Composers & the Voice 2023-25 presents
FIRST GLIMPSE
May 17 and 18, 2024
The Great Room at South Oxford Space
Featuring works by the 2023-25 Composers & the Voice Fellows:
Joshua Brown, Andi Lee Carter, Kervy Delcy, Aiden K. Feltkamp, Anita Gonzalez, JL Marlor, Joy Redmond, Kavita Shah, Melisa Tien, LJ White
Featuring performances by members of the 2023-25 Composers & the Voice Resident Singers and Music Directors:
Phillip Bullock, Brian Jeffers, MaKayla McDonald, Ilene Pabon, Hans Tashjian, Natalie Trumm
Mila Henry, Kelly Horsted, Emma Luyendijk, Kyle P. Walker
PROGRAM
QBOT Feels Something
Music by Joshua Brown
Libretto by Andi Lee Carter
Baritone: Phillip Bullock
Music Director: Mila Henry
Yes I Have Sung
Music by Kavita Shah
Soprano: Makayla McDonald
Music Director: Kelly Horsted
We Are All On the Edge of Something
Music by LJ White
Bass: Hans Tashjian
Music Director: Emma Luyendijk
Watching Rehearsal Footage
Music by Joy Redmond
Libretto by Aiden Feltkamp
Soprano: Makayla McDonald
Music Director: Kelly Horsted
The Friend Zone
Music by LJ White
Libretto by Aiden Feltkamp
Soprano: Natalie Trumm
Music Director: Mila Henry
The Freedom Clock
Music by Kavita Shah
Libretto by Anita Gonzalez
Mezzo-soprano: Ilene Pabon
Music Director: Kyle Walker
Star Wars Collection
Music by Kervy Delcy
Libretto by Andi Lee Carter
Mezzo-soprano: Ilene Pabon
Music Director: Kelly Horsted
Sous le ciel de Nanterre
Music & Text by Kervy Delcy
Bass: Hans Tashjian
Music Director: Emma Luyendijk
Slice of Heaven
Music & Libretto by JL Marlor
Bass: Hans Tashjian
Music Director: Mila Henry
Rubber Tower
Music by Kervy Delcy
Libretto by Anita Gonzales
Soprano: Natalie Trumm
Music Director: Kyle Walker
Rover and the Sun
Music by Kavita Shah
Libretto by Andi Lee Carter
Tenor: Brian Jeffers
Music Director: Kyle Walker
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun
Music by Joy Redmond
Baritone: Phillip Bullock
Music Director: Mila Henry
Music Library Love Song
Music by LJ White
Libretto by Andi Lee Carter
Soprano: Makayla McDonald
Music Director: Kelly Horsted
Let Me Tell You Something About New York
Music by JL Marlor
Libretto by Melisa Tien
Soprano: Natalie Trumm
Music Director: Mila Henry
I No Longer Know
Music by Joy Redmond
Libretto by Melisa Tien
Mezzo-soprano: Ilene Pabon
Music Director: Kelly Horsted
Delusional Bitch Juice
Music by JL Marlor
Text by JL Marlor & Makayla McDonald
Soprano: Makayla McDonald
Music Director: Emma Luyendijk
Daybroken
Music by Josh Brown
Soprano: Natalie Trumm
Music Director: Mila Henry
Buon Appetito
Music by Josh Brown
Libretto by Melisa Tien
Tenor: Brian Jeffers
Music Director: Kelly Horsted
2023-25 Fellows
Melisa Tien - Librettist
Melisa Tien (She/her) is a playwright, lyricist, and librettist invested in making formally unconventional, socially relevant, and emotionally evocative work. A resident of New the Dramatists, she is co-author of operas The Big Swim (Asia Society Texas Center/Houston Grand Opera, 2024), Forever (Washington National Opera, 2024), Family Heirloom (Experiments in Opera, 2024), Song of the Nightingale (On Site Opera/Arts Brookfield, 2023), and The Beehive (University of Northern Iowa, 2023); co-author of music-theater works Swell (HERE, 2021) and Daylight Saving; and author of plays Best Life (JACK, 2022), Yellow Card Red Card (Ice Factory, 2017), The Boyd Show, and Familium Vulgare. She is a member of Washington National Opera’s 2023-2024 American Opera Initiative, and was a member of Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s 2022 Ground Floor Residency Lab, Experiments in Opera’s 2022 Writers’ Room, The Assembly Theater Project’s 2021 Deceleration Lab, and a recipient of a 2020-2021 grant from the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music, and Theatre.
