In Counterpoint

Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Caroline is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. This year’s projects include the score to “Fleishman is in Trouble” (FX/Hulu), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), the score to Josephine Decker’s “The Sky Is Everywhere” (A24/Apple), music for the National Theatre’s production of “The Crucible” (dir. Lyndsey Turner), Justin Peck’s “Partita” with NY City Ballet, a new stage work “LIFE” (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust), the premiere of “Microfictions Vol. 3” for NY Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth, a live orchestral score for Wu Tsang’s silent film “Moby Dick” co-composed with Andrew Yee, two albums on Nonesuch (“Evergreen” and “The Blue Hour”), the score for Helen Simoneau’s dance work “Delicate Power”, tours of Graveyards & Gardens (co-created immersive theatrical work with Vanessa Goodman), and tours with So Percussion featuring songs from “Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part” (Nonesuch), amid occasional chamber music appearances as violist (Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, La Jolla Music Society). Caroline has written over 100 works in the last decade, for Anne Sofie von Otter, Davóne Tines, Yo Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, LA Phil, Philharmonia Baroque, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Aizuri Quartet, The Crossing, Dover Quartet, Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Miro Quartet, I Giardini, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Ariadne Greif, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Britt Festival, and the Vail Dance Festival. She has contributed production to albums by Rosalía, Woodkid, and Nas. Her work as vocalist or composer has appeared in several films, tv series, and podcasts including The Humans, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, Beyonce’s Homecoming, Tár, Dolly Parton’s America, and More Perfect. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

GRAMMY Award winning cellist Andrew Yee has been praised by Michael Kennedy of the London Telegraph as “spellbindingly virtuosic”. Trained at the Juilliard School, they are a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet who have released several albums to Critical acclaim including Andrew’s arrangement of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” which Thewholenote.com praised as “ . . .easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I’ve heard.” They were the quartet-in-residence at the Met Museum in 2014, and have won the Osaka and Coleman international string quartet competitions. Their newest recording of the string quartets of Caroline Shaw won a GRAMMY for best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble performance.As a soloist last season Andrew performed John Taverner’s The Protecting Veil and Strauss Don Quixote. In 2019 they won the first prize at Oklahoma University’s National Arts Incubation Lab for their pitch of a wearable garment that translates sound into vibrations for the hard of hearing. They like to make stop-motion videos of food, draw apples, cook like an Italian Grandma and have developed coffee and cocktail programs for award-winning restaurants (Lilia, Risbobk, Atla) in New York City. Their solo project “Halfie” draws on their experience as a bi-racial and non-binary person in having access to multiple communities at once, while not feeling at home in any of them. The works commissioned and on the concerts will feature a wide range of composers all for solo cello. They play on an 1884 Eugenio Degani cello on loan from the Five Partners Foundation.

Indigo Cook is a percussionist, dancer, and interdisciplinary artist. They graduated from Westminster University with a degree in percussion performance, where they studied with Dr. Devin Maxwell and dance faculty including Natalie Desch, Sara Pickett, and Molly Heller. As a freelance artist based out of Salt Lake, they teach and perform with various local groups in addition to managing individual and community-based creative projects, primarily in the experimental and avant garde fields. Indigo is the founder/facilitator of Interdisciplinary Arts Collective, a multi-disciplinary performance group through which they love collaborating with other artists, non-artists, and anti-artists. They are also the artistic director for ARC: Art for the Recovery Community, an annual art festival based in Salt Lake City. They relish any opportunity to make strange things, listen deeply, and remain ever in flux.  

Dr. Jane R. Fjeldsted is the director of choirs at Westminster University where she conducts the Chamber Singers and Westminster Community Choir. She is the founder and conductor of Salt Lake Singers as well as VOCALIS, a small select ensemble. Since 2015 she has been conductor of the Davis Interfaith Choir & Symphony, a community music organization of 375 members, created to unify people of different faiths.
As a studio and recording professional, she is both singer and conductor for independent commercial ventures recording scores for movies, television, and online games. She recently taught choir for at-risk high school students in Davis School district, northern Utah. With a wide variety of ensembles, Dr. Fjeldsted has had the opportunity to compose and arrange music specifically for these groups, recently completing several successful commissions. Dr. Fjeldsted has served on boards of both the Utah Music Educators Association and American Choral Directors Association of Utah.

