Conrad Cummings Photo by Kurt Hoss

Conrad Cummings is a composer of opera (including a three-week off-Broadway run of Photo-Op with Ridge Theater at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York), music for orchestra (New Jersey, Indianapolis, and Louisville Symphonies and the Brooklyn Philharmonic), and works for amplified chamber ensembles performed at the Knitting Factory and P.S. 122.

Cummings trained at Yale, Stony Brook, and Columbia, did post-doc work at IRCAM in Paris. He taught at the Oberlin Conservatory for ten years where he directed the music and media program before moving to New York to run a children's interactive media company. He is currently on the faculty at Juilliard.

Recordings of his music were released on CRI's Emergency Music label. His honors include MacDowell, Djerassi, and Tanglewood fellowships, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Opera America, and The Rockefeller Foundation.

James Siena (librettist) is a distinguished painter whose works were featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. During the 1980s he was a member of the performance collective Watchface and presented solo performance work at P.S. 122 as well as numerous East Village clubs. He is represented by PaceWildenstein.

Laura Heimes

Laura Heimes (soprano) is an artist of great versatility, performing a wide range of repertoire from the Renaissance to the 21st century. In addition to her work as a soloist, she has collaborated with many of the leading figures in early music, including Andrew Lawrence King, The King's Noyse with lutenist Paul O'Dette, Apollo's Fire, The New York Collegium, Belladonna, The Publick Musick, Brandywine Baroque, and Piffaro-The Renaissance Band, a group with whom she has toured the U.S. She has been heard at the Boston and Connecticut Early Music Festivals and at the Oregon and Philadelphia Bach Festivals under the baton of Helmuth Rilling. With the Philadelphia Orchestra she appeared as Mrs. Nordstrom in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. A native of Rochester, New York, she holds master of music degrees in choral conducting and voice performance from Temple University. She has recorded for Dorian, Pro Gloria Musicae, and Champignon International.

Clarice Jensen (cello) is a native of Independence, Missouri. She has her master's degree from Juilliard, where she also completed her undergraduate studies as a student of Joel Krosnick. Since moving to New York, Jensen has been an enthusiastic performer of new music, performing regularly with the New Juilliard Ensemble and Continuum. She has performed as soloist with the New Juilliard Ensemble for the U.S. premiere of Guo Wenjing's Concertino for Cello and Ensemble as part of the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival and the world premiere of Dimitri Yanov-Yanovsky's Hearing Solution for cello and ensemble as part of the Silk Road "Artist in Residence" program. Jensen has also appeared regularly in Julliard's Focus! festival of new music. At last year's festival, she gave the U.S. premiere of Roger Reynold's Process and Passion for cello, violin, and computer processed sound.

Sarah Schwartz (violin) is an active performer in the New York area. She performs with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, the American Symphony Orchestra, and the North/South Consonance Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Her summer festival appearances include the Grand Teton Music Festival, Caramoor Festival, Bard Music Festival, Music From Salem Contemporary Chamber Music Festival, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, and the Aspen Music Festival. Recent recitals include performances at the Morgan Library, Bloomingdale School of Music, Donnell Library, and St. Peter's Church in New York City, as well as the South Presbyterian Church in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Schwartz currently teaches at the Bloomingdale School of Music and has taught at P.S. 160 and P.S. 34 in New York City. She has taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music as a teaching assistant, and the Cleveland School of the Arts. Schwartz graduated from Oberlin College and earned a Master of Music from The Cleveland Institute of Music.

Andrew Sterman

Andrew Sterman (clarinet, tenor saxophone) is founder and co-director of MLAEV (Music Lovers Against Empty Virtuosity) and generally prefers to play simple music. His own music is very simple, but nonetheless his new CD, Blue Canvas with Spiral, featuring Fred Hersch and Rashied Ali, has been very well received. Sterman has been a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1991. In November 2003, Sterman performed and recorded the world premiere of a major new duo piece of Glass's with the composer at the piano. He is also featured on the recent CD Philip Glass: Saxophone. Sterman is a founding member of the improvisation ensemble Fish Love That and has been soloist with the EOS Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Music at the Anthology, and the International Society for Contemporary Music. As a jazz musician he has performed with many of the all time greats, including Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Dizzy Gillespie, Freddie Hubbard, Gil Evans, Buddy Rich, Ron Carter, and Sonny Fortune.

Curtis Streetman

Curtis Streetman (bass) has earned praise for the power and beauty of his voice in repertoire that ranges from the Renaissance to the music of Benjamin Britten and Conrad Susa. His opera credentials include the major bass roles in Verdi's Rigoletto, Peri's Euridice, Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberfloete, Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, Britten's Billy Budd, as well as the bass leads in many of Handel's operas.

Highlights of the current season include the role of Colline in La Boheme, with the Pacific Opera Victoria, Canada; appearances with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in a program of recently discovered bass arias of C.P.E. Bach; and his directorial debut with the New York Collegium, in a program of English restoration music honoring the diarist Samuel Pepys. At the invitation of the Salzburg Festival, he will make his solo debut at Dortmund's new Philharmonic Hall in Germany. Upcoming performances include debuts with the San Diego Symphony, Switzerland's Solothurn Festival, Spain's Salamanca Festival, as well as Montreal's Les Violons du Roi under the direction of Bernard Labadie, and a return engagement with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra directed by Nicholas McGegan.

Streetman began his musical training at an early age at the Choir School of St. Thomas Church, in New York City, where he worked with the famed improvasiteur, Dr. Gerre Hancock. His career has brought him full circle, as he was recently appointed vocal instructor at the Choir School.

The Avian Orchestra is a contemporary music ensemble dedicated to building bridges between audiences, performers, and various musical styles and media. The group's aim is to provide opportunities for emerging composers side by side with more established composers in an ongoing series of themed concerts that engage audiences. Past concerts have focused on such themes as birds and music, sports-inspired music performed in a 19th century gymnasium, and a Valentine's Day concert of songs of love, lust, sex, and jealousy, which featured the burlesque performer Miss Dirty Martini. Their concerts have been popular and critical successes, described in The New York Times as "played beautifully and sensitively." Upcoming projects include The Sweet Sounds of Politics, which takes place at Loft 343 on October 28-29, 2004, and a spring 2005 concert of karaoke-themed pieces for performers and tape.