Ann DuHamel: Prayers for a Feverish Planet: New Music about Climate Change, Vol. 1

Ann DuHamel

Hailed as “an impeccable artist” (Edie Hill), a “forward thinking classical pianist” (Midwest Record), and “a delight for the ears and the soul” (Encuentro Universitario Internacional de Saxofón, Mexico City), pianist Ann DuHamel enjoys an eclectic musical career. Her performances have, so far, spanned 22 countries and 37 United States, including Carnegie Weill Recital Hall. Recent performances include venues in Medellín, Colombia, and Luzern, Switzerland, as well as a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 that garnered 3rd place from The American Prize in Piano Performance (concerto) — The Lorin Hollander Award, 2025. Her debut album, Rückblick: New Piano Music Inspired by Brahms on the Furious Artisans label, has been lauded as “an extraordinary, fascinating CD, musically very strong ... so passionate, technically excellent and inspiring” (Piano Bulletin).

Ann’s series Prayers for a Feverish Planet responds to the climate crisis with 60+ new works from composers around the world, including new works she commissioned from Gabriela Lena Frank and Libby Larsen. La Circular: Revista de Cultural Rural y Circular (Spain) wrote that her performance of works from this project at the 2023 Porto Pianofest “demonstrated … the ability of classical music in general, and the piano in particular, to transmit the concerns and thoughts of the contemporary world.” A 2023-24 McKnight Artist Fellow, she currently serves as Professor of Music at the University of Minnesota Morris, where she is the recipient of the 2025 Faculty Distinguished Research Award; as UMM’s 2026 Founders Scholar, she has crafted a series considering Chopin and Rzewski through the lens of Artivism. Ann is an avid bibliophile, ravenous chocoholic, eccentric gardener, Futurama fan, piano nerd, tea drinker, walking enthusiast, and yoga devotee.

Erick Tapia

Born in Mexico City, Erick Tapia completed his composition studies at the Faculty of Music of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he studied with Gabriela Ortiz and Francisco Cortés-Álvarez. In 2019, he was a scholarship holder of the Cátedra Extraordinaria Arturo Márquez at UNAM, where he studied for a year with the renowned Mexican composer. In 2020, he was also selected for the Young Creators program of Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA). He has received multiple awards, including first prize at the First National Composition Competition for Symphony Orchestra #EstarMejor (2020), organized by the School of Fine Arts of Universidad Panamericana; first prize at the 2021–2022 Emerging Composers Fellowship (Concertia, Houston, Texas, USA); and third prize at the Raíces Orchestra Competition (2021), organized by the Secretary of Culture of Jalisco and the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2021, he became the first Mexican student selected by the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing to have a work performed at the International Forum of the Alliance for Music Education (CCOM). His music has been performed by soloists and ensembles in Mexico, the United States, Costa Rica, Colombia, China, and Finland, and by major Mexican ensembles such as the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Eduardo Mata Youth Orchestra of UNAM.

Karen Lemon

Australian composer Karen Lemon counts amongst her qualifications a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Sydney (on Schoenberg’s post-tonal music c. 1910) and a License in Dalcroze Eurhythmics from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Her music has been performed in locations as far afield as Sydney, Los Angeles, New York and Cambridge, and by such distinguished performers as Thomas Hutchinson, Artur Cimirro and Gwion Thomas. Karen has composed music by commission or on request for CAMS, Hourglass Ensemble and the University of Bristol Schola Cantorum, and several of her works have been prizewinners in composition competitions, including Gesualdo Six, the Renée B. Fisher Award and Opus Dissonus. As a performer, though Karen is a pianist by training, she was most active as a chorister and vocalist, notably as a foundation and lifetime member of the Sydney-based new music choir The Contemporary Singers and as founder and director of and arranger for the pop-jazz a cappella ensemble The Five Skins. Karen has worked as a lecturer in Musicology at the University of Sydney and the University of Tasmania, and enjoys Associate Artist representation with the Australian Music Centre. She currently divides her time between Australia and France.

