Wolfgang Marx

In this episode, I chat with Dr. Annie Hsieh. Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh is a Taiwanese-Australian composer working in acoustic and electroacoustic music, known for creating vivid sonic experiences shaped by space, gesture, and social interaction. Her works have been presented internationally at major festivals and venues including MATA, ISCM World Music Days, Adelaide Festival, Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music, and the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, and she has received commissions from ensembles and institutions such as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Lucerne Festival, and ELISION Ensemble. She is the recipient of awards including the APRA Art Music Fund and the Belegura Composer Award, and is currently Associate Professor of electronic music and composition at Carnegie Mellon University.

In this episode, I chat with Professor Andrew Waggoner. Professor Waggoner is a composer whose vivid, dramatic style has earned praise from The New Yorker as "the gifted practitioner of a complex but dramatic and vividly colored style." His music has been commissioned and performed by major ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Academy of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, JACK Quartet, Corigliano Quartet, and international groups such as Ensemble Accroche Note and the Rudersdal Kammersolister. A recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Fromm Foundation commission, his recordings include Quantum Memoir on Bridge Records and Terror and Memory on Albany Records. He currently teaches composition and improvisation at Duke University and serves as Co-Artistic Director of the Weekend of Chamber Music.

In this episode, I chat with Professor Pascal Le Boeuf. Professor Le Boeuf is a GRAMMY-winning composer, jazz pianist, and producer whose music blends improvised performance with chamber writing and technology-driven production. Praised by the New York Times for his sleek, hyper-fluent style, he has been commissioned by ensembles and organizations including Akropolis Reed Quintet, Alarm Will Sound, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and New World Symphony. He is an Assistant Professor of Music at MIT and holds a Ph.D. in composition from Princeton University.

In this episode, I chat with Professor David S. Lefkowitz. Professor Lefkowitz is a composer, theorist, and professor at UCLA whose music has been performed widely across the United States, Europe, and Asia. His more than 150 works range from solo and chamber pieces to large-scale music for choir, orchestra, and wind ensemble, and his compositions have appeared on over twenty commercial recordings. He has taught composition, orchestration, and music theory at UCLA for more than three decades, where he has also served in departmental leadership roles. His training includes degrees from Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Eastman School of Music.

In this episode, I chat with Professor Eran Egozy. Professor Egozy is Professor of the Practice in Music Technology at MIT, an entrepreneur, clarinetist, and technologist best known as co-founder and chief technical officer of Harmonix Music Systems, the company behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which sold over 35 million units worldwide and generated over $1 billion in annual sales. Named in Time Magazine's Time 100 and Fortune's Top 40 Under 40, he now leads MIT's Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program, with research focused on interactive music systems, music information retrieval, and multimodal musical engagement. His recent projects include the audience-participation works 12 and Tutti, and ConcertCue, a program-note streaming app featured in concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and awarded a Knight Foundation grant. As a clarinetist, he performs with Radius Ensemble and has appeared with Emmanuel Music and A Far Cry.

In this episode, I chat with Professor Jason Yust. Professor Yust is a music theorist and professor at Boston University whose research spans mathematical theories of rhythm and harmonic spaces, Schenkerian analysis, eighteenth-century form, music perception, and scale theory. His 2018 book Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form received the Society for Music Theory's Wallace Berry Award in 2019, and his articles have appeared in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, and the Journal of Mathematics and Music, among other journals. He is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Mathematics and Music and has served the Society for Music Theory in multiple capacities, including as founder and former chair of its Mathematics of Music Analysis interest group. He holds a Ph.D. in Music Theory from the University of Washington and a B.A. from Brown University.

In this episode, I chat with Professor Gundula Kreuzer. Professor Kreuzer is a musicologist and Professor at Yale University whose research spans the history and theory of opera, staging technologies, media archaeology, music in the Third Reich, and contemporary experimental opera. Her first book, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 2010), won the Lewis Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society and the Gaddis Smith International Book Prize, and her second, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (University of California Press, 2018), explores how composers shaped staged opera through specific theatrical technologies. She is a member of the Academia Europaea and recipient of the Royal Musical Association's Dent Medal, the Alfred Einstein Award, and multiple other honors. At Yale, she founded the YOST: Y | Opera | Studies Today conference series and leads the Opera Studies Today Working Group, fostering dialogue between artists, scholars, and administrators in the field.

In this episode, I chat with Professor Wolfgang Marx. Professor Marx is Professor of Historical Musicology at University College Dublin and a member of the UCD Humanities Institute, whose research centers on the representation of death in music, György Ligeti, post-truth and music, and the theory of musical genres. He has served multiple terms as Head of the UCD School of Music and has held editorial roles such as the Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland. An inaugural UCD Innovation Fellow, he is currently President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland and a general editor of Brill's series "Death in History, Culture, and Society." Before entering academia, he worked for a decade as a freelance author and product manager for major labels including Sony, Teldec, and BMG.

In this episode, I chat with Mr. Derek David. Mr. David is a composer, conductor, and educator based in Boston whose work spans dramatic chamber, vocal, and orchestral music as well as a deep commitment to Yiddish musical culture. He is currently Lecturer in Music at MIT and serves as musical director and conductor of "A Besere Velt," the largest chorus dedicated to the performance and preservation of Yiddish repertoire. His music has been commissioned by ensembles including the Juventas Ensemble, Verona Quartet, and Del Sol String Quartet, and featured at the LA Philharmonic's Noon to Midnight Festival and the Boston Festival for New Jewish Music. His honors include the American Prize in Composition (Chamber Music, 2015), the EAMA Nadia Boulanger Institute Prize, and a Morton Gould ASCAP Award, and he holds doctoral and master's degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music.

In this episode, I chat with Professor Oscar Bettison. Professor Bettison is a British-American composer and faculty member in the Composition Department at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where he has taught since 2009. Described as possessing "an unconventional lyricism and a menacing beauty," his music bridges the worlds of concert music and beyond, and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and broadcast on radio and television across the U.S., Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, and Brazil. He has received commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Alarm Will Sound, MusikFabrik, Bang on a Can All-Stars, and So Percussion, among others, and his honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize, and the inaugural BBC Young Composer of the Year Prize. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and studied previously at the Royal College of Music in London and the Royal Conservatorium of The Hague.