Aiden K. Feltkamp - LIBRETTIST
Aiden K. Feltkamp (they/he) began their artistic life at the age of 5 in Hicksville, NY playing a quarter-size cello and now they’re "upending preconceptions about voice and gender" (New York Times) as a disabled and trans nonbinary creator. As a creative writer, librettist, poet, opera performer, and producer, their work centers stories from marginalized communities and spans the serious and the ridiculous, the real and the surreal. Most recently, they wrote the libretto for an opera about Emily Dickinson’s queerness that premiered at her historical home (Emily & Sue) and curated New Music Shelf’s award-winning New Music Anthology for Trans & Nonbinary Voices, Vol. 1. They’ve been published in PBS’s American Masters series and OPERA America Magazine, and presented at the national conferences for the League of American Orchestras and Chamber Music America. They live in Jersey City with their partner, Aumna, and their pets, both organic and robotic. AidenFeltkamp.com
LJ White - COMPOSER
LJ White (He/Him) is a composer and singer inspired by the physical voice, popular culture, gender and queerness, and sociopolitical conditions. His recent collaborators include The Crossing, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Dal Niente, Steven Schick, Sleeping Giant, Third Angle Ensemble, Transient Canvas, the Spektral Quartet, the rapper Mvstermind, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Third Coast Percussion, Post:Ballet, and the St. Louis, San Francisco, and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. LJ also writes for his own voice, challenging standard conceptions of the vocal instrument and expectations for transmasculine singers on testosterone. He is currently creating a self-recorded album of his vocal ensemble work The Best Place for This, originally commissioned by the Quince Ensemble, supported by a MacDowell fellowship and grants from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission and the Puffin Foundation.
LJ earned a doctorate at Northwestern University and has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and the New College of Florida.
JL Marlor - COMPOSER
JL Marlor (she/they) is a composer, electric guitarist, performer, and educator living in Brooklyn, NY. JL is known for her narrative-driven multi-genre works drawing from the worlds of riot grrrl punk and DIY punk, Slavic choral music, plainchant, and American protest music. Last year, JL was named a Toulmin Creator in collaboration with National Sawdust. She is a frequent performer in her own works, as an electric guitarist and an indie rock vocalist. In 2017, JL collaborated on a riot-grrl musical written by SeonJae Kim and inspired by Sophocles tragedy Riot Antigone, which received its premiere at La Mama and has subsequently been performed at Ars Nova as part of ANT Festival. Beyond her work as a composer, JL fronts her indie rock band Tenderheart Bitches, which was hailed as “arriving on the indie rock scene with something serious to say” by The Wild Honeypie and was listed in Them’s list of best new songs written by queer artists. In addition to her work as a composer and songwriter, JL is a passionate educator teaching composition with the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers and is a founding member of American Composer’s Orchestra’s genre-defying educational initiative Sonic Spark Lab.
Joshua Brown - COMPOSER
Joshua Brown (he/they) is a queer experience designer and opera composer whose work poeticizes the everyday. As both a sound designer and dramaturg in a past life, they approach the relationship of sound, language, body, and context from a variety of angles. They can routinely be found making inanimate objects cry, mining innate musics from found/verbatim text, and double-fisting books of poetry and gossip rags in equal measure. Their work has been lovingly developed with Thompson Street Opera, Boston Opera Collaborative, the International Computer Music Conference, Fresh Inc, La Jolla Playhouse + Blindspot Collective, Charlotte New Music, New Opera West, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Strange Trace, and the Pittsburgh Opera. Joshua holds a BHA in Technical Writing & Music Technology and a Graduate Certificate in Music Composition from Carnegie Mellon and an MS in Experience Design from Northeastern.
Kavita Shah - COMPOSER
Kavita Shah (she/her) is an award-winning vocal composer, singer, ethnomusicology researcher, educator, and lifelong New Yorker hailed by NPR for possessing an “amazing dexterity for musical languages.” Her original projects blending modern jazz, new music, and world traditions include Visions (2014), Folk Songs of Naboréa (2017), Interplay (2018, nominated for France’s Victoires de la Musique for Jazz Album of the Year), and Cape Verdean Blues (2023). Kavita performs her music at major concert halls, festivals, and clubs on six continents, and her work has been supported by New Music America, Chamber Music America, Jerome Foundation, Camargo Foundation, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and Park Avenue Armory. Her collaborators include NEA Jazz Master Sheila Jordan, Martial Solal, MacArthur Genius Miguel Zenón, Lionel Loueke, François Moutin, and Miho Hazama. A 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Fellow, she is currently working on an album of original music for her jazz quintet about the journey to her ancestral villages in rural India, as well as her first full-length opera on the subject of child migration.
