Kirit Singh & Jasdeep Singh

Kirit Singh and Jasdeep Singh are two artists who specialise in the Hindustani classical genres of Dhrupad & Dhamār. Kirit is a disciple of the world renowned Dhrupad torchbearer, Pt. Uday Bhawalkar Ji, and Jasdeep is the foremost disciple of the world’s leading exponent of the Jori percussive tradition of Punjab, Ustad Sukhvinder Singh ‘Pinky’ Ji. With the blessings and inspiration of their gurus, they present their art, striving for spontaneity at every moment.

Plus-Minus Ensemble

Plus-Minus Ensemble is a London-based collective committed to commissioning new work and placing it alongside recent and landmark modern repertoire. Formed in 2003 by Joanna Bailie and Matthew Shlomowitz, Plus-Minus is distinguished by its interest in performative, electroacoustic and conceptual pieces, and experimental open works such as Stockhausen‘s 1963 classic, from which the group takes its name.

Plus-Minus has regularly performed in London at Kammer Klang (Cafe Oto) and City University; has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Deutschlandradio Kultur; and has performed at the Borealis (Bergen), Cut and Splice (London), Fundación BBVA (Bilbao), Huddersfield, MaerzMusik (Berlin), Spor (Aarhus), Transit (Leuven) and Ultima (Oslo) festivals and series. In 2016-17 Plus-Minus will perform for the first time in the Sampler Series at l’Auditori (Barcelona) and Klang Festival (Copenhagen).

Plus-Minus also works with student composers and has given workshops and concerts at Bath Spa University, City University London, Durham University, Guildhall School of Music, Huddersfield University, Stanford University and the University of Southampton.

In addition to performing works by Bailie and Shlomowitz, Plus-Minus has recently worked with composers such as Peter Ablinger, Laurence Crane, Bernhard Lang, James Saunders, Alex Schubert and Jennifer Walshe.

Catherine Lamb

Catherine Lamb (b. 1982, Olympia, Wa, U.S.), is a composer exploring the interaction of elemental tonal material and the variations in presence between shades and beings in a room. She has been studying and composing music since a young age. In 2003 she turned away from the conservatory in an attempt to understand the structures and intonations within Hindustani Classical Music, later finding Mani Kaul in 2006 who was directly connected to Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and whose philosophical approach to sound became important to her. She studied (experimental) composition at the California Institute of the Arts (2004-2006) under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro, who were both integral influences. It was there also that she began her work into the area of Just Intonation, which became a clear way to investigate the interaction of tones and ever-fluctuating shades, where these interactions in and of them-selves became structural elements in her work. Since then she has written various ensemble pieces (at times with liminal electronic portions) and continues to go further into elemental territories, through various kinds of research, collaboration, and practice (herself as a violist). She received her MFA from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2012 and is currently residing in Berlin, Germany.

Newton Armstrong

Newton Armstrong is a composer, electronics performer, and occasional builder of electronic musical instruments. Much of his work focusses on forms of music-making that emerge in the composed interactions between people, technologies, and their environments. His music has been performed at events such as Darmstadt, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Festival of Exiles (Berlin), What is Music? (Melbourne), Movement Research Festival (New York), Grønland Kammermusikkfestival (Oslo), Images Sonores (Liège), Ars Musica (Brussels), and Music at Villa Romana (Florence). He teaches at City, University of London.

Newton Armstrong’s thread—surface was commissioned by Plus Minus with funds provided by the APRA AMCOS Art Music Fund.

Clara Levy

Clara Levy (1991, France) studied the violin in Paris and Brussels where she completed her Master degree “cum laude” with Naaman Sluchin (2015). In the meantime she also participated to Masterclasses with Radu Blidar, Jean Lenert, Ami Flammer, Yuzuko Horigome, Claude Richard, Stéphane Tran-Ngoc and Quartet Prazak, Ebène and Bela for chamber music.

Devoted to contemporary music, she had the opportunity to play with Ensemble Linea, Ensemble Itinéraire, Ensemble Oxalys and worked with composers such as Kaija Saariaho, Howard Moody, Pascale Jakubowski and Karim Haddad.

Nevertheless, she keeps playing in several orchestras and even got the opportunity to play Fauré’s Requiem solo violin part at the Luxembourg Philharmonie.

She has done several collaborations with the choreographer Vera Tussing, supported by The Place (London) and Kaaitheater (Brussels), including the audio installation “Sound-bed”.

Following her research on the relation between musical notation, sound and movement she is now part of the Advanced Master in Contemporary Music and a member of GAME (Ghent Advanced Master Ensemble), a joint initiative of Royal Conservatory Ghent and Ictus ensemble.

Clara Levy is a member of G.A.M.E. (Ghent Advanced Master Ensemble), a joint initiative of Royal Conservatory Ghent and Ictus and Spectra ensemble.

Clara Iannotta

photograph by Astrid Ackermann

Erika Vega

photograph by Arturo Fuentes

Erika Vega (born in Mexico, 1987) studied composition in her home country with Mario Lavista and Gonzalo Macías while performing frequently as a violinist in several orchestras and ensembles, some of them based in improvisation. She traveled to Europe in 2012 on a scholarship from the Mexican government to obtain a Master’s Degree in composition at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels with Peter Swinnen while studying electronic music with Kasia Glowicka and violin with Kati Sebestyén, graduating “cum laude” in 2015. During this time she participated in masterclasses with Murail, Ferneyhough, Fuentes, Lindberg, Czernowin, Reynolds, and Aperghis among others. She has received prizes and distinctions from the Eighth International Jurgenson Competition for Young Composers at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the 2015 Call for Scores by the Odysseia ensemble in Belgium, the 2016 Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Music Workshop/Competition in Austria, the TACTUS 2017 Young Composers Forum in Belgium and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2017 National Composers Intensive (USA).
In her latest works she has been exploring the relationship between music and poetry, proposing some musico-linguistic analogies that arise from a study of phonology, syntax and semantics, interacting and exchanging techniques and essential structural qualities. Since August 2016 Erika Vega has been engaged in artistic research on the relationship between music and movement, in collaboration with P.A.R.T.S. research studios, as part of the Advanced Master’s Program in Contemporary Music curated by ICTUS ensemble at the Royal Conservatory/School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium.