Composer Bios - Three Bones

Composer Bios

Charlton Singleton

A native of Awendaw, South Carolina, Charlton Singleton began his musical studies at the age of three on the piano Throughout his youth, he went on to study the organ, violin, cello, and the trumpet Since graduating from South Carolina State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance in 1994, Singleton has taught music at the elementary through college levels He is the Artistic Director and Conductor of the Charleston Jazz Orchestra, an 18-piece jazz ensemble comprised of some of the finest professional musicians in the Southeast In addition to his roles as speaker, composer, and arranger, Singleton also leads performs as part of Ranky Tanky, a group that specializes in jazz-influenced arrangements of traditional Gullah music, a culture that originated among descendants of enslaved Africans in the Lowcountry region of the US Southeast.

Dai Wei

Dai Wei is originally from China Her musical journey navigates in the spaces between east and west, classical and pop, electronic and acoustic, innovation and tradition. She often draws from Eastern philosophy and aesthetics to create works with contemporary resonance and reflects an introspection on how these multidimensional conflicts and tension can create and inhabit worlds of their own Her artistry is nourished by the Asian and Chinese Ethnic cultures in many different ways Being an experimental vocalist, she performs herself as a Khoomei throat singer in her recent compositions, through which are filtered by different experiences and backgrounds as a calling that transcends genres, races, and labels

Featured in The Washington Post’ s “22 for 22’: Composers and Performers to Watch this year, ” Dai served as a Young Artist Composer-in-Residence at Music from Angel Fire and Composer Fellow at Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong Her newly composed chamber orchestra Invisible Portals, conducted by Marin Alsop, premiered at Carnegie Hall in March 2022 During a centralized quarantine, she wrote a piece for solo violin and electronics called Song for Shades of Crimson dedicated to those who died from COVID-19, which premiered at the Bang on a Can 2020 Marathon. Other Projects include commissions and collaborations with orchestras and ensembles such as the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Michigan Philharmonic, Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Curtis Symphony Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, and the Aizuri Quartet, among many others From concert halls to local bars, her music has been performed in various venues and festivals, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Royal Festival Hall, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, International Computer Music Conference, World Saxophone Congress, and North American Saxophone Alliance

Wei is currently pursuing her doctorate in Music Composition at Princeton University as a Naumburg Fellow. She holds an Artist Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music. After she finished her B.A. in Music Composition at the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in China, she came to the United States and earned an M M in Music Composition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Laura Ortman

A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks

An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings.She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Martha Colburn, New Red Order, and Martin Bisi

Laura has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Venice Biennale, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, REWIRE Festival at the Hague, Baltimore Museum of Art, The Stone, SF JAZZ, Gagosian, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, MoMA PS1, Toronto Biennial of Art, Borealis Festival, CBGB's, Skaņu Mežs in Latvia, Pioneer Works, Roulette Intermedium, DIA Foundation, Calder Foundation, Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe

In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast that premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in NYC and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to sold-out audiences.

Ortman is the recipient of the 2026 Native Performing Arts Fellow, 2025 Pioneer Works Music Residency, 2023 Institute of American Indian Arts Fellowship, 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial She lives in Brooklyn, New York

Trevor Weston

Trevor Weston’ s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling ” Weston’s honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley, an Arts and Letters Award in Music and a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell He received a JACK Quartet Studio Recording Project for his string quartets Juba and Fudo Myoo Weston’s work, Juba for Strings won the Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition competition

Weston won the first Emerging Black Composers Project. The award commissioned Push noted for, “Working in terse, delicate strokes, Weston covers a range of references from the African American musical tradition ” The San Francisco Symphony premiered Push under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen

According to I Care If You Listen, “The Nuance of Trevor Weston’s musical language floats through a range of influences, including Impressionism, Modernism, and African American traditions and genres such as jazz, blues, and more ” Weston’s music has been performed by The Bang on a Can All-Stars, New York Philharmonic, Chanticleer, Roomful of Teeth, Boston Landmarks Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra,

Washington Bach Consort, Harvard Choirs, The Providence Singers, The Boston Children’s Chorus, St Thomas Church Fifth Avenue Choir, Yale Choral Artists, Seraphic Fire, and the Sacred and Profane

Dr. Weston is Chair of the Music Department at Drew University and a music composition instructor for the MAP and Pre-College programs at The Juilliard School, NYC