Julie Zhu
Composer

Julie Zhu is a composer, artist and carillonneur. Her work is conceptual and polydisciplinary, operating on a broad definition of algorithm and sound architecture. She interweaves various media, from mural painting to sculpture to performance to video, and collaborates with artists from different fields to create experimental chamber experiences. Her scores range from hair cast in transparent resin to just intonation software to traditional orchestration, and have been performed by Ensemble Linea, EXAUDI, JACK quartet, Quasar, Line Upon Line, Marco Fusi, TAK ensemble, among others. As a professional carillonneur, Zhu has presented concerts and lectures throughout Europe and North America. She was appointed carillonneur at Saint Thomas Fifth Avenue in New York City in 2015. Zhu studied at Yale University (BA mathematics, BA art), the Royal Carillon School (Diploma carillon performance), Hunter College (MFA art), and currently she is a doctoral student in music composition at Stanford University and participates in the Cursus at Ircam.

Wu Wei
Sheng master and composer

The artistic talent of sheng virtuoso Wu Wei, goes far beyond the traditional limits of his Chinese instrument, the sheng, which has a history of more than 3000 years and continues into the 21st century.
The sheng, a mouth organ, formed from a bundle of bamboo reeds and wrapped in a metal bowl, sounds like the singing phoenix of a Chinese legend: silvery and fleeting as the wind.
Wu Wei's radiant and transparent sound and the infinite possibilities of his instrument in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm and polyphony have led him to collaborate with many artists and ensembles, both chamber and orchestral, to improvise in solo concerts or with large jazz bands, to play electronic music and to participate in baroque music performances.
Wu Wei's desire to experiment with new sounds and types of musical expression and his extraordinary ability to create an individual world from each performance is reflected in his collaborations with composers writing concertos for sheng and orchestra especially for him: Huang Ruo (The Color of Yellow - 2007), Guus Janssen (Four Songs - 2008), Unsuk Chin (Su - 2009), Jukka Tiensuu (Teoton - 2015), Bernd Richard Deutsch (Phaenomena - 2019), Ondrej Adamek (Lost Prayer Book - 2019), Donghong Shin (Anecdote - 2019), Enjott Schneider (Change - 2003 and several other concerti). Wu Wei has created over 250 contemporary works since 2000.

Alexis Baskind
Sound engineer and electronic music producer

Alexis Baskind is a musician, sound engineer and computer music director. Trained as a sound engineer in Benoit Fabre's class at the Conservatoire National de Région d'Aubervilliers/la Courneuve, he also studied science and technology (electrical engineering, signal processing, applied mathematics). In 1999 he joined Ircam, where he carried out research in room acoustics, earning a doctorate in 2003. Since then, he has collaborated with numerous composers, musicians and production structures, including Ircam, the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, the Campagnie des Musiques à Ouïr and the Centre international de recherche musicale (Nice). He has worked with composers Philippe Leroux, Beat Furrer, Hanspeter Kyburz, Héctor Parra, Pedro Amaral, François Paris, Philippe Hurel, Vladimir Tarnopolsky, Alexandros Markéas, Fabián Panisello, Turgut Erçetin, Rebecca Saunders, and director Jean-François Peyret, among others, in studio productions and creations of dance, theater, and music mixing electroacoustics with traditional instrumentarium. He regularly collaborates on artistic and technical projects requiring the development of specific solutions for sound processing and design, and interfacing with gestural or visual capture technologies. Former professor of sound engineering at the Hochschule der populären Künste FH (Berlin) and teacher in the Tonmeister program at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold, he regularly gives specialized courses in sound engineering and electroacoustic realization within conservatories, universities, and institutes dedicated to music creation.