School of Music

Paula Matthusen is a composer who writes both electroacoustic and acoustic music and realizes sound installations. In addition to writing for a variety of different ensembles, she also collaborates with choreographers and theater companies. She has written for diverse instrumentations, such as “run-on sentence of the pavement” for piano, ping-pong balls, and electronics, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker noted as being “entrancing”. Her work often considers discrepancies in musical space—real, imagined, and remembered.

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Raven Chacon (b. 1977) is a Diné artist known as a composer of chamber music, as well as a solo performer of noise music. He was born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, United States). Chacon attended the California Institute of the Arts, where he received an MFA in music composition. Chacon performs in the groups KILT with Bob Bellerue, Mesa Ritual with William Fowler Collins, Endlings with John Dieterich, and collaborations with Laura Ortman. In 2016, he was commissioned by Kronos Quartet to compose a work for their Fifty For The Future project. Chacon serves as Composer-in-Residence with the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project. In 2012 he was awarded a Creative Capital Visual Arts grant. In 2014, he was honored with a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship in Music. In 2018, Chacon was awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin.

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Multiple Grammy Nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow Miguel Zenón represents a select group of musicians who have masterfully balanced and blended the often contradictory poles of innovation and tradition. Widely considered as one of the most groundbreaking and influential saxophonists and composers of his generation, he has also developed a unique voice as a conceptualist, concentrating his efforts on perfecting a fine mix between Jazz and his many musical influences.

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For more than a decade, bassist-composer Harish Raghavan has helped lay the foundation for a thriving generation of artists. The Thelonious Monk Competition semifinalist garners acclaim as a sound architect for myriad original projects, from Ambrose Akinmusire’s to Eric Harland’s. Born in Chicago, the New York-based artist transitioned from Mridanga to bass at age 16. His appetite for mingling lineages has allowed him to craft an inclusive, deeply personal artistry. Raghavan’s debut album Calls for Action (Whirlwind Recordings) reflects his development as a composer and bandleader.

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Justin Asher is a Los Angeles based composer, sound designer, performer and audio producer whose work narrates the technological-human relationship. He's a multi-instrumentalist who's extended repertoire includes repurposed, non-musical devices and often involves production-as-instrument, feedback, modulated speech, and hyper-acoustics. On TV and radio, his music composing work has been in programs for ABC, CBS, A&E, MTV, NPR, and in films by Hasbro, and MGM. His work has also appeared on the recording labels Astralworks, Bongo Beat, Crammed, Island/Def Jam, Koch, Knitting Factory, Munich, Pan, pfMENTUM, Setola di Maiale, Shanacie, Touch and Go, as the Stitcher/Earwolf and Freakonomics podcast networks.

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