Program Notes | New Scores: The Cone Composition Institute Concert

Conductor and composer Christopher Rountree stands at the intersection of classical music, new music, performance art and pop. Following his 2020-21 debut with Long Beach Opera conducting Philip Glass’ Les Enfants Terribles, Rountree was named Music Director from the 2021–22 season. He maintains a long-term relationship with Martha Graham Dance Company resurrecting, recording and performing works by Copland, Kodaly, Rountree (MGDC commission), and others, with his ensemble Wild Up. In 2019, Rountree began recording a four-volume set of the music of Julius Eastman. In conjunction with this recording project, he toured the country with Wild Up, culminating in an Eastman portrait at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Rountree is currently working on two operas about love and technology with librettists Royce Vavrek and Roxie Perkins.

Rountree’s inimitable style has led to collaborations with: Björk, John Adams, Yoko Ono, David Lang, Scott Walker, La Monte Young, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Mica Levi, Alison Knowles, Yuval Sharon, Sigourney Weaver, Tyshawn Sorey, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ashley Fure, Julia Holter, Claire Chase, Missy Mazzoli, Ryoji Ikeda, Du Yun, Thaddeus Strassberger, Ellen Reid, Ted Hearne and James Darrah. Rountree also has worked with many orchestras and ensembles including the San Francisco, Chicago, National, Houston and Cincinnati Symphonies; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; International Contemporary Ensemble; Roomful of Teeth; Opéra national de Paris; and the Los Angeles, Washington National and Atlanta Operas. He has presented compositions and concerts at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Palais Garnier, Mile High Stadium, the Coliseum, Kennedy Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, ACE Hotel, National Sawdust, MCA Denver, The Hammer, The Getty, a basketball court in Santa Cruz and at Lincoln Center on the New York Philharmonic’s Biennale.

Rountree is the artistic director and conductor of Wild Up, the ensemble he founded in 2010, and artistic director of an interdisciplinary ambient series in an oak grove in LA called SILENCE. Rountree is a seventh-generation Californian descended from the first sheriffs of Santa Cruz County, he lives in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.

As a teenager growing up in Northern California obsessed with blues-rock guitar, Steven Mackey was in search of the “right wrong notes,” as he often likes to say, referencing Thelonius Monk. Today, Mackey is a GRAMMY Award-winning composer of works for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance, winner of several awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Kennedy Center Friedheim Award.

Mackey began composition studies at the University of California at Davis and received his Ph.D. at Brandeis University. Upon graduating and becoming a professor at Princeton, Mackey merged his academic training with rock guitar music. Signature pieces incorporating rock vernacular into traditional classical ensembles emerged: Troubadour Songs (1991), Physical Property (1992) and Banana/Dump Truck (1995).

Mackey repertoire includes: Dreamhouse (2003) for solo tenor, vocal quartet, electric guitar quartet and orchestra, nominated for four GRAMMY awards; A Beautiful Passing (2008) for violin and orchestra, an emotional reflection upon the death of his mother that Leila Josefowicz premiered with the BBC Philharmonic; and Slide (2011), an experimental music theater piece that won a GRAMMY Award for a recording featuring Mackey on electric guitar alongside vocalist Rinde Eckert and eighth blackbird. In 2021, the LA Phil, Gustavo Dudamel, and trumpet soloist Thomas Hooten gave the world premiere of Shivaree, a fantasy for trumpet and orchestra. Mackey further expanded his theatrical catalog with his short chamber opera Moon Tea about the 1969 meeting between the Apollo 11 astronauts and the Royal Family, premiered by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2021, as well as with his 2022 music theater work Memoir, based on the pages of his late mother’s memoirs and Concerto for Curved Space, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Andris Nelsons. Red Wood, a new environmentally concerned work, was premiered as part of The Soraya’s Treelogy Project and Mackey’s RIOT was premiered by mezzo-soprano Alicia Olatuja, Mackey on electric guitar, New Jersey Symphony, Princeton University Glee Club and conductor Xian Zhang.

Mackey’s music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Today, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife, composer Sarah Kirkland Snider, and their children Jasper and Dylan. Mackey teaches at Princeton University, where he mentors young composers as director of the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute.

Composer Leigha Amick believes that music has the potential to reflect on both the current and the timeless human experience, to provide grounds for intellectual fascination, and to quench the need for emotional expression. Her compositions have been performed by ensembles including the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, the Boulder Philharmonic, the Denver Young Artists Orchestra, the Orlando Philharmonic, the Indiana University New Music Ensemble, the Playground Ensemble, St. Martin’s Voices, St. Martin’s Chamber Choir, NOTUS Contemporary Vocal Ensemble and Ars Nova Singers. She has studied at summer programs including the Aspen Music Festival, the European American Musical Alliance (EAMA) and the IRCAM Contemporary Music Creation and Critique program through CIEE. EAMA awarded her the highest recognition in Counterpoint, Harmony and Solfège. Amick teaches counterpoint, keyboard harmony and solfège for the Young Artists Initiative at the Curtis Institute of Music. In 2022, New Voices Opera premiered Rhiannon’s Condemnation: a one-act chamber opera based on a medieval Welsh legend from The Mabinogion for which Amick wrote both the libretto and the music.

Amick received her Master of Music degree in composition from the Curtis Institute of Music where she held the Jimmy Brent Fellowship and studied with Amy Beth Kirsten, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Nick DiBerardino, Richard Danielpour and Steve Mackey. She received her Bachelor of Music in composition with highest distinction from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, completing minors in mathematics and electronic music. At IU, she studied composition with David Dzubay, Aaron Travers, Claude Baker, Sven-David Sandström and Don Freund. Before college, she studied with Daniel Kellogg and John Drumheller of the University of Colorado Boulder.

