June in Buffalo 2025: Peter Gilbert

 Peter Gilbert will be joining us for June in Buffalo 2025!

“Filled with the ghosts of sounds. He captures a dark, yet hopeful wonder through variation in color, mood, and the semblance of melodies. ...Ethereal, ambient, and benignly haunting like a morning fog on the ocean. There is always something hidden, just beyond what is happening, that seems to slowly reveal itself but never quite does.” 

– Kraig Lamper, American Record Guide, 2011

Peter Gilbert writes: “I love the feeling of being enveloped in a musical experience, of disappearing into sound. I search for musical moments that can conjure up secret passageways to transcendence—that we performers, collaborators, listeners can conjure together.”

Peter Gilbert's work combines traditional instrumental writing with elements of improvisation, live-performed electronics, and other media in works for the concert hall as well as for multi-media theater, film, and installation. In his words, he attempts to “become enveloped in a musical experience, disappearing into sound.”

Gilbert has held artist residencies with numerous institutions in Europe and the US including ZKM | Institut für Akustik und Musik, Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), and the Aaron Copland House and festivals such as the Tage Aktueller Musik, Nürnberg (Germany) and the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival. Accolades and commissions have come from the Barlow Foundation, New Music USA, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, Kennedy Center Education, NRW Fonds Neues Musiktheater, the Russolo Foundation, the Look & Listen Festival, the Third Practice Festival, the Washington International Composers Competition, Stadtstheater Darmstadt, the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges, and Theater Russelsheim.

Gilbert taught at Harvard University, Wellesley College, and the Cleveland Institute of Music, and was co-founder of the Young Composers Program at CIM and its Co-Directer from 2003-2010. Since 2010 he has taught composition at the University of New Mexico.  Gilbert's second portrait album for New Focus Recordings was named a Best of 2021 by Sequenza21. His work as a composer, performer and producer can also be heard on Innova Recordings, GM Recordings, Sono Luminus, Affeto, Centaur, and at http://petergilbert.net.

June in Buffalo 2025: Karola Obermüller

We are thrilled to that Karola Obermüller will be joining us for a second consecutive year at June in Buffalo.

Karola Obermüller composes in search of the unknown, with layers upon layers of obscured material buried deep beneath a surface that is sometimes sumptuous, sometimes bristling with rhythmic energy. Her unique voice began forming in collages of sound made with tape recorders as a child and evolved later with composition degrees from the Meistersinger-Konservatorium Nürnberg, the Hochschule für Musik Saar, and the University Mozarteum Salzburg. Her sense of rhythm and form was forever changed by studying Carnatic and Hindustani classical music in Chennai and Delhi, India. 

 A Ph.D. at Harvard University brought her to the US where she taught at Wellesley College and at the University of New Mexico, co-directing the composition area and the annual John Donald Robb Composers’ Symposium music festival, before joining the Department of Music at UC San Diego. She also lives and works part of the year in Europe and has been a visiting artist at ZKM, Deutsche Akademie Rom, Centro Tedesco di studi Veneziani, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Leipzig Gewandhaus and Hanns Eisler House, and IRCAM as well as serving as a resident composer for new music festivals at Hochschule für Musik Nürnberg, Conservatorio Piccinni di Bari (Italy), University Mozarteum Salzburg, Festival Virtuosi Century XXI, Recife (Brazil), Samobor Music Festival Croatia, and others. Obermüller frequently serves as an adjudicator for competitions such as the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Hochschulwettbewerb, the Femfestival, and the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse.  

reflejos distantes - Recorded at June in Buffalo 2024

Center for 21st Century Music · reflejos distantes

Her music, often political, always dramatic, includes operas for Staatstheater Nürnberg, Theater Bielefeld, Theater Bonn, Theater Heidelberg, and Stuttgart’s Musik der Jahrhunderte. The emotional juxtapositions of story suspended in a tableau architecture that one finds in her operas can be heard in her concert works as well which include commissions from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Music Foundation, New Music USA, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Saarländischer Rundfunk, and numerous renowned soloists and ensembles.

