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Originally from Florida, Simone Seales is a Glasgow-based cellist and performance artist. They focus on improvisation, interdisciplinary collaboration, poetry, and devising music for theatre. Through their collaborative and creative process, they prioritize play, silliness, and connection.
Simone is passionate about exploring sound, how sound can reflect emotional states of being and how emotions are embodied. Their creative influences come from Black feminist leaders such as Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur and bell hooks. Within Simone's creative work, they centre Blackness, sexuality, intersectional feminism and anti-racism. They believe Western Classical musicians are capable of making meaningful social change. Their debut album, I believe in living, is a responsive improvisation to the poem Affirmation by Assata Shakur. Through solo cello and voice, Simone Seales springboards off of Shakur’s evocative language to create a sound world which holds space for discomfort, beauty, hope, and grief. |
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Sonia Allori is a disabled composer, performer, researcher and community music therapist. Her PhD in composition explored music, text and gender and her practice has a combination of words and music at its core, inclusion and an insatiable curiosity for all things. She is a multi-instrumentalist and has been known to sing from time to time. Her work is often inspired by nature and an appreciation of humour in everyday life. Sonia is a performer/ composer with Sonic Bothy (an inclusive experimental music ensemble based in Glasgow) and is researching D/deaf performance at RCS. Recent commissions: Deconstructing Tartan (2023) – Drake Music Scotland/ Sound Festival – Clarinet & accordion, Random eddies (in the space time continuum) (2023) – Drake Music Scotland – Piano, EWI, clarinet and track, Robots & Dinosaurs (2024) – Drake Music Scotland/ Nordic Days – baritone & digital instruments. Forthcoming work in 2025 includes Adventures in captioning which explores text, improvisation and live creative captioning and Piper which reimagines the Pied Piper story in music, dance, film and XR.
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Kate Sagovsky is a composer from Stirlingshire studying for a PhD at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where she is supervised by Emily Doolittle, having previously studied at the Royal Academy of Music. Having worked for much of her life outside creative practice, her music centres around interdisciplinary collaborations which explore her interests in miscommunication, awkwardness, translation and mishearing.
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Rūta Vitkauskaitė is a composer of concert music: her ensemble and orchestral compositions have been awarded numerous prizes and performed in festivals including Apeldoorn, Sound (UK), Gaudeamus, Operadagen (NL), Nordbeg, Halland (SE), Gaida, NOA (LT), Q-O2 (BE), SUSA (DK), broadcasted on BBC Radio 3, Deutschlandradio Kultur, Lithuanian Radio and TV. Her music has been performed by outstanding ensembles and orchestras in UK and Europe, including BBC Singers, Manchester Collective, Ensemble 360, Ligeti Quartet, Kaleidoscope, Apartment House, Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, Martynas Levickis, Rakhi Singh, Jonathan Powell, and many others.
Ruta has a PhD in Composition from the Royal Academy of Music in London, and in 2024 she was received Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (ARAM) honour. In 2021, she was recipient of theestigious Royal Philharmonic Society composers' scheme, and is multiple winner of Lithuanian Composers' Union Best Composition of the Year. Her current project 'Modern Chants' exploring onomatopoeia in ancient folk music, was shortlisted for Scottish Awards for New Music 2023. Rūta's music is published by Composers Edition. Rūta is a passionate advocate for spreading new music to young people and wider communities. Since moving to Scotland, she initiated CoMA, Contemporary Music for All, Glasgow branch, of which she is Music Director, and in 2023 was appointed as Deputy Director at Sound Festival (Aberdeen). Rūta is a Lecturer in Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. |
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Dr. Angela Elizabeth Slater is a UK-based composer, whose compositional voice focuses on musically mapping aspects of the natural world into the fabric of music. Nominated for an Ivors Classical Award for her work, Through the Fading Hour, her music has been described as ‘intricate...and often ravishingly scored’ and making ‘deft and vivid use of instrumental colour’.. Slater collaborates with performers, ensembles, and initiatives worldwide to musically explore sounds, colours, and textures.
Her work The Louder the Birds Sing received its Dutch premiere by Residentie Orkest den Haag after being selected as the winner Gaudeamus’s orchestral category. Slater’s recent creative projects include fellowships at the Modern-Music Festival,; Hong Kong Intimacy of Creativity Festival, working with the Viano Quartet on Distorted Light; Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, for a commission of Where skies aflame; and Creative Dialogues Festival, for the world premiere of a tulip, iron. She has previously held Composition Fellowships at Tanglewood Music Center, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Society to name a few and also been in Mendelssohn Scholarship Award. In 2024-2025 she is looking forward to several exciting performances and commissions including performances of Kármán line for symphony orchestra, Orbits edge for chamber ensemble, and This is Jane mini opera scene for 2 sopranos and piano as part of her compositional fellowship at Aspen Music Festival. She is also enjoying working on her work Mountains become Oceans concerto for harp and percussion which is due to be premiered by Amarillo Symphony Orchestra with conductor George Jackson, harpist Rosanna Moore and percussionist Hannah Weaver on 28th February and 1st March 2025. |
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Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea is an architect of new sounds and expressions as a performer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist, specializing in contemporary classical repertoire. Trained as an operatic coloratura, she uses her voice as a mechanism of avant-garde performance art, creating “maniacal shifts of vocal production and character... like an icepick through the skull” (Jason Eckardt). She has performed as a soloist at Roulette Intermedium (New York City), Constellation Chicago, Sound Scotland, Kings Place (London), Southbank Centre (London), the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the National Concert Hall (Dublin), the Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), the Hidden Door Festival (Edinburgh), and the Casa da Música (Porto). She has collaborated with leading new music ensembles and bands including the Riot Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, the City of London Sinfonia, Sō Percussion, and Post Coal Prom Queen. http://www.stephanielamprea.com/
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Jessica Kerr is originally from Nottingham. She moved to Glasgow in 2005 following an undergraduate music degree at Bristol University and postgraduate study with Hannah Roberts at the Royal Northern College of Music.
Jessica is exploring the intersection of the arts with nature, positive climate action and environmental social justice. Recent projects in this sphere include Stories of People and Trees, a commission from the Scottish Ecological Design Agency Song shall be our Measure, and a joint commission by Cove Park and the Argyll Community Rainforest Network for artistic engagement in the temperate rainforests of Scotland. Cellist with Glisk, the Kentigern Quartet and the GRIT orchestra, Jessica has a wide range of orchestral experience within Scotland and beyond, and is a Senior Musician at Big Noise Govanhill. She plays on an English cello dating from 1810 by Furber, and was generously supported by the Arts Trust of Scotland in acquiring the instrument. www.storiesofpeopleandtrees.com |
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