Kavita holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from Harvard, an M.M. in Jazz Voice from Manhattan School of Music, and speaks nine languages. A fierce advocate for gender and racial equity in the arts, she was also a founding member of the We Have Voice Collective and the Ori-Gen Collective.
Joy Redmond - COMPOSER
Composer and pianist Joy Redmond (she/her) was born in California in 1999 and grew up in Yonkers, New York. She earned both her master’s and bachelor’s degrees at The Juilliard School, where she studied with Matthias Pintscher. Currently, Joy’s musical pursuits include composing and producing for concert, stage, film, and multimedia works, collaborating with other artists as an arranger, and performing on keyboards in a variety of genres.
Currently, Joy is working on a chamber opera for the American Opera Initiative with librettist Sam Norman. Recent projects include a chamber opera commissioned by Concordia Conservatory, an orchestra piece premiered by the Juilliard Orchestra, a choral work for The New York Virtuoso Singers, a wind nonet for Imani Winds and the Kenari Saxophone Quartet commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest, and several chamber and solo works for friends and colleagues. In the media music scene, Joy has scored short films produced by students and young professionals worldwide and created an installation for Juilliard’s Future Stages production with acoustic instruments, live electronics, and visuals projections.
Andi Lee Carter - LIBRETTIST
Andi Lee Carter (he/they) is a writer, librettist, director, and filmmaker. He is a graduate of NYU’s Musical Theater Writing Program in 2019. His first original full-length musical, Rent A White Guy was dubbed “often very funny” by The New York Times. Their work has been seen at many of New York's finest cabaret venues including Under St. Marks, the Duplex, Joe's Pub, and Feinstein's 54 Below. Recent works include: OPPY: A Mars Rover Story, Pompeii Rising, S.T.E.M. GRLZ!, 14 DAYS, Rejected!, CryOvaries, and Disconnected: The Musical! Follow them on all the social: @andileecarter website: www.andilee-carter.com
Anita Gonzalez - LIBRETTIST
Anita Gonzalez (She/her) advocates for beautiful art crafted for social activism and consciousness raising. Musicals: Kumanana (Gala Hispanic Theater), Ybor City (Latiné Musical Theater Lab), Zora on My Mind (The Woodshed), Ayanna Kelly. Plays & Librettos: Framing Faces (Atlanta Opera) Courthouse Bells (Boston Opera Collaborative), Finding the Light (Louise Toppin and Marquita Lister), Sunset Dreams (The Vagrancy), Home of My Ancestors (HGOCo). Books: Performance, Dance and Political Economy, Black Performance Theory, Afro-Mexico. Gonzalez is a Professor at Georgetown University and Co-Founding Lead of the Racial Justice Institute. She is a member of the National Theatre Conference, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab and sits on the Board of Directors of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. Gonzalez believes the art of storytelling connects people to their cultures. Over 40,000 students have taken her massive open online courses Storytelling for Social Change and Black Performance as Social Protest. www.anitagonzalez.com
Kervy Delcy - COMPOSER
Ms. Delcy is a New York City based Composer, Librettist, Singer-songwriter, and multiinstrumentalist. Drawing inspiration from diverse musical traditions and cultures around the world, Ms. Delcy weaves together elements of classical music, musical theater, opera, and electronic music to create a unique and distinctive sound. Her compositions evoke a wide range of emotions, from contemplative and introspective to uplifting and exhilarating. Her music has been performed internationally by PHACE Ensemble, a contemporary ensemble based in Vienna. Her violin solo Weary Heart was recorded by Irvine Arditi, a British violinist, and the leader of the Arditti Quartet. In 2018, Ms. Delcy, was the recipient of the ASCAP: Louis Dreyfus warner-Chappell City College Honoring scholarship honoring George and Ira Gershwin. For Ms. Delcy, music is her true love, an integral part of her life, and a new composition is always in development.
RESIDENT SINGERS
Instructors
Steven Osgood
C&V Artistic Director
Mark Campbell
Libretto Writing
Mila Henry
Head of Music / Music Director
Emma Luyendijk
Music Director
Matt Gray
Head of Drama
Kelly Horsted
Music Director
Elena Araoz
Acting
Kyle P. Walker
Music Director
Terry Greiss
Improv Studies