Frederic Rzewski (born Westfield, Massachusetts, 1938) studied music first with Charles Mackey of Springfield, and subsequently with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton Universities. He went to Italy in 1960, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola and met Severino Gazzelloni, with whom he performed in a number of concerts, thus beginning a career as a performer of new piano music.
Don Byron (b.1958) is a U.S. composer and clarinettist. While he is considered a jazz musician, he is stylistically very adventurous, having recorded klezmer music, German lieder, and cartoon music. Byron was born on 8th November 1958 in the Bronx, New York City and was raised by his parents who were themselves musicians, his mother a pianist; his father a bass player for calypso bands. His parents raised him listening to all kinds of music, taking him on trips to the ballet and the symphony, and also exposing him to jazz such as Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis records.
Alex North (December 4, 1910 - September 8, 1991) was an American composer responsible for the first jazz-based film score (A Streetcar Named Desire). North was nominated for 15 Oscars, but did not win until receiving the lifetime achievement Academy Award in 1986. Among his many film scores are Spartacus, Cleopatra, Streetcar Named Desire, Death of A Salesman, Dragonslayer, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Viva Zapata.
Bill Frisell was born in Baltimore, but was raised in Denver, CO. Once a classical clarinetist, he established a firm base in his traditional harmonic knowledge early on in life. Throughout high school and college he also played guitar in various rock and R&B groups in the Denver area. During high school, however, he became profoundly interested in jazz guitar. In 1971 Frisell attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, and also began studying with Jim Hall, one of the prominent jazz guitarists of the 1960s.
Richard Goode (born June 1, 1943) is an American classical pianist, known especially for his interpretations of Ludwig van Beethoven and chamber music. Goode was born in East Bronx, New York. He studied piano with Elvira Szigeti, Claude Frank, Nadia Reisenberg, Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski (the latter two at the Curtis Institute). He won numerous prizes, including First Prize in the Clara Haskil Competition and the Avery Fisher Prize.
Fred Hersch (born October 21, 1955 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is a contemporary American jazz pianist who has become a consistent and highly demanded performer on the international jazz scene. Hersch began playing piano at a very young age and graduated from the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. His teachers included Sophia Rosoff. He moved to New York City in the late 1970s where he soon found a place playing with notable artists such as Stan Getz, Joe Henderson, Lee Konitz, and Charlie Haden.
Robert Ashley may be either of two different artists - an American opera writer or an American video-games journalist and podcaster. A) Robert Ashley, a distinguished figure in American contemporary music, holds an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera and multi-disciplinary projects. His recorded works are acknowledged classics of language in a musical setting. He pioneered opera-for-television.