with Wolsak & Wynn in spring and and TreeTalk: Winnipeg, a chapbook/trade poetry collection with At Bay Press in fall.

Tara K. Torme

I am a poet who's been writing for many years. I've self published a book of poetry back in 2006. I am still working on my craft. I have Asperger Syndrome.

Kelly Krebs

Kelly Krebs is a Minneapolis-based composer who loves writing for singers. After a 20-year creative hiatus, Krebs returned to composing in 2015. He was selected as a composer for the MNSong Program at the 2017 Source Song Festival and in 2018, he was part of the Composer-Librettist Studio with Nautilus Music-Theater. He is currently working on the musical “Norman!” – a wildly imaginative, tragicomic prequel to the events in the classic Hitchcock film PSYCHO.

Baritone, Steven Bélanger

An accomplished clarinetist and singer, baritone Steven Bélanger is a graduate of Queen’s University (BMus, BA) and McGill University (MMus). He has performed with ensembles of all sizes and genres across Canada including the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal (SMAM), Les Violons du Roy and La Chapelle de Québec, Opéra de Montréal, VivaVoce, the Elmer Iseler Singers, the Canadian Chamber Choir and Arion Baroque Orchestra. He has appeared as soloist with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM), the McGill Baroque Orchestra, Voix Libres, Le Choeur du Vieux-Montreal, Les Grands Ballets canadiens de Montréal, the Kingston Symphony Orchestra, the Queen’s University Symphony Orchestra, the Quinte Symphony, the Grand River Chorus, Opera After Hours, the Victoria Baroque Players and the Prince George Symphony Orchestra.

Steven has appeared at music festivals across North America including the Montreal Baroque Festival, the Festival international de Lanaudière, the Montreal/New Music International Festival, Festival Vancouver, the Lamèque International Baroque Music Festival in New Brunswick and the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Mexico. He has participated in over a dozen recordings for such labels as Decca, ATMA, Naxos, Centrediscs and Grouse Records, and has recorded music for radio, television and the Cirque du Soleil.

Locally, Steven has performed as both soloist and ensemble singer with the Vancouver Chamber Choir, Early Music Vancouver, the Vancouver Cantata Singers, the Erato Ensemble, SummerChor, Laudate Singers and Stellaria. Recent engagements include the title role in Dido and Aeneas with Players & Singers and the first public workshop of Lloyd Burritt’s new opera, The Art of Camouflage, based on the memoir of Canadian writer Betsy Warland. Steven is currently the General Manager of the Vancouver Chamber Choir and is a featured artist on their newest recording of the music of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer entitled The Love that Moves the Universe.

Soprano, Robyn Driedger-Klassen

At the age of sixteen, Robyn Driedger-Klassen discovered that singing came more naturally than her attempts on the piano at Bach Preludes and Fugues.  She won a few competitions in those early days and after a few years of dilly-dallying in other university programs, she decided that music was the only career for her so, she  undertook the voice performance program at UBC with vigour.

Robyn has done lots of performing in lots of places.  She loves the costumes and grandeur of opera and adores the personal and intimate side of recitals.

Several years ago, Robyn was hired by the Turning Point Ensemble to do a work for voice and ensemble by R Murray Schafer entitled Arcana.  Faced with singing Egyptian hieroglyphs, Robyn found herself first at a complete loss, but soon fully enjoyed unravelling the mysteries found on the page.  Schafer witnessed her successful performance and since then, Robyn has thrown herself whole-heartedly into performance of contemporary vocal repertoire.  Some of her favourites have been: a fully-staged performance of Libby Larsen’s Try Me Good King, the final words and letters of the wives of Henry VIII;  Kaaija Saariaho’s Lonh, for soprano and electronics that make lovely bird sounds; Jake Heggie’s At the Statue of Venus, a woman’s inner monologue as she waits for a blind date; Brian Current’s Inventory, a complicated piece about a woman’s relationship with shoes; David McIntyre’s On the Road to Moose Jaw, a soaring song about a prairie drive; Leslie Uyeda’s White Cat Blues, a set of songs written for her with poems by Lorna Crozier; and Perruqueries, a commissioned set of songs about wigs from the weird and wonderful minds of Jocelyn Morlock and Bill Richardson.  This is an exciting time to be working with North American composers and Robyn is thrilled to make their songs come alive. However, she will always make time to sing Mozart, Schubert or Richard Strauss!