Jessie Leov is an award-winning composer, songwriter and musician based in Aotearoa, New Zealand. With a diverse practice as a music-maker, Leov’s work traverses both the classical and popular music space. Her music has been commissioned and performed by groups across Aotearoa, New Zealand and beyond including the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO), the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, NZTrio, Auckland Youth Choir, KC Vitas (US) and Celebris Ensemble (US).

In 2022, Leov was the recipient of an APRA AMCOS Professional Development Award, and received first place in the Open Category of Compose Aotearoa!, a national choral composition competition run by Choirs Aotearoa, New Zealand. She was also selected to take part in the NZ Composer Sessions where her orchestral work, marble, bark, silver, was recorded by the NZSO, in collaboration with SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music and Radio New Zealand. In 2024, Leov is Composer-in-Residence for the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, who commission and perform a new orchestral work each year by a New Zealand composer.

Leov is passionate about collaboration and has worked with artists from various disciplines including theatre, film, poetry and sonic arts. She is currently working alongside sonic artist Garling Wu on a collaborative project titled earthworks, supported by Creative New Zealand. Responding to climate change, this project brings together their respective backgrounds in contemporary classical and electroacoustic music as well as exploring wider musical influences.

Leov holds a Master of Music in Composition from the University of Auckland, completed in 2021 under the supervision of Dr. Leonie Holmes and Dr. David Chisholm.

Filipino composer/scholar Paul Gabriel L. Cosme (b. 2000) blends and breaks boundaries in his constant search for home. He combines various media, instruments and sound worlds from Asian and Western traditions with classical, pop & rock, jazz and traditional artists from the United States and throughout Asia and the Pacific including the JACK Quartet, taiko master Kenny Endo, critical theorist and artist-activist Mari Matsuda, shakuhachi player Christopher Blasdel, sheng performer Loo Sze Wang, koto player Maruta Miki, kulintang player Ron “kulintronica” Querian, members of the Minnesota Opera and the Hawaiʻi Symphony Orchestras, traditional musicians from Seoul National University, the BIPOC-centered Sugar Hill Salon Collective and many musicians he considers his dear friends.

As a scholar, Cosme’s research and works involve constructions of Philippine/Filipino subjectivities through contemporary and popular music in the 20th and 21st centuries, which are published and presented in various journals and conferences internationally. His most recent publication focuses on musical mimicry in the Philippines by comparing Taylor Swift and Filipina singer-songwriter Moira dela Torre. His current project revisits and problematizes discourses in intercultural composition through the works of Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist José Maceda.

Cosme received his Master of Music in Composition from the University of Hawaiʻi as a graduate degree fellow at the East-West Center. A winner of the Lila Bell Acheson Wallace Endowed Prize in Music, Cosme graduated as Summa cum Laude from Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota where he majored in Music and International Studies. He is also the inaugural winner of the Nā Haku Mele Competition of the Hawaiʻi Chapter of the American Choral Directors Association where he reimagined one of Queen Liliʻuokalani’s works. His teachers include Donald Reid Womack, Takuma Itoh, Thomas Osborne, Randy Bauer and Victoria Malawey.

When Cosme is not composing, he enjoys improvising on the kulintang, a set of bronze knobbed gongs from the Philippines, which he had the fortune to play in the Hawaiʻi premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner and Navajo composer Raven Chacón and Carcross/Tagish curator Candice Hopkins’s Dispatch.

Cosme loves dogs, the morning dew, Beethoven op. 132, punk rock, mangoes and his favorite Filipino dish: sinigang. paulcosme.com

Santiago Beis (1990) is an Uru-Brazilian composer, pianist, audio designer, arranger and artistic researcher. He holds a bachelor’s degree in composition from Escola de Música e Belas Artes do Paraná—UNESPAR where he worked with new music ensembles such as Orquestra de Câmara da Cidade de Curitiba, Ensemble Nova Camerata, Ensemble Móbile, Quarteto Brasiliana, UM2UO Percussion, Orquestra filarmônica da UFPR, Orquestra de Câmara da Cidade de Curitiba, Orquestra à Base de Sopro de Curitiba, Orquestra à Base de Cordas de Curitiba and Quinteto Sopro5. In Brazil he won first prize in XXII Funarte Prémio de Composição Clássica (2017), and in IV Bienal Música Hoje (2017) composition festivals and played his compositions at MadeinNY JazzGala jazz competition at the Tribeca Center of Performing Arts in New York (2017). In Curitiba, as a producer with Composteira casa de Criação, he organized workshops for composers-in-residence including Marcos Balter, Paulo Rios Filho, Alex Buck, Alexandre Torres Porres and Jorge Antunes, among other Brazilian Artists. In the US Beis graduated in 2023 with a Master of Music in Composition from the School of Music of the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he studied with Yoshiaki Onishi and Stefan Freund. During this period, Beis worked with the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the [Switch~ Ensemble], the UM University Philharmonic for the Sinquefield Composition Prize (2021) and the Sheldon Arts Foundation, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the JACK Quartet (JACK Studio 2022). Recent works include Color Utterance for the ensemble Alarm Will Sound and intus ergo foris for Talea Ensemble. Beis is pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition at the City University of New York Graduate Center in Dr. Suzanne Farrin's composition studio.