BAHLEST EEBLe readings COMPOSER FELLOWS 2025-2027
Cycle Eighteen: 2025
Reeds and a Mallet
Aaron Israel Levin
Aaron Israel Levin is an American composer whose music explores the emotional dynamism of storytelling and drama. His works have been performed and commissioned by the Aizuri Quartet, Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, Chelsea Symphony, Historical Keyboard Society of North America, Iowa Composers Forum, loadbang, Music Teachers National Association, New European Ensemble, Onix Ensamble, Salastina, and Sputter Box. Select honors include the Cortona Prize; the Audience Choice Commission from the Earshot Underwood New Music Readings with the American Composers Orchestra; the Druckman Prize from the Aspen Music Festival & School; and, the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His music has been showcased by notable presenters such as Carnegie Hall (NYC), Centro Nacional de las Artes (Mexico City), Constellation (Chicago), the DiMenna Center (NYC), the Schubert Club (Saint Paul, MN), and Spectrum (NYC). Originally from Saint Paul, Minnesota, Aaron holds degrees from Grinnell College, the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague, and the Yale School of Music. He is the 2024-26 Composer-in-Residence with Chicago Opera Theater.
Marina López
Marina López is a Pittsburgh-based composer, educator, and budding writer. She seeks to challenge borders between musical genres and between art forms, to create immersive experiences that subvert audience’s preconceptions. Born and raised in Mexico City, she has a deep interest in exploring the psychological, ethnomusicological, and physical roots of her musical heritage. Ultimately, her goal is to break down the barriers between the Western musical canon and the music of those who have been previously excluded from it.
Her music has been performed by Transient Canvas, the Chamber Orchestra of Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Mellon University Contemporary Ensemble, Counter)inductions ensemble, the Carnegie Mellon University Philharmonic, Kamratōn ensemble, and Boston's White Snake Project, amongst others. She has been awarded multiple fellowships, such as the 50th Anniversary Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, Virginia) and the Bahlest Eeble Fellowship with the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.
She has participated in reading sessions with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Leonard Slatkin, as well as with the Houston Symphony Orchestra under Maestra Yue Bao. In September of 2024 the Grand Rapids Symphony premiered her orchestration of Clara Schumann’s Three Romances for Violin and Piano under Maestro Marcelo Lehninger. She is one of the current Virginia B. Toulmin Orchestral Commission grantees, with her piece 'Moño' set top be performed by five orchestras around the country.
Iván Enrique Rodríguez
Puerto Rican composer Dr. Iván Enrique Rodríguez (b. 1990) is acclaimed for music described as fiery, gripping, and emotionally powerful by San Francisco Classical Voice, Boston Classical Review, and New York Concert Review. His work has been performed across Puerto Rico, the Americas, and Europe in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Harpa, and Jordan Hall. A recipient of the 2019 ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Award and the 2023 ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize, Rodríguez has also been honored by Musical America as one of its 2021 Top Professionals of the Year and by Junior Chamber International with the Ten Outstanding Young Persons of the World award in Puerto Rico.
His music often explores social justice and the human condition, interwoven with the pulse of Puerto Rican heritage. Notable works include A Metaphor for Power, premiered by the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Cristian Măcelaru, and Casting the Dice, commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. He has been composer-in-residence at Sweden’s Lövstabruks Kammarmusikfestival and Cabrillo, and his compositions have been recorded by artists including Laura Downes, Choral Arts Initiative, soprano Stephanie Lamprea, and trumpeter Luis “Perico” Ortiz.
Rodríguez’s accolades include Italy’s Rimini International Choral Competition and the Maurice Ravel International Composition Prize. A passionate advocate for equity, he has collaborated with the Vision Collective in refugee camps across Europe and composed works addressing migration, identity, and resistance.
He earned his Bachelor’s from the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico and completed his Master’s and Doctorate at The Juilliard School, where he studied under Melinda Wagner as a C.V. Starr Fellow.
Sam Wu
Sam Wu's music "abounds in delicate colours, wisps of sound and sylvan textures" (Gramophone). Many of his works center around extra-musical themes: architecture and urban planning, climate science, and the search for exoplanets that harbor life.
Selected for the American Composers Orchestra's EarShot readings and the Tasmanian Symphony’s Australian Composers’ School, Sam is also the winner of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and First Prize at the Washington International Competition.
