A recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships , she has also received awards from the American Music Center, Meet the Composer, New Jersey State Arts Council and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. A two-year retrospective of her music in Shepherdstown, WV, funded by the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Arts Partners Program culminated in the premiere of her folk oratorio, COAL.

Performed by such ensembles as the Denver, Illinois, Knoxville, National and Richmond Symphonies, her music has been featured by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; the Cassatt, Ciompi and Kronos Quartets and Da Capo Chamber Players. It has been heard at the Aspen, Havana in Spring, Moscow Autumn and West Cork Festivals, among many others. Twice a fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy her residencies also include Bramshaus, La Cité des Arts, MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Yaddo.(include the full title of Yaddo)

Based at the University of Virginia, where she is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Music and Director of the Virginia Center for Computer Music, Shatin was educated at Douglass College (AB), The Juilliard School (MM) and Princeton University (PhD). She was also twice a Margaret Lee Crofts composition fellow at Tanglewood. Commissions have come from groups including the Ash Lawn Opera, the Barlow Foundation, the Dutch Hexagon Ensemble and the National Symphony, among many others. Her music is recorded on Capstone, Centaur, CRI, Neuma, New World and Sonora and published by C.F. Peters, Colla Voce, Hal Leonard and Wendigo Music, the latter distributed by MMB. For more information, visit www.judithshatin.com.

Penelope's Song is a tribute to Penelope, Queen of Carthage and wife of Odysseus. It was inspired by Homer's epic, the Odyssey, which tells of the travails of Odysseus, but comments from Penelope's point of view. Ulysses was away from home for twenty years, first at war in Troy and then, due to the sea-god Poseidon's wrath, for ten more years. The story also tells of Penelope, left waiting for him for all that time, and of the many suitors, filled with greed and arrogance, who tried to woo her in order to become king. To stave them off she devised many excuses. In one, she said she would take no suitor until she finished weaving a shroud for her husband's aged father, Laertes. But, since she unraveled at night what she wove by day, she made no progress. Instead, she actively waited for Ulysses' return. This piece sings of her adventures. The electronics were created from a recording of a local weaver working on wooden looms. I processed and shaped these materials, weaving a new sonic fabric. This performance marks the world premiere of this version of for amplified cello and electronics. The original was commissioned by violist Rozanna Weinberger, and was premiered at the Musica Viva Festival in Portugal in 2003. A version for violin and electronics was premiered by Timothy Summers last season in Aarhus, Denmark.

I am frequently inspired by stories and myths from a wide variety of sources. Often, though, ideas spring to mind that are not directly connected to current reading or experience. This was the case in the composition of Penelope's Song. When violist Rozanna Weinberg approached me to commission a piece for amplified viola and electronics, the idea of creating a piece about Penelope, Queen of Ithaca and wife of Ulysses, sprang to mind. One hears a good deal about Ulysses, much less of Penelope. Interestingly, Margaret Atwood's Penelopiade, a wonderful retelling of her story, was published in 2005. As I was thinking about Penelope, I recalled how she fended off suitors, during Ulysses twenty-year absence, by setting impossible tasks for them. One was that she would not consider a suitor until she finished her weaving. But since she unravelled by night what she wove by day, she never finished. This led me to record the sound of a woman weaving on wooden looms, and to use those sounds as the source material for all of the electronic music. Sometimes they are recognizable, though sonically reshaped, while at others they have been transformed beyond recognition.

I approached Kathy Aoki, with whom I had a wonderful previous collaboration, about creating a video for Penelope's Song. In this case, my music was already complete, and she and Marco Marquez wove their video from the musical fabric.

From the Animators: This animation, inspired by the weaving sounds of Judith Shatin's Penelope's Song, is our first collaborative effort. The creative process began with interpretive analysis of the electronic music. The weaving notion and the loom recordings became very important for both the images and their rhythmic motion. We also discussed our understanding of Penelope's onus (weaving and unraveling her work as she fends off the suitors while waiting for Ulysses to return) in relation to Shatin's music. We used a combination of digital painting, 3-d modeling/animation, and digital video to achieve the final animation. Throughout the process, we consulted with Shatin about her visual expectations. We thought of the piece in three movements. The first is realized as a building up of the cloth/threads, with a feeling of weight and impending danger or pressure. The second was interpreted as a night scene, wherein Penelope ponders her position and surreptitiously unravels the weavings. The last movement is a visual refrain based on the first, with more dramatic and decisive motions.

