Kyle Gann is a composer and was new-music critic for the Village Voice from 1986 to 2005. Since 1997 he has taught at Bard College. He has published five books on American music, including volumes on Conlon Nancarrow, Robert Ashley, and John Cage's 4'33"; he also wrote the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of Cage's Silence. Gann studied composition with Ben Johnston, Morton Feldman, and Peter Gena. Of his hundred-plus works to date, about a fourth are microtonal. He's received commissions from the Orkest de Volharding, the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir, the Dessoff Choir, the Relache Ensemble, pianist Sarah Cahill, and many others.
Frits van der Waa (1954) read musicology at Utrecht University and graduated in 1980. He has been working mainly as a music journalist, notably for De Volkskrant. He was editor of De Slag van Andriessen (1993) and translated several books on music and other topics.
Jelena Novak works as a musicologist, theorist of art and media, researcher, dramaturg and critic. Her current research is based on voice, corporeality, and new media in postopera. She is the author of Wild Analysis: Formalist, Structuralist and Post-structuralist Approaches to Music (Divlja analiza, 2004), Opera in the Age of Media (Opera u doba medija, 2007) and Women and Music in Serbia (2011, co-author). Her articles are published in journals such are: "Studies in Music Theatre", "Music, Sound and Moving Image", "Maska", "Walking Theory", "New Sound","Teatron" among the others. Novak is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at CESEM (Research Centre for Aesthetics and Sociology of Music), Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Avra Sidiropoulou is a lecturer of Theatre Arts at the Open University of Cyprus and artistic director of Athens-based Persona Theatre Company. She holds a PhD in theatre theory (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), an MFA in Directing (Columbia University), an MPhil in American Literature (Cambridge University) and an M.A. in Text and Performance (King’s College London). She has taught and directed internationally and her main areas of specialization include the theatre of the director-auteur, adaptation and the ethics of directing and theory of theatre practice. Her monograph Authoring Performance: the Director in Contemporary Theatre was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011.
Bojan Djordjev is a theatremaker active in both institutional and independent theatre. His interests in theatre and performance include collective authorship, working with experimental playwriting and post-drama theatre. MA in Theory of Arts and Media at University of Arts in Belgrade, where he is also PhD candidate. BFA in Theatre Directing at Faculty of Drama Arts, Belgrade. Author, director and performer of numerous pieces in Belgrade, and several in Vienna, Lyon, Stuttgart, Gent, Zagreb. Since 2002 together with visual artist Siniša Ilić developed and performed nomad (Gent, Zagreb, Stuttgart, Bucharest, Belgrade, Vienna, San Diego) project Desert of Picture. Member of editorial collective and co-founder of TkH (Walking Theory) platform and Journal for performing arts theory (editor of TkH issue 2 dedicated to Einstein on the Beach). Artist in Residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Les laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Paris as part of TkH project How to do Things by Theory; and Artslink at New York Theatre Workshop, New York. Currently participant of DasArts Master of Theatre programme, Amsterdam. Directing credits include performances based on: H. Guibert, E. Jelinek, J. Joyce, G. Ferčec, I. Sajko, and three operas including Les enfants terribles by P. Glass.
More information at bojandjordjev.wordpress.com
Pieter T'Jonck (1960) is an architect and art critic, specialising in the field of theatre, dance, architecture and occasionally fine arts. Apart from his job as director of the architectural firm T’Jonck-Nilis BV-BVBA, he has written for various media since 1980: Veto (1983-85), De Standaard (1985-2000), De Tijd (2001-06), De Morgen (since 2006) and Klara Radio (since 2006). He publishes regularly on performing arts, architecture and urbanism in journals such as Etcetera, DWB, De Witte Raaf, Ballettanz (now Tanz), Springerin, Corpus AT and A+, and contributes to many book publications. In addition to architecture workshops at the University of Ghent (1994-2001), he has taught at the academy in Antwerp and Ghent. He is still involved with DasArts, Amsterdam as advisor and has run workshops on criticism in Amsterdam, Brussels, Istanbul, Vienna and Bucharest. In 2010-2012 he was curator of the triennial for visual art, fashion and design "Superbodies" (exhibition running feb-may 2012) in Hasselt. He lives in Leuven.
Zeynep Bulut is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. She received her Ph.D. in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices in Music from the University of California at San Diego in 2011. Prior to her doctoral education, she studied sociology (B.A.), opera, and visual arts (M.A.) in Istanbul, Turkey. Zeynep investigates the use of non-linguistic voice and bodily sounds in experimental music and sonic arts, drawing on psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and sound and performance studies. In light of this research, and inspired by French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu’s notion of skin-ego, she theorizes voice as skin, as a physical and phenomenal matrix of senses, a primary point of contact and difference between self and the external world. Her broader research interests include historical epistemologies of hearing, anthropology of senses and affect, deaf performance and culture, and voice and speech disorders in the history of science and medicine. She is currently working on her book, entitled Skin-Voice: Contemporary Music Between Speech and Language. In addition, she is writing two articles, one for the forthcoming volume Gestures of Music Theatre: The Performativity of Song and Dance (Oxford: Oxford University Press), and another for the academic journal Musica Humana (Seoul, Korea). Her most recent publication, “Theorizing Voice in Performance: György Ligeti’s Aventures,” appeared in Perspectives of New Music. Alongside her scholarly work, Zeynep has also composed and performed voice and sound pieces for concert, video, and theatre, which have been exhibited in the United States, Europe and Turkey.
John Richardson is Professor of Musicology at the University of Turku in Finland. He is author of An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford University Press 2011) and Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Wesleyan University Press 1999). He is additionally co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (both forthcoming in 2013). Positions of trust include Chair of the Finnish Musicological Society and Director of the International Institute for Popular Culture. He has published widely on contemporary classical music, popular music and cultural musicology.
Sander van Maas is Professor of Dutch Contemporary Music at Utrecht University and Assistant Professor of Contemporary Music at the University of Amsterdam. His work focuses on the philosophy and criticism of twentieth and twenty-first century music. Key themes in his work are theories of listenership and musical postmetaphysics and religion.
Jack Henry Moore handled the sound and lights for the UFO Club and the London Arts Lab, organised the Alchemical Wedding in 1968 at the Albert Hall and established the MIkweg (Milky Way) in Amsterdam in 1970, which became the base for Videoheads. He video recorded the world premiere of "Einstein on the Beach" in Avignon, France.
Keith Potter is Reader in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was Head of the Department of Music between 2004 and 2007. A journalist, programme-note writer and editor as well as a musicologist, he is the author of Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; paperback edition 2002), and has published on many different areas of contemporary music, with a particular emphasis on British and American work. He was the co-founder and, for seventeen years, Chief Editor of Contact: a Journal of Contemporary Music, and for ten years a regular music critic on the UK daily newspaper, The Independent. Current research includes work on the Steve Reich archives at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland, from which organisation he was awarded a scholarship in 2011; and participation, with computer-science and psychology specialists, in a project on information-dynamics and the analysis of minimalist compositions, funded by the UK Engineeering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Frequently invited worldwide as a speaker on minimalist musical topics, in particular, he is presently Chair of the Society for Minimalist Music and a co-editor of the Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, to be published in 2013. He reviewed the London performances of Einstein on the Beach in May 2012, part of this work's current world tour, for the UK-based Opera and Tempo magazines.
