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Dr. Reena Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (BM’05) and the Yale School of Music (MM’11, MMA’14, DMA’18). Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis, Christopher Rouse and Samuel Adler. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazumdar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians, explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers.

Dr. Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. She divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber and choral work. She has written commissions for ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Kronos Quartet, and her music has featured on multiple Grammy-nominated albums, including The Singing Guitar by Conspirare, BRUITS by Imani Winds, and Healing Modes by Brooklyn Rider.

Regarding Tuttarana, Esmail writes: 

The title of this piece is a conglomeration of two words: the Italian word "tutti", means "all" or "everyone", and the term "tarana" designates a specific Hindustani (North Indian) musical form, whose closest western counterpart is the ‘scat’ in jazz. The tarana is a place where musicians can put their greatest virtuosity on display, leaving an audience in awe. While a tarana is a solo form, I wanted to bring that same energy to an ensemble form.

This work was originally written for treble chorus, then arranged for brass quintet, and is now in its third iteration for concert band.

Composer of the new The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay for The Metropolitan Opera, Mason Bates is imaginatively transforming the way classical music is created and experienced as a composer, DJ, and curator.  With electro-acoustic works such as Mothership and multimedia projects such as the animated film Philharmonia Fantastique, Bates has become a visible advocate for the modern orchestra and imaginatively integrates it into contemporary culture.   

His deep relationship with the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where he was appointed the nation’s first composer-in-residence, continues with recent performances of his Grammy-winning opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs and Philharmonia Fantastique.  Championed by legendary conductors from Riccardo Muti, Michael Tilson Thomas, Marin Alsop, and Leonard Slaktin, his symphonic music is the first to receive widespread acceptance for its unique integration of electronic sounds.  Named as the most-performed composer of his generation, Bates has also composed for feature film, including Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees starring Matthew McConaughey and Naomi Watts.  He is also a passionate advocate impacting the next generation through classical/club shows produced by Mercury Soul and his educational ecosystem Sprite’s World, which reaches hundreds of thousands of students and teachers across the country.


Regarding Mothership, Bates writes:

This energetic opener imagines the wind ensemble as a mothership that is ‘docked’ by several visiting soloists, who offer brief but virtuosic riffs on the work’s thematic material over action-packed electro-acoustic orchestral figuration.

The piece follows the form of a scherzo with double trio (as found in, for example, the Schumann Symphony No. 2). Symphonic scherzos historically play with dance rhythms in a high-energy and appealing manner, with the ‘trio’ sections temporarily exploring new rhythmic areas. Mothership shares a formal connection with the symphonic scherzo but is brought to life by thrilling sounds of the 21st Century — the rhythms of modern-day techno in place of waltz rhythms, for example.

Recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas, Mothership received its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House and the YouTube Symphony on March 20, 2011, and it was viewed by almost two million people live on YouTube.

At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Dr. Lindsay Bronnenkant directs the Symphony Band, teaches conducting classes, and leads a graduate conducting seminar. Prior to her appointment at UMass Amherst, Bronnenkant taught basic conducting at Nazareth College and led the Hobart and William Smith Colleges Community Wind Ensemble as she completed a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Conducting degree at the Eastman School of Music. In her time at Eastman, she served as Assistant/Associate Conductor of the Eastman Wind Ensembles, Assistant Conductor and Teaching Assistant for the University of Rochester Wind Symphony, and Teaching Assistant for basic conducting classes. She was a Frederick Fennell Conducting Fellow and a finalist for the Eastman School of Music Teaching Assistant Prize. Bronnenkant holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (D.M.A. Wind Conducting, ’22), the University of Michigan (M.M. Wind Conducting, ‘19), Nazareth College (B.M. Music Education, ’14), and the University of Rochester (B.S. Brain and Cognitive Sciences, ’10). Her conducting mentors include Mark Scatterday, Michael Haithcock, Jared Chase, and Nancy Strelau, and she has taken composition lessons with Keane Southard, Nancy Strelau, Christopher Winders, David Liptak, and Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez.