Kathy Aoki received her MFA in printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis in 1994. Since then she has worked as a professional artist and teacher, exhibiting her prints, paintings, and sculptures at such venues as San Francisco, New York, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Quito Ecuador, and Kobe, Japan. Permanent collections include SFMOMA, the Harvard University Art Museums, and the City of Seattle. This is her second animation project with composer Judith Shatin, whom she met during an artist residency at the MacDowell Colony. Aoki is currently an assistant professor of studio art at Santa Clara University, where she teaches computer arts.

Marco Marquez received his MFA in Computer Art from the New York School of Visual Arts in 1999, specializing in 3-d modeling and animation. After returning to California, Marco worked as a lead/senior designer at multiple design agencies in Silicon Valley, designing and producing web design, brochures, and corporate branding. Marco currently lectures at Santa Clara University's Art department, where he teaches 3D, computer art, and graphic design courses. His fine art interests include painting, digital and mixed media. This is his first collaborative animation with artist Kathy Aoki and composer Judith Shatin.

Cellist *Maxine Neuman's solo and chamber music career spans North America, South America, Europe and Japan. A three-time Grammy Award winner and a grant recipient from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, her biography appears in "Who's Who in the World." She is a founding member of the Claremont Duo, the Belmont Trio, the Crescent String Quartet, the Vermont Cello Quartet and the Walden Trio, groups with which she has traveled and recorded extensively.

Her long list of recording credits includes Deutsche Grammophon, Columbia, Angel, EMI, Nonesuch, Biddulph, CRI, Orion, Leonarda, Argo, Opus One, SONY/Virgin, AMC, Thorofon, Vanguard, Musical Heritage, Albany, Northeastern and CBS World Records.

She has appeared as soloist before a sold-out audience in New York's Town Hall in the American premiere of Giovanni Battista Viotti's only cello concerto, and for Austrophon, she recorded Schumann Cello Concerto in Count Esterhazy's historic palace in Austria. She can also be heard in such diverse settings as the Montreux Jazz Festival, the films of Jim Jarmusch, and with the rock band Metallica. She has expanded the chamber ensemble repertoire - especially for multiple celli and cello and guitar - by arranging and transcribing works from every period. A longtime champion of contemporary music, she has commissioned and premiered works by many of today's leading composers.

In New York, she can be heard in the Orchestra of St. Luke's, New York Virtuosi, American Composers Orchestra, Brooklyn Philharmonic and many other fine ensembles.

Distinguished as a teacher as well as performer, Ms. Neuman has served as a judge for numerous international competitions. On the faculty at the New York's School for Strings and Hoff-Barthelson Music School, she has taught at Bennington College, Williams College and C.W. Post University.

Her cello is a J.B.Guadagnini, dating from 1772.

Larsen has been hailed as "the only English-speaking composer since Benjamin Britten who matches great verse with fine music so intelligently and expressively" (USA Today); as "a composer who has made the art of symphonic writing very much her own." (Gramophone); as "a mistress of orchestration" (Times Union); and for "assembling one of the most impressive bodies of music of our time" (Hartford Courant). Her music has been praised for its "clear textures, easily absorbed rhythms and appealing melodic contours that make singing seem the most natural expression imaginable." (Philadelphia Inquirer) "Libby Larsen has come up with a way to make contemporary opera both musically current and accessible to the average audience." (The Wall Street Journal) "Her ability to write memorable new music completely within the confines of traditional harmonic language is most impressive." (Fanfare)

Libby Larsen has received numerous awards and accolades, including a 1994 Grammy as producer of the CD: The Art of Arlene Augér, an acclaimed recording that features Larsen's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Her opera Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus was selected as one of the eight best classical music events of 1990 by USA Today. The first woman to serve as a resident composer with a major orchestra, she has held residencies with the California Institute of the Arts, the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, the Philadelphia School of the Arts, the Cincinnati Conservatory, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony. Larsen's many commissions and recordings are a testament to her fruitful collaborations with a long list of world-renowned artists, including The King's Singers, Benita Valente, and Frederica von Stade, among others. Her works are widely recorded on such labels as Angel/EMI, Nonesuch, Decca, and Koch International.