Laura Schwendinger

Laura Schwendinger, composer of Artemisia, winner of the 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Opera award, was the first composer to win the Berlin Prize. A Professor of music composition at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, her works have been championed by Dawn Upshaw, Jennifer Koh, Janine Jansen, Matt Haimovitz, the Arditti, JACK and Spektral Quartets, International Contemporary Ensemble, Eighth-Blackbird, Juilliard, American Composers Orchestra, and the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra of Hungary. Her music has been performed at Kennedy & Lincoln Centers, Berlin Philharmonic, Wigmore & Carnegie Halls, Miller Theater & Théâtre Châtelet, Tanglewood, Aspen, Talis and Ojai Music Festivals. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and First Prize of the 1995 ALEA III International Competition, as well as multiple fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Copland House, Fromm, Koussevitzky and Bogliasco Foundations, MacDowell and Yaddo Colonies. Her music has been called “captivating, artful and moving,” “music of infinite beauty,” in the New York Times, as well as “the genuine article...onto the “season’s best list,” in the Boston Globe. Recent premieres include her second opera, Cabaret of Shadows, a Fromm Commission produced by Musiqa in Houston, Nightingales for Eleanor Bartsch and Ariana Kim, a consortium commission with the Dubuque & UW Symphony Orchestras, and a harp concerto, Second Sight, for Atlanta Symphony Principal Harpist Elisabeth Remy Johnson, commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the Emory University Orchestra program, a solo cello work, commissioned as part of Matt Haimovitz’s Primavera Project, Ghost Music for the Chameleon Arts Ensemble, and Silent Springs for Cantori New York’s 40th anniversary concert at Merkin Hall. Her third opera, about Margaret Fuller, will premiere April 28, 2026, at Symphony Space in New York. The San Francisco Classical Voice reviewed her opera Artemisia as “sumptuous on every level,” and Colin Clarke wrote of her JACK CD QUARTETS, “the sheer intensity of the music is spellbinding…the passion shines through like…light.”

Juhi Bansal

“Radiant and transcendent,” the music of Juhi Bansal weaves together themes celebrating musical and cultural diversity, nature and the environment, and strong female role models. Her music draws upon elements as disparate as Hindustani music, the spectralists, progressive metal, musical theatre and choral traditions to create deeply expressive, evocative sound-worlds. As an Indian composer brought up in Hong Kong, her work draws subtly upon both those traditions, entwining them closely and intricately with the gestures of western classical music.

Recent projects include Love, Loss and Exile, a song cycle on poetry by Afghan women commissioned by Songfest; Songs from the Deep, a new orchestral work inspired by humpback whale songs commissioned by the Oregon Mozart Players; and Waves of Change, a digital operatic short on womanhood, identity, and clash of cultures inspired by the story of the Bangladesh Girls Surf Club. Working across orchestra, choral music, opera, chamber music, art song and electronics, recent seasons have included commissions from the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, Virginia Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Beth Morrison Projects, Choral Arts Initiative, New York Virtuoso Singers, and more. Her music has been featured on several Grammy-nominated albums, and is regularly performed throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. A conductor as well as composer, Bansal has been awarded fellowships by the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera, the Atlantic Music Center, Seasons Music Festival, Oregon Bach Festival Composer’s Symposium, and the Pacific Music Festival. She frequently premieres the work of other composers and accompanies singers at the piano.

Ian Dicke

Ian Dicke is a composer, musician, and software designer inspired by the intersection of technology and social-political culture. Praised for his “refreshingly well-structured” (Feast of Music) and “uncommonly memorable” (Sequenza 21) catalogue of works, Dicke’s music has been commissioned and performed by ensembles and soloists around the world, including the New World Symphony, Alarm Will Sound, Paul Dresher Ensemble, Invoke, Hocket, and pianists Vicky Chow, Nadia Shpachenko, Vicki Ray, and Aron Kallay, among others. His work has been featured on several international festivals, including MATA, the Cabrillo Festival, and the ISCM World New Music Days. In 2022, Dicke’s two act opera Roman received two fully staged performances produced by the Los Angeles organization Synchromy. His debut album Cowboy Rounds was recently released on the label Bright Shiny Things.

Dicke has received grants, awards, and recognition from the Hellman Foundation, Barlow Endowment, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, New Music USA, New York Youth Symphony, ASCAP, and BMI, among others. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to research interactive musical interfaces and environments in Stockholm, Sweden and has served as an artist in residence at various institutions, including the MacDowell Colony and Atlantic Center for the Arts. From 2013-2023 Dicke was the founder and curator of the Outpost Concert Series, which connected Riverside, California’s musical culture with groundbreaking artists across the national contemporary music landscape. Dicke is a Professor of Composition at the University of California, Riverside and founder of Novel Music, a software company that distributes innovative Max for Live devices.

