guest composers and lecturers
Artjom Kim (Uzbekistan) – composer, conductor
Fabio Nieder (Germany) – composer, conductor
Joël Bons (Netherlands) – artistic director, composer
Rokus de Groot (Netherlands) – musicologist, composer
Wim Henderickx (Belgium) – composer
Klaas de Vries (Netherlands) – composer
Mark Armanini (Canada) – composer, co-artistic director VICO and BC Chinese Music Ensemble

participating composers
Francisco Castillo Trigueros (Mexico)
Ali Authman (Kurdistan)
Stefano Pierini (Italy)
Thierry Tidrow (Canada)
Ran Xia (China)
Thanasis Deligiannis (Greece)
Cynthie van Eijden (Netherlands)
Yu Oda (Japan)
Igor Iofe (Russia)
Fátima Fonte (Portugal)
Yanwa Guo (China)
Cinzia Nistico (Italy)
Danai Bletsa (Greece)
Tristan Carter (New Zealand)
Rafael Giménez de la Vega (Mexico)
Hui Tak Cheung (Hong Kong)
Luisa Antoni (Italy)
Aura Rascon (Mexico)
Hardi Kurda (Sweden)

and more...

Artjom Kim was born 1976 in Bekabad, near Tasjkent, in Uzbekistan. He started his musical education (playing the bajan) at the age of ten. In 1995 he took his first composition lessons with the famous Uzbek composer M. Tadjiev and later with Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky. In 2001 he received his Master s Degree at the Tashkent State Conservatory. During his studies he got involved with Ilkhom XX, the international contemporary music festival. Many of his compositions were premiered at this festival, while it also offered him an opportunity to start conducting: he conducted several first performances of music by young Uzbek composers, as well as Uzbek first performances of Requiem by Alfred Schnittke, Les Noces by Stravinsky and the Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. Artjom Kim regularly composes for film and theater. Over the past few years he was guest composer with the Nieuw Ensemble for which wrote four works: Stabilis/Mobilis, L'autre plaine, De Profundis and Rag Music for european and non-european instruments. In 2004 Kim has organized the Omnibus Ensemble in Tashkent, which has become the first chamber ensemble concentrated in modern music in Central Asia. Speaking about composing, Kim says: 'To me the most fascinating moment in music is when opposite processes in a composition collide, thus creating tension and energy. It is this energy that determines the development and form, and is my main motive for writing music'.



Fabio Nieder, geboren in Triest – einer Stadt, in der zahlreiche Kulturen aufeinandertreffen – ist wie kaum ein anderer ein Vertreter der heutigen multikulturellen Gesellschaft. Er studierte Klavier bei Roberto Repini und Komposition bei Guilio Viozzi am Konservatorium seiner Heimatstadt und erhielt 1977 ein Stipendium der „Jeunesses Musicales“ zum weiteren Studium beim polnischen Komponisten Witold Lutoslawski in Groznjan (Kroatien). Als Komponist hat er wichtige Preise und Auszeichnungen erhalten, seine Werke werden bei wichtigen Festivals aufgeführt und er erhielt Auftragsarbeiten wichtiger Institutionen. Einer seiner Bewunderer ist Luciano Berio. Zur Zeit ist Fabio Nieder Dozent am Konservatorium von Triest. Fabio Nieder ist ein feinfühliger Musiker, der die ihm eigene Poesie in vollkommener Unabhängigkeit entwickelt hat. Nieder ist ein unvergleichlicher Instrumentalist, ein Illusionist, der es versteht, seine Zuhörer zu verzaubern.





Joël Bons was born in Amsterdam. He studied guitar and composition at the Sweelinck Conservatory and visited the summer courses of Franco Donatoni in Siena and the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. In Freiburg he continued his studies with Brian Ferneyhough. Bons composed chamber and ensemble works such as Attacca, Variations, Sextet, Tour, Bref, Draught, First Edition, Feeststuk, Flard and Tour à Tour. His music has been performed by the Asko Ensemble, Atlas Ensemble, Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Nieuw Ensemble, Radio Chamber Orchestra and Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

In 1980 Joël Bons co-founded the Nieuw Ensemble. He has been reponsable for virtually all programmering of this group. Besides he organised festivals such as Complexity? (1990), Rules and Games (1995), Improvisations (1996), the multi cultural Festival of Plucked Instruments (1998), and The Refined Ear (on microtonality, 2002). Bons has worked as free-lance artistic adviser for organisations such as the Holland Festival, Gaudeamus, ISCM (Dutch section), Donemus, Rotterdam Arts Council and the Concertgebouw. Bons supervised all cd recordings of the Nieuw Ensemble and produced a solo cd by violinist Irvine Arditti. Together with film director Frank Scheffer he made a television documentary on Boulez’ Eclat.

In 1988 Bons visited World Music Days in Hong Kong. He then traveled through China where he became aquainted with a new generation of Chinese composers. In 1991 the Nieuw Ensemble presented these remarkable talents to western audiences, which marked the international breakthrough of new Chinese music.
In 1998 Joël Bons and the Nieuw Ensemble were awarded the Prince Bernhard Fund Music Prize for their ‘markedly lively and adventurous programming which can be described as groundbreaking, both in the literal and figurative senses of the word’.
In 2002 Bons did artistic research in the Near East and Central Asia and founded the Atlas Ensemble, a unique chamber orchestra uniting musicians from China, Central Asia, the Near East and Europe. For his work with the Atlas Ensemble he was granted the prestigious Amsterdam Prize for the Arts 2005. In 2005 he was appointed lector at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam where he is now teacher and coordinator of the composition department. At the request of the Festival d'Automne à Paris Joël Bons curated the music programme of ‘Scène artistique du Moyen-Orient’, for which he visited the Middle East in the spring of 2007.



 

Rokus de Groot (*1947 Aalst, Netherlands), musicologist and composer, conducts research on music of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially in the field of aesthetics and techniques of composition, and in the field the interaction between different cultural traditions, particularly in the perspective of present-day (re)conceptualisations of past and present religious and spiritual traditions in relation to music. He also has published on Edward Said and polyphony/counterpount, in the musical sense, as a metaphor and as an intellectual mode. 
He obtained his MA in musicology with honours at the University of Amsterdam (Frank Ll. Harrison, Ton de Leeuw) and and his PhD at the University of Utrecht (Paul Op de Coul, Jos Kunst). As a musician he received teaching from Cor Visser and Willem Vogel (organ) and Ernst Heins (Central-Javanese court gamelan). He obtained a diploma of cantor-organist in 1969.
He holds the chair of musicology at the University of Amsterdam, after occupying a personal chair ‘Music in the Netherlands since 1600’, at the University of Utrecht (1994-2000). In 1993/4 he was a fellowat NIAS. 
In 2009 he was visiting professor at the American University of Cairo (AUC), Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, and in 1992 and 2003 at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City.
On the invitation of American University of Cairo, he delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture 2009, 'Contrapuntal Intellectual: Edward Said and Music'.
He has given lectures and guest courses at universities and music institutions in West- and East-Europe (a.o. The Conservatories of Moscow, Athens, Ghent and Tirana), India (Delhi at ARCE; Mumbai at the University of Bombay and NCPA; Chennai at Prakriti Foundation, Banares at Hindu University), the Americas (UCLA, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and South-Africa (Johannesburg), about intercultural exchange, about Western compositions based on musical models from Indian and Turkish classical traditions, as well as about the history and theory of Western music.