Count to Five

Composer Bios

Angélica Negrón

Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys, and electronics as well as for chamber ensembles, orchestras, choir, and film. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” (WQXR/Q2) while The New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise.” Negrón has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Kronos Quartet, loadbang, MATA Festival, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sō Percussion, the American Composers Orchestra, and the New York Botanical Garden, among others. She has composed numerous film scores, including Landfall (2020) and Memories of a Penitent Heart (2016), in collaboration with filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo. Upcoming premieres include works for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra, Opera Philadelphia, LA Philharmonic and NY Philharmonic Project 19 initiative.

Allison Loggins-Hull

Allison Loggins-Hull is a flutist, composer and producer with an active career performing and creating music of multiple genres. In 2009 she and Nathalie Joachim co-founded the critically acclaimed duo Flutronix, which was praised by The Wall Street Journal for being able “to redefine the instrument.” Similarly, MTV Iggy recognized Flutronix for “redefining the flute and modernizing its sound by hauling it squarely into the world of popular music.”

Allison has performed at The Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Orchestra Hall (Chicago), World Cafe Live, and several other major venues and festivals around the world. She has performed or recorded with a wide-range of artists including the International Contemporary Ensemble, Imani Winds, Lizzo, The National Sawdust Ensemble and others. With Flutronix, she has released two full studio albums (Flutronix and 2.0), a live album (Live From the Attucks Theatre), an EP (City of Breath) and is signed to Village Again Records in Japan. As a member of The Re-Collective Orchestra, Allison was co-principal flutist on the soundtrack to Disney’s 2019 remake of “The Lion King,” working closely with Hans Zimmer. On the small screen, she has been featured in an internationally broadcast ESPN Super Bowl commercial, the 62nd annual GRAMMYs Award Show and the Black Girls Rock! Awards Show.

Allison has composed for Flutronix, Julia Bullock and others and has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Carolina Performing Arts, Alarm Will Sound and The Library of Congress. She was a co-producer of Nathalie Joachim’s celebrated album “Fanm d’Ayiti,” which was nominated for a 2020 GRAMMY for Best World Music Album. In support of her work, Allison has been awarded grants from New Music USA and a fellowship at The Hermitage Artist Retreat in Englewood, Florida.

Allison is on the flute faculty of The John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University. She’s a teaching artist at The Juilliard School’s Global Ventures and is a former faculty member of The Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program.

Allison lives with her family in Montclair, New Jersey.

Ellen Reid

Ellen Reid is one of the most innovative artists of her generation. A composer and sound artist whose breadth of work spans opera, sound design, film scoring, ensemble and choral writing, she was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera, p r i s m.

Along with composer Missy Mazzoli, Ellen co-founded the Luna Composition Lab. Luna Lab is a mentorship program for young female, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming composers. Since the fall of 2019, she has served as Creative Advisor and Composer-in-Residence for Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

In 2020, she created Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK, a work of public art that reimagines city parks as interactive soundscapes. SOUNDWALK premiered in New York’s Central Park, featuring the New York Philharmonic, and continues to expand to parks around the world, fostering collaborations with ensembles such as Kronos Quartet and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Ellen received her BFA from Columbia College, Columbia University and her MA from California Institute of the Arts. She is inspired by music from all over the globe, and she splits her time between her two favorite cities – Los Angeles and New York. Her music is released on Decca Gold.

Lesley Flanigan

Lesley Flanigan is an experimental electronic musician living in New York City. Inspired by the physicality of sound, she builds her own instruments using minimal electronics, microphones and speakers. Performing these instruments alongside traditional instrumentation that often includes her own voice, she creates a kind of physical electronic music that embraces both the transparency and residue of process — sculpting sound from a palette of noise and subtle imperfections. Her work has been presented at venues and festivals internationally, including The Red Bull Music Festival at Saint John the Divine (New York), De Doelen (Rotterdam), Sonar (Barcelona), The Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park (Chicago), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Kitchen (New York), The Broad Museum (Los Angeles), ISSUE Project Room (Brooklyn), TransitioMX (Mexico City), CMKY Festival (Boulder), the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.

Mary Kouyoumdjian

Mary Kouyoumdjian is a composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. As a first generation Armenian-American with family directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, she uses a sonic palette that draws on her heritage, interest in music as documentary, and background in experimental composition to progressively blend the old with the new. A strong believer in the freedom of speech and the arts as an amplifier of expression, her compositional work often integrates recorded testimonies with resilient individuals, features field recordings of place, and aims to invite empathy by humanizing complex experiences around social and political conflict.

Kouyoumdjian has received commissions for such organizations as the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Beth Morrison Projects/OPERA America, Bang on a Can, Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the American Composers Forum, Roomful of Teeth, WQXR, REDSHIFT, Experiments in Opera, Helen Simoneau Danse, the Nouveau Classical Project, Music of Remembrance, Friction Quartet, Ensemble Oktoplus, and the Los Angeles New Music Ensemble among others. Her work has been performed internationally at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Barbican Centre, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Millennium Park, Benaroya Hall, Prototype Festival, the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Cabrillo Festival, Big Ears Festival, 21C Music Festival, and Cal Performances. Her residencies include those with EMPAC, Buffalo String Works, Alarm Will Sound/The Mizzou International Composers Festival, Roulette/The Jerome Foundation, Montalvo Arts Center, and Exploring the Metropolis. Her music has been described as “eloquently scripted" and "emotionally wracking” by The New York Times and as "politically fearless" and "the most harrowing moments on stage at any New York performance" by New York Music Daily. In her work as a composer, orchestrator, and music editor for film, she has collaborated on a diverse array of motion pictures including orchestrating on the soundtracks to The Place Beyond the Pines (Focus Features) and Demonic (Dimension Films).