Daniel Blinkhorn

Daniel Blinkhorn is a composer, digital media artist and field recordist currently residing in Sydney, Australia. Although often working in the electroacoustic and videophonic domains, his output includes chamber, symphonic and wind orchestra works, sound installations, music for film, dance, radiophonic composition and various hybrid/inter-media environments. Blinkhorn’s works are widely performed, exhibited and presented internationally, and his compositions have received numerous international and national composition citations. He is a 2011 Churchill Fellow (Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, Australia), has worked in a wide variety of creative, academic, research and performative contexts, and is a lecturer in the Composition and Music Technology faculty at the Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. Blinkhorn is also a represented composer at the Australian Music Centre, and the representative member/councilor for composition at Music Australia (2012–2020).

Blinkhorn has undertaken numerous composition residencies, and self-directed recording intensives internationally (La Muse En Circuit, Paris, ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Institute for Music and Acoustics, Germany, CMMAS – Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras, Mexico, Centre de Arts, Montreal, Visby international Centre for Composers, Sweden and Islao de Arts, Madagascar) and is an ardent location and environmental sound recordist, where he has embarked upon a growing number of expeditions throughout the high Arctic/ North Pole region of Svalbard, Africa, Amazon, West Indies, Northern Europe, Middle East, Alaska, Mexico, Cuba, Madagascar and Australia.

Judith Shatin

Composer Judith Shatin is renowned for music that seamlessly spans acoustic and digital realms. Called “highly inventive on every level” by The Washington Post, her music combines an adventurous approach to timbre with dynamic narrative design and a keen awareness of the sonic landscape of modern life. She has become ever more drawn to responding to current challenges through her music, resulting in such pieces as For the Birds, Floes, Singing the Blue Ridge, Storm and Terra Infirma. At the same time, her music is replete with references to literature, the visual arts and the sounding world, both natural and built. Her compositions are performed in concert halls and at festivals such as Carnegie Hall, The Concertgebouw, The Kennedy Center, Aspen, BAM Next Wave, Moscow Autumn and the Tel Aviv Opera House. She has been commissioned by organizations and acclaimed ensembles including the Barlow Endowment, the Fromm Foundation, Kronos Quartet, Da Capo Chamber Players, the Dutch Hexagon Ensemble, Berlin PianoPercussion and The American Composer’s Orchestra. The Society of American Music has selected Shatin as their 2026 Honorary Member in recognition of her contributions to American Music. Other honors include four National Endowment for the Arts Composer Fellowships and grants from the American Music Center, Meet the Composer, the Virginia Commission for the Arts and Americans For the Arts Animating Democracy project. A two-year retrospective at Shepherd College was sponsored by the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Arts Partners Program, culminating in her boundary-breaking folk Oratorio Coal. Shatin has held residencies at the Bellagio Center, La Cité Internationale des Arts, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Yaddo. Her music is published by American Composers Edition, E.C. Schirmer, Hal Leonard and Wendigo Music, and appears on over 30 commercial recordings. Shatin is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia, where she founded the Virginia Center for Computer Music.

Gunter Gaupp

Gunter Gaupp is a composer based in Memphis, Tennessee, whose work combines interests in noise composition and genre music. His recent releases utilize folk melodies, chaotic textures, and improvisation to explore themes of interpersonal connection and accessibility. In particular, his work looks to utilize visceral, relatable gestures along with familiar tonal languages and extended techniques in order to encourage meaningful connection in shared spaces. A recent partnership with Crosstown Arts in Memphis resulted in a performance project wherein the performers and audience were challenged to connect over a shared experience despite not sharing physical space. The resulting piece focused on the use of gestures centered around breath, heartbeat, and vocalization to encourage players to become more intimately aware of their physical relationship to one another and extend a sense of physical vulnerability to an audience. Gunter served as a composer-in-residence at Crosstown Arts in Spring 2022 where he built upon the themes in this piece and worked toward the release of his debut album. Gunter’s work has been recognized in calls for scores by TEMPO Ensemble, Liminal Space Ensemble, and New York Dance & Arts Innovations, and was recently featured in Boston New Music Initiative’s Living Music Summit. Recent premieres include collaborations with loadbang, Hypercube, Julius Quartet, Four Corners Ensemble, and Quijote Duo.