Holder of the 2003-2004 Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education at the Library of Congress and recipient of the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Libby Larsen is a vigorous, articulate champion of the music and musicians of our time. In 1973, she co-founded (with Stephen Paulus) the Minnesota Composers Forum, now the American Composers Forum, which has been an invaluable advocate for composers in a difficult, transitional time for American arts. Consistently sought-after as a leader in the generation of millennium thinkers, Libby Larsen's music and ideas have refreshed the concert music tradition and the composer's role in it.

Slow Structures for flute, cello, and piano, is a composed in the manner of an object poem, which takes its inspiration from winter snow: its tempi, its beautiful, translucent light, its mystic, infinitely shifting suggestive shapes. The title of each movement is inspired by fragments of poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tomas Tranströmer. The piece examines the slow formation of frozen form. The music begins with the force of a blizzard, slightly fierce, virtuosic in its gestures, and given form by the impetus of the force of nature. Then, the musical motives begin to settle in relationship to each other, slowly creating a structure which is both recognizable and unrecognizable. Within the structure, the musical gestures of the opening express themselves in new ways in which we recognize them only by what we can no longer audibly perceive. Finally, the slow structure in which the musical elements have been operating begin to loosen, melt as it were, creating a hypnotic atmosphere-much like the hypnotic effect of the drip of a melting icicle.

The Snow-Storm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delated, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the famer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

Snow-Flakes
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Out of the bosom of the Air
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

Snow-Melting Time, '66
by Tomas Tranströmer (translated Robert Bly)

Massive waters fall, water-roar, the old hypnosis.
Water has risen into the car-graveyard - it glitters
Behind the masks.
I hold tight to the narrow bridge.
I am on a large iron bird sailing past death.

Ms. Moughalian performed Bach Sonatas with pianist Diane Walsh for Lincoln Center's Great Performers Bach Festival, as soloist with the National Symphony of Ecuador, the Naumberg Orchestra, Bachannalia, Long Island Philharmonic, Hudson Chamber Symphony, and the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, with which she recorded the Brazilian composer Osvaldo Lacerda's Piccolo Concerto and the Alec Wilder Suite for flute and strings for the Helicon label. In 2005 she served as guest Principal flute in the Orquestra Sinfonico do Estado São Paulo, Brazil, and had also participated in a five week, 28-concert tour of Brazil performing and recording 20th and 21st century chamber works of Brazilian composers for SESC.

Recently, she appeared in recital with soprano Barbara Hendricks at the 92nd St. Y in a program of Bach cantatas for soprano and flute solo. She recorded a solo CD, The Operatic Flute with pianist Mikael Eliasen for the MHS label. She has appeared as guest flutist with numerous groups including Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Richardson Chamber Players, New York Chamber Ensemble, L'Ensemble, Dorian Quintet, Essential Music, Amadeus Virtuosi. In 1999 she became a member of the Quintet of the Americas, a woodwind quintet founded in 1976 in Bogota, Colombia, which specializes in the performance of works by living composers of North and South America, and has recorded two discs with the group.

An active freelance player in the New York area, she serves as solo flute of Gotham Chamber Opera, L'Opera Francais de New York, New Philharmonic Orchestra of New Jersey, St. Patrick's Cathedral, appearing annually on their televised Christmas Eve celebration and on international television during the New York City visit of Pope John Paul II. She has been guest principal flute with groups including American Ballet Theatre, Long Island Philharmonic, Westfield Symphony, Stamford Symphony, Queens Symphony, Philharmonia Virtuosi, and numerous others. She performs for the concert programs of St. Ignatius, First Presbyterian, Trinity (Wall St.), and Redeemer Presbyterian churches. Ms. Moughalian was recently appointed principal flute of the Colonial Symphony.

Ms. Moughalian was the resident flute professor for three seasons for the Governor's School for the Arts in Virginia, and has presented classes based on her study of the bel canto vocal approach with Mikael Eliasen. She has presented flute classes during residencies in Cali, Colombia, at the National Conservatory in Tblisi, Georgia, at the Special Secondary Music School in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Beijing, China, and at numerous universities in the United States. The Quintet of the Americas is in residence at New York University, and presents a Woodwind Institute there annually in June. In addition, her major teachers were Keith Underwood and Philip Dunigan at the North Carolina School of the Arts.

