From her first recordings for Kapp Records, and her highly acclaimed Carnegie Hall recital debut as an artist on the Sol Hurok roster, Ann Schein’s amazing career has earned her high praise in major American and European cities and in more than 50 countries around the world. She has performed with conductors including George Szell, James Levine, Seiji Ozawa, James dePreist, David Zinman, Stanislaw Skrowacewski, and Sir Colin Davis, and with major orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Baltimore Symphony, the Washington National Symphony, the London Philharmonic, the London Symphony, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. She has performed at the White House during the Kennedy administration.  From 1980 to 2000, she was on the piano faculty of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. She has been an artist-faculty member of the Aspen Music Festival and School since 1984. Her performance of the Rachmaninoff 3rd Concerto during the 2006 season with conductor Joseph Silverstein was one of the most recent of over 100 performances of this work since the beginning of her career. She has been chosen to hold the Victoria and Ronald Simms Chair, awarded to a member of the Aspen piano faculty for two years, for the summers of 2006 and 2007, now extended to 2008 in special recognition of her teaching prominence.  Recent recordings include a Schumann album of solo works on Ivory Classics, a Chopin CD including the 24 Preludes and the Sonata in b minor on MSR Classics, and a recording of the Walton Violin and Piano Sonata with violinist Herbert Greenberg on the Delos label.   During the 2006-07 season she has performed concertos of Mozart, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms in major cities across the United States in a continuing series of appearances. During the summer of 2007 she has appeared in the Great Lakes Festival, the Indiana Piano Festival, the Kent-Blossom Festival, and the Eastern Festival as well as the Aspen Festival, in a combination of solo recitals, chamber music, and master classes. In December 2007, she performed Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 3 in Bloomington, Indiana with Lawrence Leighton Smith conductor.

Composer and author David Schiff was born in New York City on August 30, 1945. He studied composition with John Corigliano and Ursula Mamlok at the Manhattan School of Music, and with Elliott Carter at the Juilliard School where he received his D.M.A.  He holds degrees in English literature from Columbia and Cambridge Universities. His major works include the opera Gimpel the Fool, with libretto by I. B. Singer, the Sacred Service, written for the 125th anniversary of Congregation Beth Israel of Portland, Slow Dance, commissioned by the Oregon Symphony, Stomp, commissioned by Marin Alsop for Concordia, and recorded by the Baltimore Symphony conducted by David Zinman, Solus Rex, for bass trombone and chamber ensemble commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and premiered by David Taylor, Speaking in Drums, a concerto for timpani and string orchestra commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra for its timpanist, Peter Kogan, Vashti, a retelling of the Book of Esther for mezzo-soprano, clarinet and piano, commissioned by the Gold Coast Chamber Music Festival and 4 Sisters, a concerto for jazz violin and orchestra, which premiered in Cambridge, England in 1997 and received its American premiere with Regina Carter and the Detroit Symphony in January 2004, New York Nocturnes, a piano trio written for Chamber Music Northwest, Pepper Pieces, arrangements of songs by Jim Pepper for jazz violinist Hollis Taylor and strings, Canti di Davide, a concerto for clarinet and orchestra premiered by David Shifrin and the Virginia Symphony in October 2001, Singing in the Dark, for Alto Saxophone and String Quartet, premiered at Chamber Music Northwest in July 2002 by Marty Ehrlich and the Miami String Quartet, All About Love, a song cycle for mezzo-soprano, tenor and chamber ensemble which premiered at Chamber Music Northwest in July 2004 and Canzona for brass, percussion and strings commissioned by the Seattle Symphony and premiered by them in January 2005 conducted by Gerard Schwarz.  He is the author of The Music of Elliott Carter (Cornell University Press) and George Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (Cambridge University Press) as well as many articles on music for the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Opera News and Tempo.

Jonathan Bernard is the author of The Music of Edgard Varèse (Yale University Press), which won the Young Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory in 1988; the editor of Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937-1995 (University of Rochester Press); and a contributing editor to Music Theory in Concept and Practice (University of Rochester Press).  His articles on such topics as the history of French and German music theory, the music of Varèse, Bartók, Carter, Messiaen, Ligeti, Feldman, and Zappa, minimalist aesthetics and analysis, pitch-spatial theory and analysis, recent American tonal music, the history of twentieth-century compositional practice, and rock & roll of the 1960s have appeared in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Music Perception, Perspectives of New Music, American Music, Musikometrika, Musical Quarterly, and Contemporary Music Review, and in edited collections from Faber & Faber, University of Rochester Press, Cambridge University Press, Schott, Routledge, Greenwood Press, and Garland Publishing.  
Bernard has served as editor of Music Theory Spectrum (1988-1991) and as chair of the Publications Committee, Society for Music Theory (1998-2001). He is currently a member of the editorial boards of Perspectives of New Music, American Music, and Twentieth-Century Music, and a member of the advisory board for the Yale University Press monograph series, Composers of the Twentieth Century (Allen Forte, general editor).  Bernard has received support in the past from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Amphion Foundation, the Paul Sacher Stiftung, and the Graduate School Fund and Royalty Research Fund at the University of Washington.

Alan Theisen (b. 4 October 1981; Port Huron, Michigan) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Music Theory at Florida State University and a graduate of the University of Southern Mississippi.  He is currently writing his dissertation on the late orchestral compositions of Elliott Carter.  Theisen was recently awarded the Best Student Paper prize at Music Theory Southeast 2008 for his essay "From Piano to Orchestra (and Back) with Boulez’s Notations pour orchestre"; other research interests include György Ligeti, Michael Brecker, and film music.   Also active as a composer, Theisen’s pieces reflect both a modernist musical language and emotional accessibility; recent works include "Songs to Nowhere" for mezzo-soprano and piano and Allegro Capriccioso, the latter of which was commissioned by the 2009 Samford University Honor Bands.  Composer Dimitri Terzakis commends Theisen's Saxophone Concerto as being “the product of a unique talent.”  Theisen has performed at two World Saxophone Congresses (Montreal 2000 & Minneapolis 2003), is a journalist for the online periodical Sequenza21, and has chaired the Music Theory Forum at FSU for two years.  He lives with his wife Misty and their two cats in Tallahassee, Florida.