Kamilla Arku
Kamilla Arku, a Liberian-Norwegian pianist, draws on her diverse background as inspiration for her work as a performer and educator. She has performed for Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Intercultural Music Initiative, and the American Musicological Society. Last season she performed in the U. K., U. S., and Liberia. Her creative practice centers on improvisation, interdisciplinary conversation, and community-building. Kamilla is the founder and director of Music for Liberia, a nonprofit that supports young people in Liberia, and is currently a Ph. D. student in Musicology at New York University.
Phil Ford
Phil Ford is an associate professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and affiliate faculty in IU’s Cognitive Science Program. His musicological work has dealt especially with postwar American culture and music, as well as sound, performance, philosophy, and the intellectual history of counterculture. The main product of this research has been the monograph Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013). In public scholarship, he founded and wrote for the blog Dial ‘M’ for Musicology, a collaboration with Jonathan Bellman that ran from 2006 to 2018. Since 2018 he has co-hosted the podcast Weird Studies with writer/philosopher J. F. Martel. Weird Studies considers magical, contemplative, and otherwise supernormal styles of thought, feeling, and experience. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Martel, is titled Weirding (Strange Attractor).
Julian Johnson
Julian Johnson is Regius professor of music at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously held positions at the University of Oxford and the University of Sussex. He was for many years an active composer, receiving professional performances and broadcasts in Europe, the U. S., and Japan. He has published widely on music from the late eighteenth century to the present, with a particular focus on Gustav Mahler and the wider cultural and historical significance of musical Modernism. His work engages with the philosophy of music, ideas of nature and landscape, and the relation of music to literature and visual art. He has published six books, including the widely acclaimed Who Needs Classical Music? (2001) and, more recently, After Debussy (2020). He is committed to fostering a wider public understanding of music and has worked regularly with the BBC and leading orchestras as well as opera companies and major music festivals. In 2017 he was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy.
Steven Ledbetter
Steven Ledbetter was musicologist and program annotator for the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998, when he created Steven Ledbetter Program Notes. He now writes essays for orchestras, chamber ensembles, opera companies, and recordings all over the English-speaking world. He earned a Ph. D. in musicology at New York University and taught at Dartmouth College before joining the Boston Symphony. In 1991 his BSO program notes received an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for “distinguished print and media coverage of music.”.
Thomas May
Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work appears in the New York Times, Gramophone, Strings, Chorus America’s The Voice, and other publications. The Lucerne Festival’s English-language editor, he is also U. S. correspondent for the Strad and program annotator for the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Ojai Festival. His publications include Decoding Wagner: An Invitation to His World of Music Drama and The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an American Composer.
Matthew Mugmon
Matthew Mugmon has written notes for the Aspen Music Festival and School since 2018, and is associate professor of musicology at the University of Arizona. He has served as the New York Philharmonic’s Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence, and his research appears in the Journal of Musicology, Music & Letters, the Journal of Musicological Research, and the essay collection Rethinking Mahler. His monograph Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler was published in 2019 by the University of Rochester Press.
Markus Rathey
Markus Rathey is the Robert S. Tangeman professor of music history at Yale University. His research focuses on the relationship between music, religion, and society from the early modern period to the late nineteenth century. He has published extensively on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, Heinrich Schütz, Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, and Felix Mendelssohn. His most important books include an introduction to Bach’s Major Vocal Works (Yale University Press, 2016), a seminal study of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (Oxford University Press, 2016), and a book that explores Bach’s music in the context of social and political discourses of his time (Bach in the World, Oxford University Press, 2023). He has been the president of the American Bach Society and currently serves on the editorial board of the Yale Journal of Music and Religion.
Harlow Robinson
Harlow Robinson is an author and a lecturer as well as Matthews distinguished university professor of history (emeritus) at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography; Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev (editor and translator); The Last Impresario: The Life, Times and Legacy of Sol Hurok; and Russians in Hollywood: Hollywood’s Russians. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Opera News, Musical America, and other publications. He has lectured and provided program essays for Aspen Music Festival and School, Boston Symphony, Metropolitan Opera Guild, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Lincoln Center.
Dan Ruccia
Dan Ruccia is a writer, violist, composer, and graphic designer based in Durham, North Carolina. He received his Ph.D. in Music Composition from Duke University in 2013, having studied with Stephen Jaffe and Scott Lindroth. He is an active member of the Triangle free improv scene, playing with Cyanotype, Polyorchard, and others. He can often be found spinning records at WPRB-Princeton, riding his bike to shows, or herding dragons and alicorns with his seven-year-old daughter.
Joel Rust
Joel Rust is a composer and sound artist who creates works across a variety of media. His recent works and works-in-progress include an opera, interactive installations, and a song cycle about summoning angels. He has received commissions from artists and groups in the U. K., U. S., and France, and his works appear on recordings by Discantus, The Hermes Experiment, and the Choir of King’s College, London. He has held positions at Emory University and New York University, having completed studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Harvard, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