Kenji Bunch has emerged this past decade as one of the most prominent American composers of his generation.

Hailed as a "composer to watch" by the New York Times, Mr. Bunch's works performed by more than twenty American orchestras in the last five years. Currently serving as the Composer in Residence with the Mobile Symphony, Mr. Bunch has also participated in residencies for the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, the Spoleto USA Festival, the Craftsbury Chamber Players, and for Young Concert Artists, Inc. from 1998-2000. Mr. Bunch's music is regularly performed and broadcast worldwide, and has been recorded on the EMI Classics, RCA, Kleos Classics, GENUIN, Pony Canyon, Capstone, and Crystal labels.

A versatile musician, Mr. Bunch also enjoys an active performing career. As a founding member of the Flux Quartet, and now with the performing composer group Ne(x)tworks, Mr. Bunch has become one of New York's premiere interpreters of new and experimental music. Recognized for his own groundbreaking original works for viola, he frequently performs in recital and in workshops with pianist Monica Ohuchi. He also plays fiddle in the bluegrass band Citigrass, and performs and records with many prominent jazz, rock, and pop musicians.

After early viola studies with Pierre d'Archambeau in his native Portland, Oregon, Mr. Bunch studied at the Juilliard School in viola with Toby Appel, and in composition with Robert Beaser. Other composing mentors include Stanley Wolfe and Eric Ewazen.

Also a dedicated teacher, Mr. Bunch currently teaches viola and composition at the Juilliard School Pre-College and at the Mark O'Connor Strings Conference in San Diego. He was a visiting professor in composition at Bennington College in Vermont in 2002 and frequently conducts master classes and workshops in viola, composition, improvisation, music appreciation, and as a consultant in arts education.
www.kenjibunch.com

Crawl Space
Crawl Space was originally written for solo cello in 1996 and transcribed for viola in 2004. Inspiration for the work comes from an experience I had one summer as a teenager, helping my father install fiberglass insulation underneath our house with a staple gun. Though I don't normally suffer from claustrophobia, I found myself terrified of being buried alive under the weight of my house. Reliving that peculiar experience years later, I conceived of this work as a struggle to "escape" the extreme low register of the instrument. The work is essentially a study in the different registers of the instrument, and in leaping exponentially from low to high. Stylistically, I wrote this as a tribute to the electric guitar gods of the 1970's, from Hendrix and Jimmy Page to Eddie Van Halen. Suggestions of power chords, hammer-ons, distortion, and other idiomatic rock guitar effects pop up throughout the work.

Sarabande
Sarabandewas written for violinist Stefan Milenkovich in 2006 and transcribed for solo viola a year later. The work was inspired by Bach's solo string writing, particularly the C minor cello suite. In the original version, Bach calls for the cellist's A string to be tuned down one note to a G, giving the instrument a darker, mysterious resonance that more intensely suggests the C minor tonality.
I adopt Bach's tuning for this work, which also uses left-hand pizzicato to help define the distinctive 3/4 meter of the dance, with a particular emphasis on the second beat.

The 3 G's
I wrote The 3 G's for solo viola while teaching at the Mark O'Connor Strings Conference in San Diego in the summer of 2005. Among the many string traditions I learned about at the Conference was the wonderful folk fiddling of Appalachia, commonly referred to as "Old-Time." These self-taught fiddlers learned tunes aurally from each preceding generation, often using experimental techniques to create unique and evocative sounds. The tunes were played unaccompanied at dances and parties, and the fiddle was occasionally retuned to create different resonances for the instrument. My favorite such scordatura is called "Bonaparte's tuning" (DADD from the top down), after the well known fiddle tune Bonaparte's Retreat. I transposed this tuning to the viola, creating a GDGG tuning that was even more strikingly resonant than on the violin.
Inspired by the notion of a solo string instrument accepting full responsibility for the music at a party, I wrote The 3 G's in the tradition of these dance tunes, but with a much more contemporary vernacular for the dance material. In addition to a variety of effects used to exploit this unusual resonance, I used a bow technique associated with bluegrass music called "chopping" to provide a percussive rhythm for the work.