Pianist Kimi Kawashima enjoys a committed career as a teacher, performer, and arts advocate. She was born and raised in Bowling Green, Ohio. An avid chamber musician, Kimi has curated and performed in critically acclaimed programs ranging from Schubert’s Winterreise at the Grand Teton Music Festival to  “Intersections: A Musical Perspective of Cy Twombly” at the Menil Collection in Houston, performing John Cage’s seminal Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. She has performed for composers Andrew Norman, Thomas Osborne, Tristan Murail, Frederic Rzewski and Chen Yi, and has recently given the Utah premieres of works by Wang Lu, Karen Tanaka, and Anthony R. Green. Kimi graduated from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and completed her DMA in piano performance at Rice University, as a student of Brian Connelly, where she was the winner of the Shepherd School Concerto Competition, performing the Concerto for Piano and Strings by Alfred Schnittke with the Shepherd School Symphony Orchestra and conductor James Gaffigan. She has recorded for MSR Classics and performed on the Hyperion recording of Saint-Saens’ beloved Carnival of the Animals, with pianist Jason Hardink and Thierry Fischer and the Utah Symphony. She is currently Director of Music and Piano faculty at Westminster University. She was appointed by the Governor of Utah to serve on the Music Board of the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.

Noriko Kishi has appeared regularly with the Utah Symphony and the Canyonlands New Music Ensemble. Formerly, she was Principal Cellist and featured soloist with the New World Symphony, and a member of the Sacramento Symphony. Ms. Kishi has performed with notable conductors, including Leonard Bernstein, Georg Solti, and Seiji Ozawa. She has also participated in master classes with Yo-Yo Ma, and members of the Quarneri and Cleveland Quartets. An advocate of contemporary music, Ms. Kishi was artist-in-residence for the Salty Cricket Composers Collective and premiered solo and chamber works by Utah composers. She earned her bachelor’s at the Eastman School and her master’s at the New England Conservatory. Her principal teachers were Irene Sharp, Robert Sylvester, and Bernard Greenhouse. Noriko has taught at the San Francisco School of the Arts, San Francisco Community Music Center, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Preparatory Department. A member of the Music in the Mountains Festival Orchestra (Calif.) for twenty-six years, this is her twenty-fifth year at Arizona Musicfest.

Soprano Hilary Koolhoven has delighted audiences from the United States to Europe with her warm voice and dramatic acting skills. With experience in opera, musical theatre, and recital repertoire, she has showed excellence in a wide range of roles: from the flexibility of singing required from the title character of "La Cenerentola," to achieving the multi-layered and comedic personality of Margaret in "The Light in the Piazza." Hilary graduated from the University of Utah with a Master of Music degree and received her Bachelor of Arts from Westminster University in Salt Lake City. Along with performing in university settings, she has worked with organizations such as Utah Opera, Ohio Light Opera, and the Franco-American Vocal Academy. 

Haruhito Miyagi is a composer, organist, harpsichordist, and hurdy gurdyist with a background in Kodály and music theory pedagogy. His compositions have been described as “elegant and cathartic” and have been performed by such groups as Orquestra Sinfônica do Teatro Nacional Claudio Santoro of Brasilia, Musica Nostra Kórus of Budapest, the Battery String Quartet of Chicago, and by members of the Utah Symphony. He was a fellow at the Deer Valley Emerging Quartets and Composers Music Festival in 2013 and also a recipient of a Barlow Endowment for Music Composition commission in 2020. Miyagi is published with Kontrapunkt Music and Takabayashi publishing houses and is recorded under the Sanctus Records label. As an organist, Miyagi has performed throughout Europe and the United States.