Regarding Tarot, Bronnekant writes:

Gustav Holst was incredibly interested in Indian culture, going so far as to teach himself Sanskrit. Some evidence suggests that he tried to incorporate Indian rāgas into his works, and after investigating Holst’s resources and analyzing his Planets, I believe that Holst tried to reference rāgas that evoked similar characters to those of the planets in his suite. Holst’s access to authentic performance of Indian music was limited, however, and like many composers -- especially as a British composer entrenched in modal composition during the English folk song revival of the early twentieth century -- he took what he understood of rāgas and filled in the gaps with Western theoretical knowledge, resulting in the treatment of what were once rāgas as scales or modes.

I decided to compose a suite that traces Holst’s footsteps but applies his musical experimentation to a new topic: Tarot. Like astrology, Tarot cards have been used for divination, and as each planet in modern astrology represents specific characteristics and personality traits, so too does each Tarot card. Some elements of the Hindustani thāts, Karnātak mēlakarta rāgas, and pitch sets Holst references in his Planets are referenced in Tarot using a similarly Western approach to portray Tarot card analogs.

In Tarot, the Fool represents someone who dives head-first through open doors with enthusiasm (and sometimes with a blissful ignorance of any looming danger). The card represents new beginnings, playfulness, naïveté, and optimism. The first movement, The Fool, contains several intentionally comedic moments as the Fool, unaware of the luck manifesting from his will, manages to skip through a minefield unharmed. The movement references the pitches of the Kalyān that are found in Jupiter, a benefic planet of good fortune, to represent the Fool’s beginner’s luck. The movement also uses the whole-tone scale hinted at in some of Holst’s themes for Uranus, a chaotic and unpredictable planet, to depict the unintentional mayhem that inevitably follows each of the Fool’s steps.


In Tarot, the suit of cups corresponds with emotional energy and the element of water. A deeply empathic soul, the King of Cups tempers his emotions by balancing his heart with his head. The King leads diplomatically through compassion. The second movement, The King of Cups, references the pitches of mēlakarta rāga Dhavalāmbari from Neptune as a nod to a fellow intuitive and ruler of the sea, and additionally employs the pitches of the Bhairavī that are found in Venus to allude to the King’s kind and gentle countenance. 

The Tower represents surprise, upheaval, and destruction. It represents the collapse of structure, the crumbling of façades based on faulty foundations. The final movement references Mars, the Bringer of War with two similar pitch sets: the one Holst uses in Mars, as well as a theme that Holst may have meant to draw from, Bhairav.

Australian-born Percy Grainger was a piano prodigy turned composer who was known for his eccentricity, his colorful prose, and his unusually unique music. He came to the United States at the outbreak of World War I and enlisted as an Army bandsman, becoming an American citizen in 1918. Grainger went on to explore the borders of music with his idiosyncratic folk song settings, his lifelong advocacy for the saxophone, and his innovative Free Music machines which predated electronic synthesizers. He wrote a series of “Hillsongs,” famously arranged the folk song “Country Gardens” for piano (which he performed regularly), and arranged many Scottish folk songs. Grainger would often compose his music with purposeful distortions of time in order to recreate the effect of the inaccurate and imprecise folksongs. 

Lincolnshire Posy was written as a commission for the 1937 American Bandmasters Association convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and was partially premiered on March 7, 1937, by the Milwaukee Symphonic Band. Much to Grainger's chagrin, this mostly-amateur ensemble was not able to perform the entire work, instead premiering only movements one, two, and four - three and five were considered too difficult, and Grainger had yet to finish the final, sixth movement. Adding to the composer's frustration, the premiering ensemble was made up mostly of bandsmen from the workers' ensembles of Milwaukee's Pabst Blue Ribbon and Blatz breweries. Grainger, a famously obstinate teetotaler, would later write angrily in the published score that the performers cared "more about their beer then the music." 



Regarding Lincolnsire Posy, Grainger writes: 

This bunch of 'musical wildflowers' (hence the title Lincolnshire Posy) is based on folksongs collected in Lincolnshire, England (one noted by Miss Lucy E. Broadwood; the other five noted by me, mainly in the years 1905-1906, and with the help of the phonograph), and the work is dedicated to the old folksingers who sang so sweetly to me. Indeed, each number is intended to be a kind of musical portrait of the singer who sang its underlying melody--a musical portrait of the singer's personality no less than of his habits of song--his regular or irregular wonts of rhythm, his preference for gaunt or ornately arabesqued delivery, his contrasts of legato and staccato, his tendency towards breadth or delicacy of tone...

