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Guest Musicians
- Jennifer Ashe, soprano (Winter 2007)
- Michael Barrett, tenor (Winter 2007)
- Andrew Beer, violin (Winter 2007)
- Brian Calhoon, percussion (Spring 2011)
- Sebastian Chavez, bassoon (Winter 2007)
- William Cutter, conductor (Spring 2011)
- Melanie Dyball, violoncello (Winter 2007)
- Akira Fukui, bass (Winter 2007)
- Branden Grimmett, organ (Winter 2007)
- Jonathan Hess, percussion (Spring 2011)
- Martin Near, countertenor (Winter 2007)
- Andrew Shenton, conductor (Winter 2011)
- Teresa Wakim, soprano (Fall 2009)
- Henry C. Ward, oboe (Winter 2007)
 Brian Calhoon, percussion
percussionist for BANG!, June 2011
A San Francisco bay area native, Brian Calhoon enjoys combining
percussion, marimba, and voice in creative ways. He is equally
comfortable in a symphony hall, a theater pit, recording new works—and
even playing the marimba and singing simultaneously.
Brian has performed throughout Boston and San Francisco, including at
San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall, having worked with famed conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Edwin Outwater. Currently
residing in Boston, Brian is in demand as a freelance percussionist
and marimbist, and frequently premieres new works as the core
percussionist with the Juventas New Music Ensemble. He can be heard on
the GM Recordings, Innova, Dan Levitan Music, and Parma record labels.
Brian continues to adapt and commission new works for
marimba/vibraphone/voice (for one player) and has plans soon to record
an album of his unique repertoire.
A Bang On A Can Summer Festival fellow, composer Steve Reich praised
Brian's performance in Music for 18 Musicians following the 2009
concert of Reich's music. In the summers of 2003 to 2005, Brian toured
the United States and Europe playing in the front ensemble of the
Concord Blue Devils Drum & Bugle A-Corps. Brian has shared the concert
stage with Lyle Mays, Jack Van Geem, and Nancy Zeltsman as a
percussionist, marimbist, and a vocalist.
An admissions counselor at The Boston Conservatory, Brian also remains
involved in arts administration with Zeltsman Marimba Festival. He
holds degrees from Boston Conservatory and San Francisco Conservatory
of Music, and is a member of the Pi Kappa Lambda music honor society.
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 William Cutter, conductor
conductor for BANG!, June 2011
Dr. William Cutter is Senior Lecturer in Music and Director of Choral Programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is conductor of the M.I.T. Concert Choir and Chamber Chorus. A member of the conducting faculty and Director of Choral Studies at The Boston Conservatory since 2003, he conducts the Boston Conservatory Chorale and teaches graduate conducting. He has also held academic posts at the Boston University School for the Arts, the University of Lowell, and the Walnut Hill School for the Arts. He served as music director and conductor of the Brookline Chorus, an auditioned community chorus of eighty voices, for five seasons. Cutter currently serves as the artistic director for the Boston Conservatory Summer Choral Institute for high school vocalists and served as Chorus master and Associate Conductor of the Boston Lyric Opera Company from 2002–2007. For four summers he was conductor of the Boston University Young Artists Chorus of the Tanglewood Institute, and was music director and conductor of the Opera Laboratory Theater Company, as well as founder and music director of the vocal chamber ensemble CANTO which specialized in contemporary choral music.
As assistant to John Oliver for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, he has prepared choruses for John Williams and Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops. In May 1999, he prepared the chorus for two television tapings and their recently released “A Splash of Pops” which featured the premiere of “With Voices Raised” by composer of the Broadway musical Ragtime, Stephen Flaherty. In August 2002, Cutter prepared the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for their performance of Beethoven’s Symphony #9 under the baton of Sir Roger Norrington. In 2007, Cutter was guest conductor of the New England Conservatory Chamber Singers and the Chorus Pro Musica in Boston. During the summer of 2009, Cutter was chorus master for “Red Sox Album” CD recorded by the Boston Pops. He also prepared backup singers for a concert with James Taylor at Tanglewood in August 2009.
Cutter served on the faculty of the North Carolina Summer Institute of Choral Art and is in demand as a guest conductor and adjudicator throughout the United States and Canada. In 2002, he was asked to serve as a choral consultant for the Boston Symphony’s educational outreach program.
With degrees in composition, Cutter maintains an active career as a composer with recent performances by the Illinois State University School of Music Orchestra, Cantata Singers, PALS Children’s Chorus, Monmouth Civic Chorus, the New Jersey Gay Men’s Chorus, the Boston Pops, the New World Chorale in Boston, Melodious Accord of New York City, and Opera Omaha.
