Ken Ueno Photo by Alexandra Gardner

Ken Ueno is a man comfortable with a gear shift—a composer of music that thrills with its interior complexity in one case and probes the ear deeply with a simple overtone vocal line in the next. He is also as likely to pick up the inspiration for his work inside a candy store and a childhood memory as in the text of Calvino, Beckett, or Joyce. "I think about the influence of the internet and cable television and globalization," says Ueno, a Brooklyn-born Japanese-American. "I am a multiplicity of identities, maybe unresolved. And maybe one possible contemporary proposition is that it doesn't have to be a resolved linearity. I think that's part of the liberation of being a musicmaker today; we can engage with all of these things."

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Molly Thompson Photo by Karen Lindskog

On stage, Molly Thompson's music comes across as honestly raw and yet sophisticatedly crafted, filled with intimate lyrics and intriguing cross-genre influences. Off stage, she's disarmingly forthcoming—the kind of woman you could easily think of as your best friend after a 15-minute conversation. Still, her musical personality seems to draw a curtain around some more mysterious internal characters, and it keeps her audiences on their toes.

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Ned McGowan Photo by Aldo Allessie

Ned McGowan is a sponge. Although born and raised in the United States, he has now lived in Amsterdam for a third of his life. At a certain point, McGowan says that "I found myself saying, 'What am I going to do?' We live in this age of specialization it seems like, but I'm just getting broader, not more specific." But this broadness has been his boon, turning him into a musical polymath whose diversity of interests is perhaps his greatest asset.

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Jenny Lin

Pianist Jenny Lin may have a small, lean frame, but she's no weakling. Truth be told, she weighs in at 105 lbs., but at the piano keyboard, she's a bona fide heavyweight—attacking some of the most challenging repertoire with raw strength and energy. Whether it's the grandiose sweep of a Chopin etude or a defiant new piece by a little-known young composer, she dedicates every ounce of her musical prowess to delivering knock-'em-dead interpretations. It's the passion and dedication that Jenny brings to the table that sets her apart in the field. Jenny doesn't merely perform music, she lives it.

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Alex Mincek

Despite the debts his work owes to the European avant-garde, Alex Mincek creates a complex and repetitive music that can only be called American. Listen in as Mincek discusses his influences, his involvement with the Wet Ink Ensemble, and his love of Annie.

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Elizabeth Brown Photo by Peter Schaaf

As a child growing up on an Alabama farm, composer Elizabeth Brown may not have been able to envision a future life in music for herself, but she could already hear it playing in her head. Her musical language might most accurately be compared to the vagaries of human memory. She has a habit of leaving a lot of play in her musical line, particularly when it comes to pitch, and by not clamping down, somehow it often seem that she allows room for the listener to hear so much more.

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Photo by Jim Block

Think the history of computer music only dates back to 1995? There's obviously a lot more to this story than the laptop. John Bischoff is an early pioneer in the field, and he'll share what the evolution of this music looks like and has involved for him.

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Jason Eckardt is a composer who produces scores of frighteningly complex notation; who counts Schoenberg, Coltrane, Stockhausen, Ferneyhough, and Lachenmann among his primary influences; and who got his start in music as a guitarist in a metal band.

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Pianist and composer Michael Djupstrom may have been born in 1980, but don't come to his work expecting trendy, genre-bending, "I want my MTV!" sonic pop-culture references.

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Anna Clyne Photo courtesy of the composer

"I should probably tell you, I don't really like talking about my music," Anna Clyne shyly confesses partway through our interview. The British-born, New York-based composer is laughing and gamely trying to answer my questions, but the whole exercise is clearly starting to wear her out. "It's interesting to have this conversation, to be reflecting back on these other pieces and to actually see that there is a common thread going. But generally I'm not really a backwards thinker. I'm more of a 'what's coming next'."

Clyne (b. 1980), who picked up a bachelor of music degree with honors from Edinburgh University and a master of music degree from the Manhattan School of Music, has capitalized on that forward-looking focus, successfully exploring and integrating electronic, small ensemble, and full-orchestra sound palettes in a range of situations—from collaborations with choreographer Kitty McNamee and her Hysterica Dance Company to commissions from Carnegie Hall and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

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Garrett Fisher

Deeply influenced by Asian and Middle Eastern timbres and acting styles, Seattle-based composer Garrett Fisher has created nearly a dozen mixed-media stage shows which integrate his own myriad influences along with those of his many collaborators. Under the umbrella of The Fisher Ensemble, the performers have staged productions that fluidly incorporate dancers and mask-makers, film and recorded sound, and instruments that span the globe.

The perfect entry point into The Fisher Ensemble's work perhaps comes through Fisher's The Passion of Saint Thomas More, first presented in 1995. Rather than a literal telling of events—More refused to sanction Henry VIII's denial of the authority of the Pope and was beheaded for high treason—Fisher's one-hour long piece forgoes the how's and why's and instead serves more as a post-minimalist and ritualistic meditation on the final hours of More's life. "What I'm really interested in," Fisher says, "and what I have always been interested in is where a narrative coincides with music. And the way I approach it is not necessarily the traditionally operatic way where you have a story you're telling and then here's a leitmotif that fits with this character and in Act 3 such-and-such happens. I'm more interested in the structure of an overall musical progression or an idea that develops, and how that kind of parallels or works with the storyline."

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Photo by Katya Pronin     Nor'easter personnel: Christopher Tignor, violin and software instruments Stephen Griesgraber, electric guitar David Nadal, electric guitar Leanne Darling, viola Aaron Jackson, grand piano and fender rhodes Rob Collins, fender rhodes and grand piano Marlan Barry, cello Maxim Moston, violin Brett Omara-Campbell, violin

Though Chris Tignor writes the majority of the music performed by Slow Six, the compositional process is only beginning when he first presents his ideas to the band. The project is intentionally set up to allow plenty of opportunity for Tignor to tweak the electronics and the score, both during rehearsals and after live performances. It also offers the performers the opportunity to live with the parts and make suggestions of their own. That process might go on for a year or more before the band even thinks about going into the studio.

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John Morton Photo by Molly Sheridan

Composer John Morton suspects that most of us carry an early sonic memory tied to a music box—perhaps one featuring a plastic ballerina on pointe, spinning around to a cloying soundtrack of "When You Wish Upon a Star." But he was not a particular fan of the little automated music players when his wife, the sculptor Jacqueline Shatz, first asked him to take a break from his orchestral and chamber music composing in order to help her with a project that was to incorporate the child's toy. That opportunity to compose his own music using the little machines opened up a sound world in which he has since made himself quite at home. He has taken the timbre of the plucked metal tines of a music box and—by juxtaposing them, electronically processing them, and physically altering them—discovered a very personal vernacular.

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