Robyn is on the core faculty of the Vancouver International Song Institute, and is also pleasantly surprised to find herself Head of Voice at the Vancouver Academy of Music. Robyn loves books, geraniums, hikes, canoes, cups of tea and a clean house.  Robyn lives with her husband and two vocal critics under the age of five. She can bake a wicked loaf of bread and in recent times, has learned a considerable amount about monster trucks, fast cars and dinosaurs.

Pianist, Corey Hamm

Pianist Corey Hamm is establishing a unique musical profile performing widely in North America and in Asia as both soloist and chamber musician. His CD of Frederic Rzewski’s hour-long solo piano epic The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (Redshift Records)  won Spotify's Best Classical Recording 2014, and Best Classical Recording at the 2014 Western Canadian Music Awards. He has performed the work over 80 times and many more performances are to come in 2018,  the year of Rzewski’s 80th Birthday. Corey Hamm’s extensive work in the 1990s with  the great French composer Henri Dutilleux will  come to fruition in his plan to record Dutilleux’s complete works for solo piano and chamber with piano in the near future. Among his other recording plans is a soon-to-be-released CD of solo works written for him by Keith Hamel, Jocelyn Morlock, Jordan Nobles, Dorothy Chang, and  Scott Godin, a CD with Nu:BC, and two more CDs with PEP (Piano and Erhu Project). He recently performed two works on Jocelyn Morlock’s CD, on Redshift Records. 

Corey Hamm has commissioned, premiered and recorded over three hundred works by composers  from all over the world.  These commissions have been for solo piano, various chamber music formations as well as concerti. 

His most extensive collection of commissioned works includes over 70 pieces  for  PEP (Piano and Erhu Project) with whom he has toured China.  To date the composers for the project come from China, Canada, UK,  and the United States, and include Michael Finnissy, GAO Ping, Brian Cherney. The result is a new and flourishing catalogue of works for piano and erhu composed in the musical languages of the 21st century.  This combination of instruments bringing together two of the world’s great musical traditions,  now has a unique collection of works for Nicole Ge Li and Corey Hamm to draw from for audiences of the 21st century. They have released some of these works on their PEP CDs, Vols. 1 and 2 (Redshift TK437 and 440). Volume 2 was nominated for Best Classical Recording at the 2015 Western Canadian Music Awards. Volumes 3, 4 & 5 are in preparation for release in 2019. 

He has also commissioned  over 50 works for The Nu:BC  Collective and for  Hammerhead Consort  (two piano and two percussion).  As pianist for The Nu:BC Collective  he has released the critically acclaimed CD Beyond Shadows (Redshift TK432). As a founding member of Hammerhead Consort, he received the 1993 Sir Ernest Macmillan Memorial Foundation Chamber Music Award, and was winner of the 1992 National Chamber Music Competition. 

In recent years, Corey Hamm has studied, recorded and toured one of the great piano works of the last decades, Frederic Rzewski's monumental hour-long solo piano epic, The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (Redshift TK431). This work, made up of a theme and 36 variations, has been recorded by a small number of pianists including Marc-André Hamelin, Ursula Oppens,  and Stephen Drury. Frederic Rzewski received Corey Hamm’s interpretation as one of the finest to date. “Excellent! Bravo! This may be the best recording.” 

Corey Hamm premiered Dorothy Chang’s new PEP Double Concerto for erhu and piano soloists, Gateways, with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra (VSO) in Apr. 2018, and was soloist in the World Premiere of Jordan Nobles’ Piano Concerto with Bramwell Tovey and the VSO. He gave the World Premiere of Howard Bashaw's Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion with conductor Grzegorz Nowak and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and  has recent and upcoming performances of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto 3, Prokofiev Piano Concerto 2, Bartok’s Piano Concerto 2, Lutoslawski’s Piano Concerto, Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, Faure’s Fantasie Op. 111, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Dr. Hamm is Professor of Piano at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he was awarded the prestigious Killam Teaching Award. He is on the Piano Faculty of both the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) at NEC in Boston, and MusicFest Perugia, in Italy. His beloved teachers include Lydia Artymiw, Marek Jablonski, Stéphane Lemelin, Ernesto Lejano, and Thelma Johannes O'Neill.

Guest Composer, Leslie Uyeda

As a long-time friend of Art Song Lab, we’re thrilled to have legendary composer and collaborative pianist, Leslie Uyeda as our guest composer for Art Song Lab 2020.

For your chance to work with Leslie, apply today.

Born in Montréal, Québec, Leslie Uyeda is a composer, pianist and conductor.

She studied piano with the late Dorothy Morton at McGill University and with William Aide at the University of Manitoba. She has played chamber music since her student days and continues to perform her own music with her colleagues.

During 20 years in opera, Leslie worked as a coach, pianist and conductor with the Canadian Opera Company, L’Opera de Montreal, Manitoba Opera, Opera Hamilton, the Banff Centre and the Chautauqua Institute of Music in New York. In concert she has collaborated with some of Canada’s best singers, performing recitals with Tracy Dahl, Richard Margison, Brett Polegato, Wendy Nielsen, Heather Pawsey, Liping Zhang, Jean Stilwell and Viviane Houle. After moving to Vancouver, B.C., Leslie became Chorus Music Director at Vancouver Opera, where she also conducted several mainstage productions.

Leslie started composing at a very young age. A few years ago she left her positions at Vancouver Opera and the University of British Columbia to compose full time. Leslie is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre, and is a member of SOCAN, the Canadian League of Composers (www.composition.org), and the Association of Canadian Women Composers (www.acwc.ca).

Leslie Uyeda's principal publisher is The Avondale Press (AvP) c/o The Canadian Music Centre.

Leslie lives very happily with her family in Vancouver. She loves reading, photography, walking her dog Puff, Iyengar yoga, watching great British TV, and cheering for Le Club de Hockey Canadien – the Montréal Canadiens!

(bio from www.leslieuyeda.com/)

Guest Poet, Renee Sarojini Saklikar

An alumni of Art Song Lab herself, Renee Sarojini Saklikar has done some pretty amazing things in her career since ASL 2012/2013.

For your chance to work with Renee, apply today!

photo credit: Sandra Vander Schaaf

Trained as a lawyer at the University of British Columbia, with a degree in English Literature, Renée Sarojini Saklikar teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and Vancouver Community College.

Renée’s first book, Children of Air India, (Nightwood Editions, 2013) won the 2014 Canadian Authors Association Award for poetry and her second book, with Wayde Compton, The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (Anvil Press/SFU Public Square, 2015) was a finalist for a 2016 City of Vancouver Book Award.

Fascinated by artistic collaboration, Renée’s work has been made into opera and song cycles (air india [redacted], Turning Point Ensemble, 2015) and visual art (Chris Turnbull).

Renée is working on an epic sci-fi journey poem, THOT-J-BAP, parts of which appear in literary journals (The Capilano Review, Dusie, The Rusty Toque, Tripwire) and chapbooks (above/ground, Nous-zot and Nomados presses) and her chapbook, After the Battle of Kingsway, the bees, was a finalist for the 2017 bpNichol chapbook award.

She recently published a long poem about her personal connection to the Air India Flight 182 bombing, in an anthology of scholarly and artistic work (Remembering Air India, the art of public mourning, University of Alberta Press, 2017). This spring, Renée published poems about bees in the book Listening to the Bees (Nightwood Editions, 2018) in collaboration with scientist and Governor General award winner, Dr. Mark Winston.

As Surrey’s Poet Laureate, Renée has demonstrated her passion for connecting people through poetry through offering free writing consultations, teaching poetry in schools and at community events, and hosting workshops with youth and seniors to tell Surrey stories. Her legacy project involved bringing teens and seniors together to share their stories (Surrey Stories Connect: teens and seniors write Surrey, Surrey Libraries, 2016).

She is currently collaborating with teen writers on a series of chapbook writing workshops. Since starting the position, she has participated in over 40 events each year and mentored over 150 writers through consultations and workshops.

(bio from https://www.surrey.ca/community/16795.aspx)