Emily Nelson holds degrees in voice, music history, and early music performance from Indiana University and the University of Utah, where she completed her doctorate in vocal performance. Her passion for teaching stems from her deep love of sharing music as a performer. She co-founded Utopia Early Music, a 501(c)(3) organization that gives historically informed performances of medieval, baroque, and renaissance music in Salt Lake City. She is an Adjunct Professor at Westminster University, where she teaches voice and World Music, and an Associate Instructor at the University of Utah, where she teaches World Music and Survey of Jazz. She also teaches voice and songwriting at Eva Carlston Academy, a residential therapy high school that uses the arts to empower students.

Violist John T. Posadas enjoys an active career as a performer and educator. Recitals have taken him across the country and abroad with appearances at the Kennedy Center, Tanglewood Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Santa Fe Opera, Grand Teton Music Festival, Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Forth Worth Chamber Music Society, and the Chautauqua Institute. As a chamber musician, he has won top prizes at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and is a founding member and the violist for the Baumer String Quartet. Orchestrally, he has performed with the Boston Symphony, Houston Symphony, Santa Fe Opera, Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Naples Philharmonic, among many others. JT joined the Utah Symphony as a member of the viola section in September 2020. Before joining the Utah Symphony, he had been a resident artist and adjunct professor of viola and chamber music at the University of South Florida School of Music. A sought-after guest teacher and clinician, Posadas has taught masterclasses at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, University of Toronto, University of North Texas,, University of Florida, and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. For his extraordinary service in the arts, John was named an official Kentucky Colonel at the age of 13. 

Violinist Karen Wyatt began her orchestral career with a 3 year fellowship at the New World Symphony in Miami, FL, under the leadership of Michael Tilson Thomas. During her fellowship at New World, Karen toured internationally and participated in a residency at the Opera Comique in Paris. She also performed as a principal musician with many notable conductors such as Manfred Honeck, Robert Spano and Itzhak Perlman.Karen holds a Bachelors of Music and a Performer’s Diploma in violin performance from Indiana University where she studied with Paul Biss. She has also studied with Pavel Pekarsky, Alexander Kerr and Jennifer Ross. Karen especially enjoys performing chamber music, baroque music, and teaching. When not performing with the orchestra, Karen enjoys gardening and baking.

Raised in Japan, 郁金香 Jin-Xiang Yu is a soprano with roots from China, Japan, Korea, and Russia. She grew up in a family of musicians and painters, speaking Japanese and Mandarin Chinese and learning English and Spanish at international schools. After over a decade of studying, performing, and teaching languages and musical arts in New York City, she has recently decided to call Salt Lake City, Utah, her new home.  She has performed with Yale Philharmonia in Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi under Maestro Peter Oundjian. She sang the role of Papagena (Der Zauberflöte) with Yale Opera, was the soprano soloist with the Yale Concert Band in the performance of 岁月甘泉 / Ask the Sky and the Earth, and took part in the Mile-Long Opera by David Lang produced on the High Line in New York City and in Mother of Us All with the Juilliard School and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, she sang the opera mono-drama Chhlong Tonle (Crossing the River) by Liliya Ugay/Sokunthary Svay with the support of the Opera America IDEA Grant. As a Bonfils-Stanton Apprentice Artist at Central City Opera, she sung the role of Annina in La Traviata and la Japonaise in Boismortier’s Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse and covered Aldonza in Man of La Mancha. She holds a degree in theatre dance from The American Musical and Dramatic Academy, a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and a Bachelor of Music in vocal performance from CUNY Queens College, and a Master of Music in Opera from Yale School of Music. She is a recipient of the Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award and the William Orr Dingwall Korean Ancestry Grant. She has been a semi-finalist of the Young Concert Artist Competition, a finalist in the Kaleidoscope Instrumental and Vocal Competition, and the first-place winner of the Lyra NY International Vocal Competition in Art Song.