Steve Reich has influenced composers and mainstream musicians all over the world. Music for 18 Musicians and Different Trains have earned him two Grammy Awards, and in 2009, his Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize. Reich’s documentary video opera works—The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot—have been performed on four continents. His recent work Quartet, for percussionist Colin Currie, sold out two consecutive concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London shortly after tens of thousands at the Glastonbury Festival heard Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) perform Electric Counterpoint followed by the London Sinfonietta performing his Music for 18 Musicians.

In 2012, Reich was awarded the Gold Medal in Music by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has additionally received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the BBVA Award in Madrid, and recently the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. He has been named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Royal College of Music in London, the Juilliard School, the Liszt Academy in Budapest, and the New England Conservatory of Music, among others. “There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them,” states The Guardian.

Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt’s creative output has significantly changed the way we understand the nature of music. As one of the most radical representatives of the Soviet avant-garde, Pärt’s work passed through a profound evolutionary process: from neo-classical piano music to the individual use of dodecaphony, composition with sound masses, chance music, and collage technique. Most notably, Pärt has shifted the boundaries with his unique tintinnabuli music.

After his last and most dramatic collage piece Credo (1968), Pärt withdrew for almost eight years. In 1976, after intensive study of Gregorian chant, the Notre Dame School, and classic vocal polyphony, he emerged with a new and highly original musical language which he called tintinnabuli (from tintinnabulum, Latin for “little bell”) and which has defined his work up to today. Tintinnabuli first appeared in a short piano piece Für Alina (1976), a subsequent rush of new works included Fratres, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, and Tabula rasa (1977), which remain among his most highly regarded. His “musical Credo” is rooted in the Christian tradition, and since the Word (Logos) plays a vital and even structural role in Pärt’s compositional process, both his orchestral and vocal works are mostly based on liturgical texts. Pärt’s oeuvre is rich and versatile, including many large-scale compositions for choir and orchestra, four symphonies, and works for soloists and orchestra, as well as numerous choral pieces and chamber music.

In 1980, Arvo Pärt was urged by public authorities to leave the country. He and his family settled first in Vienna and then West Berlin. Important works like Passio, Te Deum, Miserere, Lamentate, Symphonie No. 4, Adam’s Lament, and numerous choral works have been created ever since and have been performed worldwide.

In 2010, Pärt returned to Estonia where he resides today. The same year the Arvo Pärt Centre, which holds Pärt’s personal archive, was established in Laulasmaa, near Tallinn, by the composer’s family. His numerous awards include honorary membership of American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996), Classical Brit Awards (2003, 2011), Léonie Sonning Music Prize (2008), Premium Imperiale (2014) and Ratzinger Prize (2017). He is a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture in Vatican and holds honorary doctorates from several universities, University of Sydney, Australia (1996), University of Durham (2002) and University of St Andrews, United Kingdom (2010), St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, USA (2014), Oxford University, United Kingdom (2016) among others.

Ensemble Signal, described by the New York Times as “one of the most vital groups of its kind” and “a new-music ensemble that by this point practically guarantees quality performances,” is a New York-based ensemble dedicated to offering the broadest possible audience access to a diverse range of contemporary works through performance, commissioning, recording, and education. Signal was founded by Co-Artistic/Executive Director Lauren Radnofsky and Co-Artistic Director/Conductor Brad Lubman.

Since its debut in 2008, Signal has performed over 200 concerts, given New York, world, or US premieres of over 20 works, and co-produced 10 recordings. Signal has appeared at Lincoln Center Festival, Walt Disney Concert Hall, BIG EARS, Cal Performances, Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, The Bang on a Can Marathon, Washington Performing Arts and the Library of Congress, and has worked closely with composers including Steve Reich, Helmut Lachenmann, Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Oliver Knussen and Hilda Paredes. Their educational activities include community performances and educational outreach, as well as workshops with emerging composers.

Steve Reich projects have been a special focus for Ensemble Signal over the past decade. Signal made its 2008 debut in New York City performing Reich’s Daniel Variations. Since then, Signal has added to its repertoire 20 works by Reich and has mounted nearly 30 events involving Reich’s work. Throughout 2017 – 18, they gave the US premieres of a new work by Reich for 19 musicians entitled Runner at venues across the US. Their recording of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians on harmonia mundi received widespread critical acclaim including a Diapason d’or and appeared on the Billboard Classical Crossover Charts.

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective that is transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. The ensemble’s 35 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. A recipient of the American Music Center’s Trailblazer Award and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, ICE was also named the 2014 Musical America Ensemble of the Year. The group currently serves as artist in residence at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts’s Mostly Mozart Festival and previously led a five-year residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

New initiatives include OpenICE, made possible with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which offers free concerts and related programming wherever ICE performs, and enables a working process with composers to unfold in public settings. DigitICE, a free online library of over 350 streaming videos, catalogues the ensemble’s performances. ICE’s First Page program is a commissioning consortium that fosters close collaborations between performers, composers, and listeners as new music is developed. EntICE, a side-by-side education program, places ICE musicians within youth orchestras as they premiere new commissioned works together.

The Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Wall Street, directed by Julian Wachner, is the premier ensemble of the celebrated music program at Trinity Church Wall Street.

Besides leading liturgical music at Trinity’s services each Sunday, the choir performs in Bach + One, Compline by Candlelight, and many other concerts and festivals throughout the year, often in collaboration with the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, NOVUS NY, and Trinity Youth Chorus. Each year the choir anchors Trinity’s Time’s Arrow festival, while its celebrated performances of Handel’s Messiah have become a long and storied annual tradition. This season at Trinity, in addition to its regular midday programming, the choir showcases new music by David T. Little, Ellen Reid, Daniel Schlosberg, and Nico Muhly in monthly evening concerts.

The Choir of Trinity Wall Street has been featured with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the New York Philharmonic, and the Rolling Stones, during the band’s 50th anniversary tour. In recent seasons the choir has performed at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and London’s Barbican Theatre, besides touring extensively throughout the United States, with appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Berkeley Early Music Festival, Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, BAM Next Wave Festival, and the Prototype Festival, where the choir premiered Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Angel’s Bone. This season brings the world and East Coast premieres of Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins’s new opera p r i s m, a Trinity co-commission with Prototype, at LA’s REDCAT and NYC’s La MaMa, as well as a reprise of Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Anthracite Fields at Carnegie Hall.

The Choir of Trinity Wall Street received a Grammy nomination for Handel’s Israel in Egypt, recorded with Wachner and the Trinity Baroque Orchestra for Music Omnia. Released on the ARSIS, Avie Records, Cantaloupe Music, Musica Omnia, Naxos, and VIA Recordings labels, the choir’s discography also features Bach’s complete motets, Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone, a Grammy-nominated recording of Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields, and choral music by Ralf Gawlick, Trevor Weston, and Wachner himself. Like the choir’s many other collaborations with living composers, these recordings testify to its unwavering commitment to new music.