Sam’s collaborations span five continents, including with the orchestras of Philadelphia, New Jersey, Minnesota, Sarasota, Melbourne, Tasmania, Macao, and Shanghai, the New York City Ballet, Sydney International Piano Competition, the Lontano, Parker, Argus, ETHEL, and icarus Quartets, conductors Marin Alsop, Osmo Vänskä, and Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei.
From Melbourne, Australia, Sam received degrees from Harvard, Juilliard, and Rice. He is currently on faculty at Whitman College, as their Visiting Assistant Professor in Theory and Composition. Sam's teachers include Tan Dun, Anthony Brandt, Pierre Jalbert, Chaya Czernowin, and Richard Beaudoin.
Cycle Nineteen: 2025
Breath, Bass, and a Mallet
Keith Donaghue
Keith Donaghue is a largely self-taught composer and arranger currently daylighting as House Manager for The Philadelphia Orchestra. In that role as in his music, he is driven by sharing meaningful experiences with the human family and creating music that is fueled by connection and empathy. His works have been performed for the National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) and he was one of the Spring ’24 Allentown Symphony New Chamber Music Concert competition winners. He has received several commissions from Philadelphia-local musicians, including a bass feature for mixed ensemble, a trumpet studio piece for seven Bb trumpets, a violin sonata, and others. His background in jazz-influenced improvisation is complemented by a strong control over color and melody to bring about music that is detailed, spontaneous, and cathartic.
Eliana Echeverry
Eliana is a Colombian composer, pianist and vocal coach. She studied composition at National Conservatory of Colombia and obtained a master’s degree from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. She also has a psychology bachelor’s degree from National University of Colombia.
She is a very eclectic musician and she has experience in jazz, pop music, Latin music and classical music. Her music and arrangements are often played in Spain, France, Netherlands, Colombia and the US.
She has been a private tutor for students of all ages and backgrounds and has 10 years of experience teaching piano and composition. She has also worked as vocal tutor for singers from pop to lyric repertoire and has worked with new talents in Latin-America, some of them are pursuing their careers as singers in the Latin music industry.
Harry González
Harry González is a Colombian composer, violinist, pianist, and conductor. His music reflects his interpretation and feelings on existential human issues, personal experiences, and personal adventures through a constant seeking of new sounds and techniques in his compositional process. He constantly likes to play with contradictory ideas to create ambiguous sonorities and sensations, and defy listeners’s expectations.. His music has been commissioned by organizations like The Sheldon Arts Foundation, the Mizzou New Music Ensemble, the Mizzou New Music Initiative, the Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra, and the new music ensemble Periscopio of Universidad EAFIT. Professionally, González has gained important experience conducting his works with Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra and St. Louis Symphony Orchestra players; playing violin with Medellín Philharmonic Orchestra and popular music ensembles; premiering his pieces that include violin or piano; editing music by Manuel Maria Párraga and Pedro Morales Pino for the project Historias del Piano Colombiano; accompanying Mizzou students in the piano; working as a teaching assistant for the Mizzou New Music Initiative with production tasks, programs, teaching and grading undergraduate courses; and working as production assistant for the MICF 2023 and the Missouri Summer Composition Institute.
Recently, González won first place in the Humanities division of the Research and Creative Activities Forum at Mizzou with his research on how music can be used to convey climate change and his piece Insomnolence for string trio was selected to be performed at the New Music on the Bayou Festival 2024. Currently, González is pursuing his Master of Music degree in Composition at the University of Missouri with the guidance of Stefan Freund and Utku Asuroglu.
Carlos C. Mauro Gálvez
Carlos C. Mauro Gálvez (b. 1998) is a Boston-based composer, improviser, software developer, and inventor originally from Peru. His music, inspired by Peruvian traditions, Free Improvisation, Microtonality, and Timbre-Driven approaches, has been performed in the United States and Europe. He has studied composition with John McDonald, Andrew List, and Alla Cohen, and classical guitar with multi-Latin Grammy Award winner Berta Rojas. Mauro's work at the intersection of software development, digital music notation, and accessibility technologies has been showcased at the International Conference for Music Notation and Representation in Zurich, supported by Tufts University’s Music Department and the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts organization. On a daily basis, Carlos can be found collaborating with musicians in the Boston area, writing code, or hunting for the best (and reasonably priced) mango products at local stores. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music Theory and Composition from Berklee College of Music and is completing his Master of Arts in Music at Tufts University.
Cycle Twenty: 2025
Horn (Remote)
Kalaisan Kalaichelvan
Kalaisan Kalaichelvan is a composer and pianist based in Toronto, Canada. His compositional practice spans multiple disciplines, drawing from film, dance, theatre, installation and deals with themes of translation and transference.
Named by Ludwig Van as one of “six emerging Canadian composers to keep an eye on”, his music has been performed and premiered by celebrated ensembles such as Pro Coro Canada, the Dior Quartet, NMC Ensemble and Extended Music Collective. Kalaisan is a 2021 Fellow of the prestigious Sundance Composers lab and is one of the awarded grantees of the Sundance Institute’s Art of Practice Fellowship. He has held residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and was an alumna of the Canadian Film Centre as one of the 2021 Slaight Music residents. Kalaisan was awarded the SOCAN Emerging Composer Award in 2023. In 2023, Kalaisan wrote the music for the film In Flames, which was selected as the Pakistani entry for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards.
Kalaisan has been mentored by esteemed composers and music leaders such as Paul Wiancko and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet, Dinuk Wiejertane, Suzanne Farrin, Felipe Lara, Brian Current and Michael Zaugg. Kalaisan’s music is defined by its genre-bending boldness, its refined classicism and musical ingenuity. Having worked across various disciplines and communities of thought, Kalaisan seeks to bring together incongruous institutions to build novel structures that reflect his artistic upbringing.
Ben Shirley
Born and raised in Berlin, San Francisco, and Texas, Ben Shirley is an accomplished concert composer, film composer, orchestrator for film & television, and musician. His clarinet quintet, “High Sierra Sonata” is featured on the 2024 GRAMMY® AWARD nominated American Stories album, recorded by Pacifica Quarter & New York Philharmonic Principal Clarinetist Anthony McGill. American Stories was released on Cedille Records in 2023.
A bassist for 25+ years, Ben was previously signed to Epic Records in bands with radio singles charting in the top 5. Addiction drove him into homelessness in 2011.
While living at the Midnight Mission, a shelter in Los Angeles’ notorious Skid Row for 26 months, Ben returned to school, earned a scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and began a new life as a concert and film composer.
Ben’s works have been commissioned, performed, and recorded by prominent ensembles, including Pacifica Quartet, Quadre-The Voice of Four Horns, Denver Friends of Chamber Music, Interlochen, Detroit Chamber Music, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (with Utah State University), and The Newark-Granville Symphony.
Ben is a television and film composer and orchestrator and a frequent speaker and guest lecturer who shares “his story.”
Matthew Shorten
Australian-born composer Matthew Shorten envisions his compositions with an innate expressive sensitivity, ethereal harmonic language, and rich timbral sensibilities. He has received commissions internationally from countless trailblazing organizations, festivals, and concert artists, including the VOCES8 & the VOCES8 Foundation, Choir & Organ Magazine, Kyo-Shin-An Arts, chatterbird, the Aster Quartet of the University of Michigan, Anwen Mai Thomas at the Royal Academy of Music, the Cortona Sessions for New Music, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Wintergreen Music, and the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, among others. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of his compositional inspirations – traversing the bounds of music, art, literature, and the humanities – Matthew’s projects and commissions include his chamber work Ekphrases, a string quartet which brings three cross-cultural portraits to life, and a chamber oratorio entitled The Last Tea, centered on the ritual death and final tea ceremony of the pre-eminent Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyū.
Matthew is based in Massachusetts, where he is pursuing an M.A. at the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, as a Graduate Fellow of the Clark Art Institute and a Curatorial Intern at the Williams College Museum of Art.
Cycle Twenty-One: 2025
Harp (Remote)
Nick DePinna
As a composer and producer of both concert and commercial music, Nick DePinna’s output is wildly diverse. His creative concert works are performed with increasing regularity across the United States, while at the same time his music for visual media can be heard on 1000+ films and episodes of television across networks such as ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, HBO, ESPN, A&E, BBC, National Geographic WILD, VH-1, Hallmark, CMT, Netflix, and Disney+.
His arrangements, orchestrations, and transcriptions have been performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Jazz Orchestra, the Chicago Sinfonietta, the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, the Riverside Symphonia, the Hollywood Jazz Orchestra, the Tri-C JazzFest Cleveland, MUSE/IQUE, the MESTO Orchestra, the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters, the Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra Unlimited, and have been recorded for many albums and film scores.
A protégé of James W. Newton Jr., DePinna also trained in Western Art Music composition with David Lefkowitz, Paul Chihara, and Ian Krouse, while simultaneously receiving mentorship from American artists of the African musical diaspora including Kenny Burrell and Jon Jang.
DePinna is on faculty at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. He is also co-founder of “L.A. Signal Lab,” a new-music collective focused on the intersection of notated and improvised music.
SiHyun Uhm
SiHyun Uhm is an accomplished composer, pianist, and multimedia producer, with bases in both Los Angeles and South Korea. Throughout her career, she has garnered commissions from esteemed institutions such as the US AirForce Academy Band, Yamaha, Rice University, Columbia Digital Audio Festival, and more. Notably, SiHyun has been recognized as a Composer Fellow by the American Composers Orchestra and the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab, in addition to receiving prizes and awards from esteemed organizations like the President's Own Marine Band and the Art Council of Korea.
Her artistic versatility transcends traditional boundaries, as evidenced by her proficiency across genres including classical, electronic, pop, rock, and film/game music. SiHyun's exceptional talent has been further acknowledged with a 3rd prize in the Shanghai International Digital Music Festival.
SiHyun completed her undergraduate studies at the Eastman School of Music and earned a Master's degree in composition from The Juilliard School. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in composition at UCLA, further solidifying her commitment to pushing artistic boundaries and contributing meaningfully to the field of music composition. Additionally, she holds a diploma from the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Massachusetts.
Ian Erickson (Auditor)
Ian Erickson is a composer, musician, and craftsman based in Berkeley, California. As a composer Ian has worked with JACK Quartet for their Studio Reading sessions, Sirius Quartet, Odd Savvy, and PARMA Recordings. In 2021 he released his first solo album, t ö l u r, consisting of works written for piano, drum set, and mixed electronics.
A recipient of a 2023 Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency, Ian designed and built an original instrument called a kolvorgan. The residency culminated in writing and recording an album titled \textures/. Released in 2024, it is comprised of solo works performed on drum set, keyboards, electronics, and his kolvorgan.
In the East Bay Area Ian works as a dance accompanist at The University of California Berkeley, freelance musician or craftsman, and as a regular studio assistant for Paul Dresher. Originally from southwest Missouri, he is a graduate of Missouri State University, and holds two Bachelor of Arts degrees in Music Composition and Jazz Studies with an emphasis in drum set performance. Ian has also obtained formal instruction from the Port Townsend School of Woodworking.
Lauren McCall (Auditor)
Lauren McCall is a composer and music educator from Atlanta, Georgia. She studied for her master’s degree in music composition at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she is a Ph.D. student studying music technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Lauren has had compositions performed around North America and Europe. This includes her piece for open instrumentation titled To Cover You, which was performed at the Fresh Inc. Festival, and Continuum, which was performed by the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Laptop Orchestra. She enjoys collaborating with technologists, musicians, and artists. Along with composing, Lauren enjoys playing classical music and jazz on the clarinet and piano, spending time in nature, spending time with family and friends, and traveling.
Cycle Twenty-Two: 2026
TBD
Dayton Hare
Colorado native Dayton Hare is a composer who often draws inspiration from elements of the natural world around him, striking a balance between narrative and atmosphere. In his work, he hopes to raise questions about our relationship to our environment, elevate underappreciated beauty found around us, and explore the blurry lines of perception.
Currently a Paris-based Fulbright scholar and composer-in-residence at the Fondation des États-Unis, he is a student at the École Normale de Musique, and previously earned his master’s degree in composition from the Yale School of Music and bachelor’s degrees in music composition and English literature from the University of Michigan. His music has been commissioned by the New York Youth Symphony, Interlochen Arts Center, the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Yale Planetary Solutions, and others. Ensembles who have performed his work include the Utari Duo, Mammoth Trio, Bent Frequency, Yale Percussion Group, and more.