His music is published by E.C. Schirmer, Boston; Lawson and Gould, New York; Alfred Educational Publishers, Los Angeles; Roger Dean Publishers, Wisconsin; Shawnee Press; Pennsylvania; and Warner/Chappell of Ontario, Canada. His primary composition teachers included Pulitzer Prize winning composers David del Tredici and Bernard Rands.
As a professional tenor, he has sung with the premiere vocal ensembles in Boston, including the Handel and Haydn Society, Cantata Singers, Boston Baroque, Emmanuel Music, and the Harvard Glee Club. He has been a featured soloist on the Cantata Singers Recital Series and has been a recitalist on the M.I.T. faculty performance series.
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 Jonathan Hess, percussion
percussionist for BANG!, June 2011
A native of Minnesota, Jonathan performs with the South Dakota Symphony, the Boston Percussion Group, Marsh Chapel Collegium, and remains an active free-lance percussionist throughout the Midwest and New England regions. He is a founding member of the Axial Age Ensemble, which blends traditional music of Iran with contemporary ideas of Western chamber music. Hailed by the Duluth Tribune as an “engaging and eclectic mixture of world/ jazz/ and improvisational music [that] surges back and forth between different emotions,” the trio collaborated with composer Michael Terrati for the sound track to Jila Nikpay’s film, Rhythms of Tide, which premiered at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN and is now being shown in art museums and film festivals internationally. Jonathan recently returned from Ghana after an intensive study with xylophone masters Bernard Woma and Edmond Tijon. His performances can be heard on WBUR, NPR, Minnesota Public Radio, and Drive105 (Clear Channel). Equally active behind a drum kit, he has shared the stage with notable acts such as Lady Antebellum, the Black Eyed Peas, Nickel Creek, Indigenous, and others. Jonathan is a state certified educator and is the director of percussion at Lynnfield High School. He holds a B.M. in music education from St. Olaf College and a M.M. from the Boston Conservatory. His teachers include Nancy Zeltsman (marimba), Bernard Woma and Edmond Tijon (gile), Kevin Watkins, Dave Hagedorn, Samuel Solomon, and Keith Aleo (percussion), John Grimes (timpani), and Gordy Knutson (drum set).
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 Andrew Shenton, conductor
conductor for The Door to Paradise, March 2011
Andrew Shenton was born in England. His first professional music training was at The Royal College of Music in London, where he studied under a scholarship from The Royal College of Organists. While at the RCM he read for a B.Mus. degree at London University and was an organ scholar at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Professor Shenton moved to the US to study for a Master’s degree at the Institute for Sacred Music, Worship and the Arts at Yale University and then for a Ph.D. in musicology at Harvard University. As a student at the ISM he prepared for a ministry involved with the arts (with music as a primary focus), as he is interested in all aspects of spirituality and the arts. This is reflected in his Master’s thesis, which concerns the renaissance of sacred art in post-war Britain, and in his doctoral dissertation, which is a musico-linguistic study of the twentieth-century French mystic composer Olivier Messiaen.
Professor Shenton has a Master’s degree in organ performance from Yale, and holds the Fellowship diploma of the Royal College of Organists. Recently he has given recitals in such venues as King’s College, Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue (New York debut), and Washington National Cathedral. He has toured extensively in Europe and the US as a conductor, recitalist and clinician, and his two solo organ recordings have received international acclaim.
In addition to diplomas in both piano and organ Professor Shenton holds the Choir Training diploma of the Royal College of Organists. He has been the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards including a Harvard Merit Fellowship, Harvard’s Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, a Yale AlumniVentures Award and a Junior Research Fellowship from the BU Humanities Foundation.
Throughout his studies he has been particularly concerned with issues of historically informed performance practice. In addition, he has made an extensive study of voice production and vocal technique, and frequently acts as a repetiteur, coach and accompanist for singers. He has pioneered contemporary music in a variety of styles and has given more than forty world premieres by composers such as Geoffrey Burgon, Joe Utterback and John Tavener.
Professor Shenton’s first monograph Olivier Messiaen’s System of Signs: Notes Towards Understanding His Music (Ashgate, 2008) has received critical and popular acclaim. Professor Shenton has also written numerous articles, including most recently essays for collections on Messiaen published by both Ashgate and Cambridge University Press. He is editor of the collection Messiaen the Theologian (Ashgate, 2010) and is editing The Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (CUP, 2011). His research interests include Messiaen, Pärt, jazz, the church and the arts, music and language, music and spirituality, performance practice, music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and music of the world’s religions.
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