Nina Flyer, cello

Mark Alburger

Mark Alburger is an eclectic American composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Founder and Music Director of the San Francisco Composer Chamber Orchestra, Music Director of Goat Hall Productions /San Francisco Cabaret Opera Company, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music Journal, Instructor at Diablo Valley College, an award-winning ASCAP composer of over 100 major works published by New Music, oboist, pianist, vocalist, recording artist, musicologist, author, and music critic. Alburger began playing the oboe and composing with Dorothy and James Freeman, George Crumb, and Richard Wernick. He studied with Karl Kohn at Pomona College, Joan Panetti and Gerald Levinson at Swarthmore College (B.A.), Jules Langert at Dominican College (M.A.), Roland Jackson at Claremont Graduate School (Ph.D.), and Terry Riley. His recordings are issued by North/South Consonance, I Kill Me Music, and New Music Publications and Recordings. Psalm 6, The Twelve Fingers, and Symphony No. 1 ("It wasn't classical") are on the streaming audio playlist of www.kdvc.org.

Allan Crossman has written for many soloists and ensembles, among them guitarist Michael Laucke, Quatuor Morency, and pianist Max Lifchitz. The North/South Consonance (NYC) recording of Millennium Overture Dance received a GRAMMY nomination in 2003, and Music for Human Choir (SATB) shared Top Honors at the Waging Peace through Singing Festival. Pianist Nanette Solomon recently performed Gypsy Ballads at the International Lorca Conference in Spain; North/South will record his FLYER (cello and string orchestra); and his most recent commission is the piano trio Icarus, for the New Pacific Trio (San Francisco). His work has been supported by North American organizations that include Canada Council for the Arts, American Composers Forum, and Meet the Composer (NY). The most recent of his many theatre scores, The Log of the Skipper’s Wife, was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford and the Kennedy Center, with Crossman’s music drawn from Irish/English shanties and dances. His music is the soundtrack for the award-winning animated short, X man, by Christopher Hinton (National Film Board of Canada). He is Professor Emeritus, Concordia University (Montreal), has taught at Wheaton College, the Pacific Conservatory, and is presently on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His doctoral studies were with George Rochberg, George Crumb, and Hugo Weisgall at the University of Pennsylvania. http://www.musiccentre.ca/

Philip Freihofner is a freelance oboist and composer. He has a degree in Music from UC Berkeley, where his most important composition teachers were Edwin Dugger and Richard Felciano. He has also taken classes at the Ali Akbar College of Music. His biggest composition projects, to date, were the music for the movement theater work "The Fish and the Fire" (1995) with Cherly Koehler's Zig Zag Theater, and a silent film score for the 1920 horror film "The Golem" written for double reed quartet. EARPLAY honored him this summer with a reading and recording of "Homage," a work-in-progress for clarinet, violin, viola and cello.

David A. Graves initially studied electronic music composition at the University of Nebraska. He has composed music for multiple genres, including "neoclassical," ambient, jazz, and rock. He has also scored music for film and theatre, including A Period Piece, a play by Rachael Kerr, performed in San Francisco and New York (1995-1998) and ICON: The Photography of Gordon Parks (2003), a movie by PCTV. In 2003 and 2005, he was the resident composer at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program where he was awarded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Fellowship. His large-scale ambient piece, tree/sigh, was installed in a redwood canyon during Djerassi's 2003 Open House. Deciduous, his most recent electronic work, was a large-scale multimedia performance, part of last July's SURROUND>SOUND series. In the past three years, in addition to electronic and rock works, he has been scoring a lot of chamber music, especially in conjunction with the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The SFCCO performed Insecurity (and Other Agencies of Government) last September. He is currently studying composition with Alexis Alrich at the Conservatory. For more information, visit www.finevermin.com.

Be'eri Moalem was born in Jerusalem, Israel, but has been living in the bay area for the past ten years. In 2005, he graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He plays the viola and violin in many local ensembles and orchestras, and has performed all over the world. He is also an aspiring composer mostly of chamber music. When not performing, practicing, or composing, Be'eri teaches music, as well as Hebrew and Judaism. Be'eri's other interests include: computers, playing basketball, watching baseball, biking, travel, cars and literature. Visit his website at: www.beeri.org

Martha Stoddard is Artistic Director of the Oakland Civic Orchestra and a founding member of ChamberMix. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Humboldt State University and a Master of Music degree from San Francisco State University, where she studied flute, conducting and composition. Her conducting credits include the Oakland Symphony Chorus, schwungvoll! new music ensemble, Santa Rosa Youth Festival Orchestra, San Francisco All-City High School Orchestra, Community Women’s Orchestra, El Camino Youth Symphony Flute Ensembles, Palo Alto Symphony, UCSF Orchestra, Humboldt Symphony, Golden Gate Men’s Chorus and the Berkeley Singers. Ms Stoddard teaches Instrumental Music and Music Theory and Composition at Lick- Wilmerding High School in San Francisco and she is an accomplished flutist who performs chamber music and in orchestra pits throughout the Bay Area. Her compositions have been performed by the American Composer’s Forum, San Francisco Chapter, “Womensing”, Trinity Chamber Concert Series, Farallon Brass Ensemble, Avenue Winds, San Francisco Choral Artists, Oakland Civic Orchestra, New Music Forum Festival of Contemporary Music, schwungvoll!, the Community Women’s Orchestra, and at Bard College and Humboldt State University. Her “Variations on an Icelandic Folktune,” was selected for the annual reading session in 2006 by the Earplay ensemble in San Francisco and her Woodwind Trio is scheduled for performance in 2007 on the New Directions Series of the Bakersfield Symphony.