Wendell Logan
An exponent of both jazz and art music, Wendell Logan is an important compositional presence within his musical generation. Throughout his distinguished career as composer, performer, and educator, he has received numerous commissions and won many awards, including four from the National Endowment for the Arts, a dozen or so ASCAP awards, three Ohio Arts Council grants and, in 1991, the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and the Cleveland Arts Prize in Music. In 1994, he was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy. A soprano saxophonist, he has performed in Africa and the Caribbean, in Europe, and throughout the United States. His work can be heard on the Orion, Golden Crest, and RPM Records labels, among others. Logan is Chair of the Jazz Studies Department at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and Professor of African American Music. He has been a member of the faculty since 1973.

Tom Lopez
Tom Lopez (www.tomlopez.org) teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he is Associate Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts, Chair of the TIMARA Department (Technology in Music and Related Arts), and Director of the Contemporary Music Division. Lopez has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund, the Betty Freeman Foundation, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Knight Foundation, the Disney Foundation, Meet the Composer, and ASCAP, and he received a Fulbright Fellowship as composer-in-residence at the Centre International de Recherche Musical in Nice, France. He has appeared at festivals and conferences around the world as a guest lecturer and composer, and he has been a resident artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Copland House, Villa Montalvo, and Djerassi. His compositions have received critical acclaim and peer recognition; including a Grant for Young Composers from ASCAP and CD releases by Vox Novus, SCI, and SEAMUS. His music has been performed around the world and at numerous venues throughout the United States, including at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Lewis Nielson
Lewis Nielson studied music at the Royal Academy of Music in London, Clark University in Massachusetts, and the University of Iowa, earning a PhD in music theory and composition in 1977. His music appears through American Composers Edition, and CDs of his music are available from Albany, MMC, Centaur, and Innova Recordings. He has received numerous honors, including the prestigious Cleveland Arts Prize in Music for 2007, and grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delius Foundation, Meet the Composer, the Georgia Council for the Arts, the Groupe de Music Expèrimentale de Bourges in France, the Ibla Foundation in Sicily, Pi Kappa Lambda, and the International Society of Bassists. He has received many commissions from solo performers and such important orchestral and chamber ensembles as the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, the Iowa Center for New Music, the new music group Thamyris, and the Aurora Brass Quintet, and his works have been performed throughout the United States and Europe. Among the more notable performances of his large works have been those by the Lake Placid Sinfonietta, the American Composer’s Orchestra, the Fresno (Calif.) Philharmonic, and recent CD recording and performance projects with the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra of Bratislava, the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Tchaikovsky Symphony of Moscow Radio. He served as Professor of Music Theory and Composition at the University of Georgia, where he directed the University of Georgia Contemporary Chamber Ensemble for 21 years. In 2000, he joined the composition faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he is currently Professor of Composition and Chair of the Composition Department.

Peter V. Swendsen
Peter V. Swendsen (www.swendsen.net) explores the capacity of electroacoustic sound and digital media to challenge and extend our engagement with performance. His music has been called “highly skillful” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian and “the sonic equivalent of ether” and “marvelous” by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is Assistant Professor of Computer Music and Digital Media at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. He spent the 2006-07 academic year on a Fulbright Fellowship at the NoTAM computer music studios in Oslo, Norway, where he worked on a large project based in soundscape composition and ecoacoustics. Swendsen is a Ph.D. candidate in Composition and Computer Technologies at the University of Virginia, where he was in residence as a Jefferson Scholars Fellow and Instructor in the McIntire Department of Music from 2002-2006. He earned a master of fine arts degree from the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music and a bachelor of music degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. His music has been heard throughout the United States and much of Europe, and also in South America and Asia in recent years. His work most recently appeared on events in Norway, the UK, and Australia and is part of a recent CD release called Resonance: Steel Pan in the 21st Century.  He also serves as Assistant Editor for Journal SEAMUS. Swendsen is the co-artistic director of Prospect Dance Group and works extensively in collaboration with choreographers.