School of Music

Ela Orleans is an electronic sound artist, performer, academic, and cinematic composer based in Paris and London.

Her sample-driven songs, often featuring Casio keyboards and reverb-caked vocals, recalled ghostly memories of ’50s and ’60s pop. Her work fuses elegant, noirish laments, lush, and atmospheric fractured narratives with influences ranging from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to the Éthiopiques series and Bernard Herrmann film scores. Since her solo
debut Low Sun/High Moon in 2008, Orleans has received international critical acclaim for her growing catalog of work.

Subsequently, Orleans has toured across the UK, Europe, USA, and Canada, and her work was presented at MoMA PS1, New York; MoCA, Massachusetts; The Venice Biennale; and TATE Britain. She has worked on several albums, film soundtracks, theater, and opera works.

In October 2013, her double album Tumult in Clouds received The Dead Albatross Music Prize voted for by the finest record shops, radio presenters, listeners, writers, and record collectors from across the UK and Ireland. Her tracks have been played frequently on major and independent radio stations across Europe, America, and Japan. She has also completed a remix of work by new age sound pioneer Laraaji, and her album Circles of Upper and Lower Hell was shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year in 2017.

In 2023 she received PhD in Music / Audiovisual Composition at the University of Glasgow (UK).

Photo: Elliot M. Selwood

1998 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music

Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist working with voice, live electronic processing, sampled sound, and video. A pioneer of live digital looping techniques, she processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. Her solo works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. She uses MAX MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures. Her performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in theaters and concert halls. In addition to her performances, she has a growing body of installation works using multi-channel sound and video.

Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan – performing in international festivals and venues including Bang on a Can at Lincoln Center (NY); La Biennale di Venezia; San Francisco Symphony’s SoundBox, the Japan Interlink Festival; Other Minds (San Francisco); and Pina Bausch Tanztheater's Festival (Wuppertal, Germany). She has received commissions to compose live and fixed-media scores for choreographers and film/video artists. Her large-scale, performance works, including Memory Trace, Baggage Allowance, Voci, and Gaijin, have been presented at venues like the Kitchen in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Theater Artaud (Z Space) in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, as well as at theaters in Washington D.C. and Budapest. Her one-act opera Wunderkabinet inspired by the Museum of Jurassic Technology (co-composed with Matthew Brubeck) premiered at The LAB in San Francisco, and was presented at REDCAT in LA and Open Ears Festival in Canada. She has shown work in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum (New York); Savvy Contemporary (Berlin); the Tang Museum (Saratoga Springs NY); the Dakar Biennale (Sénégal); Krannert Art Museum (IL), and the Kitchen (NY).

Ms. Z has received commissions from chamber ensembles including Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, Bang On A Can All Stars; Ethel, Del Sol Quartet, California E.A.R. Unit; Left Coast Chamber Ensemble; and Empyrean Ensemble. She recently composed a work for soprano Julia Bullock and the San Francisco Symphony. She has collaborated with a wide range of artists including Joan La Barbara, Joan Jeanrenaud, Brenda Way (ODC Dance), Miya Masaoka, Jeanne Finley + John Muse, Shinichi Iova Koga (Inkboat), and Luciano Chessa. She has participated in New Music Theatre’s John Cage festivals, and has performed with The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.

Pamela Z is the recipient of many honors and awards including the Rome Prize, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Dorothea Tanning Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, United States Artists Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; the Creative Capital Fund; the MAP Fund, the ASCAP Music Award; an Ars Electronica honorable mention; and the NEA Japan/US Friendship Commission Fellowship. She holds a music degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Emmanuel Attah Poku is a prominent master drummer from the Ashanti region of Ghana, West Africa. Born and raised inside the walls of the Ashanti King's palace, Attah Poku began training with his grandfather when he was only 5 years old, and officially joined the Ashanti King's drum ensemble when he was 10. Performing as lead drummer for the Kumasi Centre for National Culture, the Ashanti King's Fontomfrom ensemble, and the renowned Nsuase Kete group, Attah Poku has toured Africa extensively, playing in Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Togo, and Benin. Attah Poku is currently based in Boston, where he directs the Kiniwe African Music and Dance Ensemble at Tufts University. He also serves as the artistic director of the Agbekor Drum and Dance Society, founded by Professor David Locke (Music Department, Tufts University). Attah Poku has performed for internationally renowned figures such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Prince Charles of Wales, movie star Steven Seagal, heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis, and presidents of many African nations including Ghana, Côte D'Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Togo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia.

2023 Charlie Haden Artist in Residence

Since his arrival in New York in 1999, Cuban saxophonist, percussionist, and composer Yosvany Terry has been making a difference in contemporary music. His innovative work, a unique confluence of Cuban roots music and jazz, “has helped redefine Latin jazz as a complex new idiom.” 

— The New York Times

Born into a musical family in Camaguey, Cuba, Yosvany Terry went on to classical music training in Havana at the prestigious National School of Arts (ENA) and Amadeo Roldan Conservatory. After graduating, Terry worked with major figures in every realm of Cuban music, including pianists Chucho Valdes and Frank Emilio, and the celebrated nueva trova singer/guitarist Silvio Rodriguez. From his earliest days in New York, Terry has been welcomed by a broad range of artists in the jazz and contemporary music community, playing with Steve Coleman, Rufus Reid, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Roy Hargrove, Vijay Iyer, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Avishai Cohen, Baptiste Trotignon, Eddie Palmieri, and Gerald Clayton.

Terry continued his music education in New York, where he studied composition, orchestration and counterpoint with Leo Edward, Rudolph Palmer. Terry has received a number of commissions as well as grants to support both his performance and composition work. He is a recipient of the prestigious Doris Duke Artist Award of the class 2015. His New Throned King album received a Grammy Award Nomination for Best Latin Jazz Album.

A key aspect of his work is educating the next generation of musicians both in the US and Cuba. He has taught at prestigious institutions across the United States and Canada. He regularly visits his alma maters in Cuba to give workshops and master classes. In 2015, Terry joined the full time faculty at Harvard University as senior lecturer and director of jazz ensembles in the Department of Music.

Joining Terry during his residency are the other members of his Modern Afro Cuban Quartet:
Yosvany Terry: saxophonist and composer
Clarence Penn: drummer
Javier Santiago: pianist
Hamish Smith: bassist

2022 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music

Pianist Cory Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including multi-instrumentalist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, violinist Hilary Hahn, and transdisciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own “perplexingly perfect” (The Wire) music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader).

Smythe has been featured at the Newport Jazz, Wien Modern, and Tectonics festivals, as well as at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, where he premiered new work created in collaboration with Peter Evans and Craig Taborn. He has received commissions from Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Wiener Festwochen, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which he is a longtime member.

Smythe’s recent albums on the Pyroclastic label have been made with the support of a grant from The Shifting Foundation. He received a Grammy Award for his work with Hahn and, in 2022, a Herb Alpert Award in Music.

Photo: Caitlin Ochs

2022 Herb Alpert Award Winner in Music

Cellist and composer Tomeka Reid has emerged as one of the most original, versatile, and curious musicians in Chicago’s bustling jazz and improvised music community. A 2022 Herb Alpert awardee and MacArthur Fellow, 2021 USA Fellow, and a 2019 Foundation of the Arts and 2016 3Arts recipient, Reid received her doctorate in music from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017. From 2019 to 2021 Reid held a teaching appointment at Mills College as the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition.