Who Are We?

Pianist-Composer Winnie Cheung has long been sought after as a performer of contemporary music. Equally at home in almost any style and genre, her repertoire spans the gamut from J. S. Bach to Shulamit Ran. She has participated in numerous performances of such challenging works as Charles Wuorinen’s New York Notes, Harrison Birtwistle’s Secret Theater, and Wolfgang Rihm’s Chiffre II, Silence to be Beaten. She has also premiered a vast number of solo piano and chamber works, some written specifically for her, and she is continually active in the commissioning of new works for solo piano.

Winnie has worked with a wide variety of conductors, ensembles and orchestras, including Musica Nova and the Eastman Philharmonia, both under conductor Brad Lubman, the Eastman School Symphony Orchestra, OSSIA new music, and the BQE Project, which accompanies silent and early-talkie films. She has also worked directly with a vast array of world-renowned composers including Bernard Rands, Louis Andriessen, Harrison Birtwistle and Augusta Read Thomas, among others.

Winnie’s compositions have been performed widely throughout the United States, Canada and Southeast Asia. She has written numerous chamber and solo works, including works for non-Western instruments such as her bass koto and violin duo, Taking the Scarlet, performed by Pia Liptak and renowned koto player, Ryuko Mizutani. She has also collaborated frequently with dancers, choreographers and film-makers on a variety of multi-media and electro-acoustic works projects. In addition, Winnie has written a number of improvisatory compositions based on realizations of original hand-painted scrolls, and she continues to push musical and conceptual boundaries in her recent compositions.

Born and raised in Hong Kong in 1975, Winnie received her BA in music from the University of Chicago and her DMA in composition and piano performance from the Eastman School of Music. Her teachers include John Eaton, August Read Thomas, Robert Morris, David Liptak, and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon in composition, and Douglas Humphreys in piano.

 

Like the famous American composer John Cage, Leon Shernoff is equally at home in music and mycology (the study of mushrooms). The winner of a BMI Award for Young Composers at age 16, he divides his time between musical activities and the editorship of Mushroom, the Journal of Wild Mushrooming, America’s only magazine for morel-hunters and other aficionados of edible wild mushrooms.

A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Chicago, his music has been performed at the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and at the Pécs Music Festival in Hungary. His composition teachers include Mel Powell, Shulamit Ran, John Eaton, Andrew Imbrie, Stephen Mosko, Morton Subotnick, David Liptak and Robert Morris.

Leon has rounded out his Western studies with study of and participation in music from a wide variety of other cultures, most notably the music of the Anlo Ewe people of coastal Ghana, which he studied with Kobla Ladzekpo, Alfred Ladzekpo, and Midawo Togbe Gideon Foli Alorwoyie. A former member of Golosa (the Russian choir of the University of Chicago), and a current member of the university’s Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, Leon ran an African music ensemble at the University of Chicago for eight years, teaching the coastal Ghanaian repertoire that he had learned. In his compositions, Leon aims for a synthesis of various approaches to music-making, and hopes to explore these through his work with the Tiny Mahler Orchestra.

 

Aaron Travers was born in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1975. He earned a BM in Composition from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1997, studying with Richard Hoffmann, as well as a BA in Classics from Oberlin College the same year. He later earned an MA and PhD in Composition from the Eastman School of Music in 2003 and 2005 respectively. His teachers there included Sydney Hodkinson, Christopher Rouse, Steven Stucky and Augusta Read Thomas.

Mr. Travers has received numerous awards and commissions. He has twice won the Belle Gitelman Award in Composition and the Howard Hanson Orchestra Prize, both from Eastman. He has also won the AGO/ECS Publishing Award in Choral Composition, the Chicago Symphony First Hearing Award, the Barlow Prize from the Barlow Endowment of Brigham Young University, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Award, and a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music, the Third Coast Percussion Quartet, the Collide trio, the Hamilton College Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the Tarab Cello Ensemble, the Barlow Endowment, the Eastman Trombone Choir, the University of Rochester, the South Dakota Symphony, and Gloria Musicae of Sarasota, Florida. Mr. Travers’ works have been performed widely throughout the United States and Canada, as well as select locations in France, earning critical acclaim. In addition, he has served as composer-in-residence at the Seaside Institute in Seaside, Florida, conducting work on a children’s opera and working with local students. He currently resides in Evanston, Illinois, teaching composition at Northwestern University.

 

Peter Slavin received his BM in composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Elinor Armer, David Conte and Conrad Susa, and his PhD in music from the University of California, Berkeley, where his teachers included Cindy Cox, Jorge Liderman and Andrew Imbrie. He has won awards and other recognition for his piano playing, and has worked professionally as an accompanist, organist and choir director, and freelance pianist since his teens. His compositions, which include a number of songs, choral works, chamber music, solo piano pieces, and an opera, have been performed widely in the San Francisco Bay Area and his native state of Texas. He is currently the music director of Immanuel United Church of Christ in Evergreen Park, IL.

The Tiny Mahler Orchestra

Performing the best in rarely heard music of any century.

For more information, email Leon Shernoff.