Ensemble Profiles

de Liguoro’s Dante’s Inferno as part of a consortium between the film studies, French, and Italian departments and the Center for Creativity and the Arts at Emory University. Salerni was the recipient of the Atlanta Symphony Talent Development Program’s Aspire Award in 2019. He holds degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music and the Yale University School of Music.

Nathan Schram is a Grammy Award–winning composer. He has collaborated, in the studio and on stage, with many of the great artists of today including Björk, James Blake, Sting, David Crosby, Becca Stevens, David Byrne, Just Blaze, Itzhak Perlman, and others. Schram is a PhD student in composition at Princeton University and an Honorary Ambassador to the city of Chuncheon, South Korea. He has released two solo records of his own compositions, Nearsided and Oak & the Ghost, on Better Company Records and New Amsterdam Records, respectively. His arrangement of Radiohead’s 2 + 2 = 5 written for Becca Stevens and Attacca Quartet was also nominated at the 2023 Grammy Awards. Apart from performing, he is the founder and executive director of Musicambia. Founded in 2013, Musicambia develops music education programs and performances inside prisons and jails throughout the United States.

Andrew Yee (she/they), cellist and composer, was trained at The Juilliard School. The Attacca Quartet, which has released several albums to critical acclaim, included Yee’s arrangement of Haydn’s Seven Last Words, which thewholenote.com praised as “. . . easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I’ve heard.” She co-composed a score to Wu Tsang’s film adaptation of Moby Dick; or, The Whale with Caroline Shaw that premiered with the Zurich Chamber Orchestra and then in New York at the Shed by the New York Philharmonic.

She is writing works for Leilehua Lanzilotti, the Thalea Quartet and the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra this season. Her solo project Halfie draws on her experience as a bi-racial and trans person in having access to multiple communities at once, while not feeling at home in any of them. The works commissioned, and on the concerts, will feature a wide range of composers all for solo cello. She has been touring a duo show with Caroline Shaw since 2021. In 2019 she won the first prize at Oklahoma University’s National Arts Incubation Lab for her pitch of a wearable garment that translates sound into vibrations for the hard of hearing. She likes to draw apples, cook like an Italian grandma, and has developed coffee and cocktail programs for award-winning restaurants (Lilia, Risbobk, Atla) in New York City. Her son Otis is the love of her life. She plays on an 1884 Eugenio Degani cello on loan from the Five Partners Foundation.

The New York Times has called red fish blue fish a “dynamic percussion ensemble from the University of California.” Founded more than 25 years ago by Steven Schick, the San Diego–based ensemble performs, records, and premieres works from the last 85 years of western percussion’s rich history. The group works regularly with living composers from every continent. Recent projects include the world premiere of Roger Reynolds’s Sanctuary and the American premiere of James Dillon’s epic Nine Rivers cycle with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). In the summer of 2011, red fish blue fish collaborated with George Crumb, Dawn Upshaw, and Peter Sellars at the Ojai Music Festival to premiere the staged version of The Winds of Destiny. Eighth Blackbird invited red fish blue fish to join them in performances of works by American icons John Cage and Steve Reich at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The New York Times called their “riveting” John Cage performance the “highlight” of the program. In 2012 red fish blue fish presented four concerts of percussion music alongside Percussion Group Cincinnati at the John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington, DC, where they performed highlights from Cage’s collection of percussion works. red fish blue fish has had impact on new music percussion both by virtue of their many performances and acclaimed recordings, and also through their commitment to research and pedagogy as a resident ensemble at UCSD. The group’s numerous alumni hold major teaching and artistic positions throughout the world.

Recordings of the percussion chamber music of Iannis Xenakis and Roger Reynolds on Mode Records have been praised by critics around the world. Their recording of the early percussion works of Karlheinz Stockhausen received Germany’s award for the best recording of contemporary music in 2015.

MITCHELL CARLSTROM

MICHAEL JONES

KOSUKE MATSUDA

CAMILO ZAMUDIO

STEVEN SCHICK director