For these folksingers were kings and queens of song! No concert singer I have ever heard approached these rural warblers in variety of tone-quality, range of dynamics, rhythmic resourcefulness and individuality of style. For while our concert singers (dull dogs that they are--with their monotonous mooing and bellowing between mf and ff, and with never a pp to their name!) can show nothing better (and often nothing as good) as slavish obedience to the tyrannical behests of composers, our folksingers were lords in their own domain--were at once performers and creators. For they bent all songs to suit their personal artistic taste and personal vocal resources: singers with wide vocal range spreading their intervals over two octaves, singers with small vocal range telescoping their tunes by transposing awkward high notes an octave down...


These musical portraits of my folksingers were tone-painted in a mood of considerable bitterness--bitterness at memories of the cruel treatment meted out to folksingers as human beings (most of them died in poor-houses or in other down-heartening surroundings) and at the thought of how their high gifts oftenest were allowed to perish unheard, unrecorded and unhonoured.


It is obvious that all music lovers (except a few 'cranks') loathe genuine folksong and shun it like the plague. No genuine folksong ever becomes popular--in any civilised land. Yet these same music-lover entertain a maudlin affection for the word 'folksong' (coined by my dear friend Mrs. Edmund Woodhouse to translate German 'volkslied') and the ideas it conjures up. So they are delighted when they chance upon half-breed tunes like Country Gardens and Shepherd's Hey (on the borderline between folksong and unfolkish 'popular song') that they can sentimentalise over (as being folksongs), yet can listen to without suffering the intense boredom aroused in them by genuine folksongs. Had rural England not hated its folksong this form of music would not have been in process of dying out and would not have needed to be 'rescued from oblivion' by townified highbrows such as myself and my fellow-collectors. As a general rule the younger kin of the old folksingers not only hated folksong in the usual way, described above, but, furthermore, fiercely despised the folksinging habits of their old uncles and grandfathers as revealing social backwardness and illiteracy in their families. And it is true! the measure of a countryside's richness in living folksong is the measure of its illiteracy; which explains why the United States is, to-day, the richest of all English-speaking lands in living folksong.

FLUTE
Mad Andrus*
Emily Dupuis
Gianna Gassira
Stephen Kim
Sydney Tomishina

OBOE + ENGLISH HORN
Natalie Gilbert
Brady Santin*
Cole Trenkelbach

BASSOON
Griffin Harrel
Abbie Harrison*
Rebecca Williams

CLARINET
Anthony Angelillo
Evelyn Balzer
Kaitlin Barron
Joseph Carrero
Phoebe Donaghy-Robinson
Amanda Haussmann
Christian Laughlin*
Will Lesser
Toag Wolf

SAXOPHONE
James Baker
Lauren Bradbury
Leah Kilkenny
TJ Lanks
Allyson Lauth*
Bryson Sauer

PIANO
Dmitri Novgorodsky

ORGAN
Russell Posegate

HARP
Elizabeth Mayo

TRUMPET
Juliet Arau
Nathan Felch 
Cal Fitanides*
Camilo Mamani
Alessio Vega
Lamar Williams

HORN
Sarah Griffin
Kate Martin*
Hope Massey
Simon Stainbrook

TROMBONE
Thomas Burkum
Estelle Kamrass*
Elvis Lazo
Meghan Liang
Ilan Medwed
Will Shanton

EUPHONIUM
Jamie DiSalvo*
Tyler Phoebus

TUBA
David Castro*
Noah Smith

PERCUSSION
Audrey Diddle
Jack Foley
Jake Lachance
Elliot Liberty
Jillian Mihalik
Olivia Okin*

BASS
Garrett Jorgensen

Natalie Barrett
Fisher Griesel
Skyler Haley
Fiona Kreizman
Henry LaBarge
Natalie Millham
Meteor Perry
Yael Sheffer
Anna Smith