Outside of music, Dayton has also worked extensively as a journalist, and served as the newsletter editor of the Ann Arbor Observer and the managing editor of the Michigan Daily, where was also the classical music columnist. As a critic, he primarily covered the contemporary music scene of southeast Michigan.
Chelsea Komschlies
Chelsea Komschlies’ music, praised for its “ingratiating allure” (San Diego Story), blends the familiar and strange in uncanny ways, evoking vivid multisensory imagery and psycho-emotional landscapes. A Ph.D. candidate at McGill University under Jean Lesage, she has received McGill’s Andrew Svoboda Prize for Orchestral Composition and the Research Alive Student Prize. Her thesis on musically encoding shared multisensory information is supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, which recognized it as the top-ranked music research project in the province.
Her work has been commissioned and supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, the Hermitage, Fromm, and ASCAP Foundations, the Alfred Casella Award (Curtis Institute), and Copland House. Presenters include Alarm Will Sound, Bozzini Quartet, Quasar Saxophone Quartet, the Louisville Orchestra, Tucson, Omaha, Vermont, Pittsburgh, Steamboat, and Lima Symphonies, TIME SPANS, Grant Park Music Festival, Choral Arts Philadelphia, Fifth House Ensemble, Codes d’accès, Le Vivier, the Boulanger Initiative, Make Music Chicago, and Star Trek: The Cruise.
A 2023 Virginia B. Toulmin Commission recipient through the League of American Orchestras, she premiered Mycelialore for orchestra and electronics with the Tucson Symphony in 2025. She joins the Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps in 2025-26 and is expanding her work into immersive VR and AI-assisted film techniques.
Celka Ojakangas
Celka Ojakangas is a Los Angeles-based composer whose “work rates high on the bold and beautiful scales” and “takes molecular musical quirks and explodes them, then seizes precious moments of lyricism.” (Columbia Tribune) Her music plays with hybridism and recontextualization, intentionally exploring and blurring the boundaries between culturally-defined genres for a resultant fun and eclectic palette of textures, rhythms, and grooves. Celka gleans her musical ideas from her collaborative work as a violist in symphonies, new music ensembles, jazz bands, and rock bands, always with the intention of bringing creativity and play to the forefront of the listener’s and performer’s experiences.
Celka’s compositions have been premiered and commissioned by many artists including Martin Chalifour with the LA Philharmonic, Alarm Will Sound, Music from Copland House, Hub New Music, Hocket, Kaufman School of Dance, the Raleigh Symphony, Portland State University Opera, New Opera West, Blackhouse Collective, Bantam Winds, the Thornton Symphony Orchestra, and the Thornton Wind Ensemble.
Celka has a DMA in Composition from the University of Southern California. Former mentors include Donald Crockett, Andrew Norman, Ted Hearne, Sean Friar, Frank Ticheli, Mara Gibson and Carlyle Sharpe. She currently serves as a Visiting Professor of Music at Occidental College and Glendale Community College, and also teaches string instruction to children at the Neighborhood Music School in Boyle Heights, CA.
Abby Swidler
Abby Swidler, violinist, vocalist, and composer, spins sound into immersive dreamscapes that invite listeners to explore and reflect upon the natural world. They create music for art-installations, dance, film, and performance. They are a founding member of the performer/composer collective Diaphanous Ensemble, and perform as their solo project tonguetide. Abby’s compositions and songs are immersive sonic collages of instruments, voices, earthbound materials, field-recordings, and electronics. In making work about climate change, queer ecology, and healing, the gathering and compiling of sounds from their environment is central to their composition and production process. This prismatic approach reflects the vividness, instability, and mutability of the natural world. They have been an artist in residence at Banff Center for the Arts, Antenna Cloud Farm, Subcircle Residency, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and were a JACK Quartet Studio artist. They have a B.M. in Violin Performance from Eastman School of Music and a M.M. in Contemporary Improvisation from The New England Conservatory. Abby has performed and recorded with artists including Iron & Wine, Hamed Sinno, Japanese Breakfast, Angel Olsen, L’Rain, Lady Lamb, and Palaver Strings, and has been featured on over 40 studio albums. Originally from Missoula, MT, they live in Brooklyn, NY.