Kouyoumdjian holds a D.M.A and M.A. in Composition from Columbia University, where she studied primarily with Zosha Di Castri, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fred Lerdahl, and George Lewis; an M.A. in Scoring for Film & Multimedia from New York University; and a B.A. in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied with Chaya Czernowin, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Anthony Davis, Steven Schick, and Chinary Ung. Dedicated to new music advocacy, Kouyoumdjian is a Co-Founder of the annual new music conference New Music Gathering, served as the founding Executive Director of contemporary music ensemble Hotel Elefant, and served as Co-Artistic Director of Alaska's new music festival Wild Shore New Music. As an avid educator, Kouyoumdjian is Assistant Professor of Composition at Boston Conservatory at Berklee and is on faculty at Brooklyn College's Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema and at The New School. She has taught at Columbia University, Mannes Prep, and the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program. Kouyoumdjian is proud to be on the board of the American Composers Forum and is published by Schott's PSNY.

Caroline Shaw

Caroline Shaw is a New York-based musician—vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer—who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sō Percussion and Gil Kalish, Seattle Symphony, Anne Sofie von Otter with Philharmonia Baroque, the LA Philharmonic, Juilliard 415, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, the Dover Quartet, TENET, The Crossing, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, the Baltimore Symphony, and Roomful of Teeth with A Far Cry. Caroline’s film scores include Erica Fae’s To Keep the Light and Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline as well as the upcoming short 8th Year of the Emergency by Maureen Towey. She has produced for Kanye West (The Life of Pablo; Ye) and Nas (NASIR), and has contributed to records by The National, and by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry. Once she got to sing in three part harmony with Sara Bareilles and Ben Folds at the Kennedy Center, and that was pretty much the bees’ knees and elbows. Caroline has studied at Rice, Yale, and Princeton, currently teaches at NYU, and is a Creative Associate at the Juilliard School. She has held residencies at Dumbarton Oaks, the Banff Centre, Music on Main, and the Vail Dance Festival. Caroline loves the color yellow, otters, Beethoven opus 74, Mozart opera, Kinhaven, the smell of rosemary, and the sound of a janky mandolin.

Guest Artist Bios

Andie Tanning

Andie Tanning is a violinist and performer.

She is the cofounder and musical director of Wild Shore New Music, now in its seventh year as Alaska’s premier new music festival. She released her debut album, “Dandelion,” in December 2018. Steve Dollar of the National Sawdust Log writes, “The stylistically diverse Dandelion is not only a scrapbook of Tanning’s experiences and influences, but also an open and always surprising collaboration with composers and video artists whose spirits are illuminated through the violinist’s intrepid musicianship and exploratory nature.”

She has toured internationally as a company member of the New York City Players, has served as a multi-instrumentalist in theater groups Object Collection and New Paradise Laboratories, was the fiddle player in the musical, The Snow Child, by John Strand, Georgia Stitt and Bob Banghart, and was a violin sub in the Broadway revival of Oklahoma!. Ongoing musical collaborations include a duo with guitarist James Moore, the minimalist rock band Thee Reps, and the development of a new opera by Aaron Siegel. Her album with James Moore, “Gertrudes,” was released on New World Records in 2016. She has performed at LA Opera, The Kitchen, The Pompidou, and Carnegie Hall.

Tanning is faculty at Larchmont Music Academy and St. Lukes School.

Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times, New Sounds Live, and The Wall Street Journal.

TRANSIT New Music

Taking their cues from the diversity of the city around them, the artists of TRANSIT seek to create bridges between and among the various schools and styles of music being written and performed today, while embracing innovative projects that are relevant to contemporary culture. Their goal is not to achieve an international style or to promote a particular “sound.” Rather, they champion experimental music from a wide range of influences with the conviction that the music of today is inherently meaningful to audiences and vital to social progress. Paired with superior artistry, shrewd programming, and radically open ears, this determination keeps TRANSIT firmly rooted at the cutting edge of new music.

Formed in 2007, TRANSIT has established a reputation for producing exciting concerts featuring young composers and for special projects that push the boundaries of musical convention. Through the DoubleBill Series, TRANSIT has worked closely with emerging composers from around the globe and presented world premiere-studded concerts for audiences throughout New York City. In special projects, the collective has experimented with concepts as disparate as binary-gated amplification (Tristan Perich), music for hearing-deprived musicians (Eric KM Clark), large-scale multimedia shows (Daniel Wohl), and music for hand-built speaker feedback instruments (Lesley Flanigan). TRANSIT has performed at Le Poisson Rouge, Issue Project Room, and Galapagos Art Space; for the MATA Interval, Astoria Music Society, and Darmstadt Classics of the Avant Garde series; and on joint programs alongside artists including So Percussion, Judy Dunaway, Arutro en el Barco, and Margaret Leng Tan. TRANSIT has also been a resident ensemble at the CUNY Graduate Center (City University of New York).

In all its endeavors, TRANSIT remains committed to breaking down barriers between living composers and the culture at large while maintaining the dignity of both.

TRANSIT appreciates the support of the Brooklyn Arts Council, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Meet the Composer, Jerome Foundation, the American Composers Forum, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Puffin Foundation.