For the past 20 years, Joseph Celli has devoted his time to the premiering of over 35 inter-media works created for him by various artists; to the producing of contemporary artists activities; and to the study and performance of double reed instruments from around the world. He has commissioned and collaborated with an eclectic and diverse group of artists working in new sound technology, film, video, performance and inter-media events. Celli is one of a handful of American virtuosi recognized for developing a new instrumental syntax and a new performance repertoire for his instruments, the oboe and English horn. He co-directed the 1984 and 1988 New Music America Festivals, co-founded and directed Real Arts Ways, and served on the boards of many alternative organizations. Since 1991, he has worked as an independent, unaffiliated, itinerant composer and performer on five continents. He is the founder and director of O.O. Discs, Inc.

Joel Chadabe is an internationally recognized pioneer in the development of interactive music systems. As composer and performer, he has concertized worldwide since 1969 with Jan Williams, percussionist, and other musicians. He is listed in the International Who's Who of Musicians and the Who's Who in American Music. His articles on electronic music have appeared in Computer Music Journal, Contemporary Music Review, Electronic Musician, Perspectives of New Music, Electronic Music Review, Melos, Musique en Jeu, and many other journals and magazines. Several of his articles have been anthologized in books by the MIT Press and other publishers. His music is recorded on CDCM, Centaur, Lovely Music, Opus One, CP2, and Folkways labels. He has received awards, fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright Commission, SUNY Research Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. He has been President and Chairman of Composers' Forum, Inc., in New York City. He is currently on the faculties of the University at Albany and Bennington College; President of Intelligent Music, a research and development company; and founder and President of Electronic Music Foundation. Mr. Chadabe has a B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.M. degree from Yale University.

Seth Cluett (born 1976, Troy, New York) is a composer and visual artist whose work includes photography, drawing, video, sound installation, concert music, and performance. His pieces are an exploration of the role of sound in everyday life, engaging the boundary between the auditory and the other senses as an active field of experience for the audience.

His work has been shown/performed at the 10th Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Palais de Tokyo Museum, Théatre sur le Pavé, and GRM in Paris; the ICA, Mobius Artist Space, MassArt/nonpod in Boston; WPS1/MoMA, The Kitchen, Diapason, Engine 27, Tonic, and The Knitting Factory in New York; the Betty Rymer Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, Heaven, Artemisia, and Deadtech Galleries in Chicago; as well as the Deep Listening Space in Kingston, NY. Seth's work is documented on Errant Bodies Press, Sedimental, Crank Satori, BoxMedia, and Wavelet Records.

"What is multi-dimensional drumming? After dealing with polyrhythms, I began to hear layers of sounds and rhythms. Divided into many parts and facets, the drum set and secondary instruments I use and play are all aspects of the drums. In the future, there will be many changes and developments in the area of the mind – so what we (humankind) think and hear, is what we shall see and hear. In order to play the drum set you must be able to manipulate four or five things at one time (i.e. bass drum, snare drum, high-hat, ride cymbals and maybe voice). So an instruments name and structure doesn’t stop me from playing them like a drum. You have instruments that are structurally different from the drum, but they have the same characteristic in the approach to the drum (i.e. piano, balaphone and shoes with taps). In order to find the music of the drums, I had to change my assumptions and beliefs about music in relation to the drums, which is sound in the creation of multi-rhythms." - Jerome Cooper

Viv Corringham is a British vocalist and sound artist, currently based in Minnesota, who has worked internationally since the early 1980s. Articles about her work can be found in Organised Sound (UK), Musicworks (Canada), and For Those Who Have Ears (Ireland). She received an MA Sonic Art with Distinction in 2001 from Middlesex University, England, and has had many awards, including a McKnight Composer Fellowship for 2006. Most recent works appeared in Art Colony, Grand Marais MN, Women in New Music Festival, Fullerton CA, Spark Electronic Music Festival Minneapolis MN, Rochester Art Center MN, Soundworks Festival, Cork, Ireland, and Midsummer Festival, Cobh, Ireland.

Henry Cowell may be best known as a creator of “tone cluster” compositions, which he began writing while in his early teens, but his infuence has been far broader and much deeper. As founder in 1925 of the New Music Society, he became a concert impresario for works by, among others, Carl Ruggles, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein; and publisher from 1927 to 1958 of New Music: A Quarterly of Musical Compositions. His many students included George Gershwin, John Cage, and Lou Harrison, but his interests extended beyond western classical traditions, and his radio program, “Music of the World’s Peoples,” introduced a large audience to world music long before it was fashionable. Just as Cowell’s groundbreaking book of 1930, New Musical Resources, continues to inspire successive generations of composers, Essential Cowell is key to understanding the origins and expanding dimensions of contemporary music.

Jacket photograph: Henry Cowell, 1914, age 17, reproduced courtesy of the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts/Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Curran is an American composer and performer of instrumental, electronic and environmental music familiar to new music audiences throughout Europe and the USA. Since co-founding the group Musica Elettronica Viva (with Rzewski and Teitelbaum) his musical activities include solo performances, large urban sound events, vocal improvisation groups and experimental radio works. Curran has collaborated with Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Cornelius Cardew, T. Kosugi, Pauline Oliveros, Charles Morrow, Clark Coolidge, Willem de Ridder, Simone Forti and many others.