Declan is a composer and pianist interested in exploring the interface between sound and felt space. At Colorado College (after he renounced his Political Science major) he studied piano with Susan Grace and composition with Iddo Aharony and Jane Rigler. He is strongly committed to bringing the practices of contemporary music to new audiences and communities. In 2016, he founded the Tenebrae Ensemble at Colorado College, which served as a local platform for new music. In its first two years, Tenebrae has commissioned and premiered half a dozen new works, performed four standalone and several smaller concerts, and provided a community for people to create and discuss music freely. His music has been performed across the country and internationally.

Declan’s music is rooted in the interaction between people and their environment. His music poses questions about our understanding of space via sound through tender acts of amplification and through invoking the inner beauty of sounds both forgotten and scorned. His recent music has incorporated field recordings in synthesis with acoustic performers, often through the use of live electronics.

Jacob Lane is a composer, pianist, and educator who lives in Oakland, California. He is the pianist for the chamber groups Sl(e)ight Ensemble and Portato Portato. A member of The Music Teachers’ Association of California, Jacob teaches piano performance and music theory at The Alameda School of Music and New World Music Academy. Jacob holds degrees in music performance from Mills College in Oakland, CA (MFA), and Northern Vermont State University in Johnson, VT (BA). He has studied piano with Diane Huling and Robert Schwartz, and composition with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, Zeena Parkins, and James Fei. In addition to his own ensembles, Jacob's works have been performed by Colorado College's Tenebrae Ensemble (2018), and were featured in the 2017 Atlantic Music Festival.

Rhythmic, durational, and textural development are the base of Jacob’s compositions. His music often features a limited number of themes which are continuously developed throughout a work to create a diverse yet cohesive piece. His upcoming project, Scordatura Piano (2019), explores an alternate tuning he derived from the superimposition of two scales in just intonation. jacoblanemusic.com

John Ivers is a Bay Area composer and improviser exploring hybrid creative practices. Traversing both acoustic and electronic mediums, Ivers engages intimate sonic textures, unique improvisational voices, and dynamic musical structures to unravel traditional composer-performer relationships. Ivers work has been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Quartetto Indaco, Amaranth Quartet, Aperture Duo, Brooklyn College’s ConTempo Ensemble, and by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s Intersection workshop. His work has been featured at the soundSCAPE, highSCORE, Walden CMR, Cluster, and Atlantic music festivals, and his recent collaboration with Roscoe Mitchell on Distant Radio Transmission has been featured by the Orchestra of the SEM, Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, at Ostrava Days Festival, and at the de Young Museum. Ivers is an also an active clarinetist and improviser, performing with Dirt and Copper, hi duo, and Portato Portato.

Laura Steenberge is based in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. As a performer, she sings and plays viola da gamba, contrabass, piano, guitar and other things, in traditional and untraditional song styles. As a composer, she primarily writes vocal music. As a scholar she researches connections between music and language. Her current research is about the compositional practices of medieval composers of Byzantine chant, a study that has inspired a body of creative work about ritual and metaphors of the supernatural. She will be graduating from Stanford University in June 2016 with a DMA in music composition.

*Portato Portato* is an Oakland / Santa Cruz based performance trio, playing original works and select compositions from the 20th and 21st centuries. They are committed to presenting experimental and otherwise unheard music, as well as highlighting the processes of the composer-performer relationship in new music creation.

**Jacob Lane** is a composer, pianist, and teacher who lives in Oakland, California. He works with Sleight Ensemble and Portato Portato. Jacob is a member of the Music Teachers Association of California, and teaches piano performance and music theory at The Alameda School of Music and New World Music Academy. 

In 2011, Jacob received his BA in Music Performance from Johnson State College, in Johnson, Vermont where he studied composition with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, and piano performance with Diane Huling. In 2015, he received his MFA in Chamber Music Performance from Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied composition with Zeena Parkins and Roscoe Mitchell, and piano performance with Robert Schwartz. Jacob was a composer in the 2017 Atlantic Music Festival. 

**Jon Myers** (b. 1988 in Boston, MA) is a composer and percussionist based in Santa Cruz, CA. He creates music for a variety of settings, from fully notated acoustic pieces to live electronic feedback music. Much of his output has been rigorously process-based and statistically controlled, often involving repetition and cycles to shape the flow of time via mnemonic markers and temporal shifting. Lately, he has been working on quarter-tone Disklavier studies and just-intoned fanfares for arbitrarily tuned choirs of bamboo flutes.
Myers’ compositions have been performed by Orkest de Ereprijs (Netherlands), S.E.M. Ensemble (New York), Wild Rumpus (San Francisco), Now Hear Ensemble (Santa Barbara), and the Lightbulb Ensemble (Santa Cruz). 

Myers is a doctoral student in Algorithmic Music Composition at UCSC, working primarily with Larry Polanksy. In 2014, Myers completed a Master of Arts in Music Composition from Mills College in Oakland, CA, where he studied with James Fei, Zeena Parkins, and Chris Brown. Previously, he studied with Anthony Braxton and Alvin Lucier as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, where he was awarded the Gwen Livingston Pokora Prize for music composition. 

Bay Area flautist **Michelle Lee** is a classically trained performer, new music enthusiast, improviser, and composer of electronic and electro-acoustic music currently living in Oakland, CA. Lee has attended the Conservatory of Music at University of the Pacific, and holds a degree in flute performance from Mills College. Her teachers and mentors include Michelle Caimotto, Matt Krejci, Bonnie Lockett, Maggi Payne, and James Fei. Her works and practice draw from extended techniques, natural and scientific worlds, and mysticism, as well as explore the ambiguity of reconciling the disparate: her artistic and cultural influences, the seen and unseen, texture and feeling. Current works investigate the body, ritual, intuition, and text through both traditional and experimental notation, multimedia, and performance art.