Obermüller works with lauded contemporary music ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble), Arditti Quartet, Neue Vocalsolisten, Ekmeles, MusikFabrik, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, E-MEX Ensemble, Iridium Quartet, New Thread Quartet, Soli fan tutti, Pegnitzschäfer Klangkonzepte, Ensemble Adapter, New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble, ensemble phorminx, sonic.art saxophone quartet, Splinter Reeds, Gewandhaus-Ensemble Avantgarde, and AsianArt Ensemble. She has received numerous awards including the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis, Darmstädter Musikpreis, the New York Musicians Club Prize, the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer’s Award, the Bavarian Youth Prize for Composition (awarded by Zubin Mehta), the John Green Prize for Excellence in Music Composition, and the 1st Prize of the “New Note” International Composers Competition Croatia.

Recordings of several of Obermüller’s works have been released on CD including Jacqueline Leclair’s solo CD (New Focus Recordings, Music for English Horn Alone, FCR272), a record by harpsichordist Luca Quintavalle (Brilliant Classics 96476: Mousikē—the art of the muses), a CD with the Voices of the Pearl project (Volume 3), and a disk by Duo Harmonium d’art et Pianoforte (forthcoming on dreyer-gaido). Having been selected by the German Music Council to be a part of the Contemporary Music Edition, the first portrait CD of her music was released by WERGO in 2018 and a second CD is forthcoming on New Focus Recordings.

June in Buffalo 2025: Ming Tsao

We are happy to announce Ming Tsao as a senior faculty member at June in Buffalo 2025.

Dr. Tsao is the newly appointed Birge-Cary Chair in Music Composition in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo, and we are glad that he has agreed to join us as a senior faculty member.

For Ming Tsao, composition is an act of deep interrogation. His music dissects sound and syntax, pulling apart traditional musical structures to expose something raw, intricate, and startlingly new. Tsao brings this rigorously exploratory approach to both the concert hall and the classroom, offering composers an opportunity to engage with one of contemporary music’s most precise and philosophical minds.

Tsao’s work often reimagines the very foundations of musical expression—his compositions unfold with a microscopic attention to detail, where texture, articulation, and phrasing become the building blocks of a radical new syntax. Yet beneath this structural intensity lies a profound sensitivity to beauty, albeit one that resists easy sentimentality. He says:

Mine is a materialist music whose sound world lies outside of consciousness rather than a sound world fully endowed with consciousness, with the hopes of placing the listener in a space where one is required to rethink their personhood within a larger domain of life. Noise and the violence enacted upon my music through rhythm and meter produce a music whose very integrity is damaged and violated, signaling the opposition and resistance that certain lyrical procedures meet or defy. This opposition and resistance can open our listening to a different sense of musical expression, an expression that comprises sounds before they are fully recruited into the action of human agency.

Poetry and text are recurring touchstones in Tsao’s work, not just as sources of inspiration but as integral components of his compositional language. His upcoming large-scale opera, Mudan ting (The Peony Pavilion), is a re-working of the Chinese Ming dynasty Kunqu opera of the same name, which will have its world premiere at the National Theatre Mannheim in 2026. Tsao’s through-lines of poetry, text, temporal displacement of poetic materials, and history (musical or otherwise) combine in this two-hour work.

June in Buffalo 2025: David Sanford

David Sanford will be joining us for June in Buffalo 2025!

Few composers move as effortlessly between musical worlds as David Sanford. His work draws as much from jazz and big band traditions as it does from contemporary classical and experimental music, creating a sound that is bold, high-energy, and unapologetically genre-fluid. Whether writing for large ensembles, orchestras, or his powerhouse David Sanford Big Band (formerly the Pittsburgh Collective), Sanford thrives in spaces where stylistic boundaries blur.

Much of Sanford’s music pulses with rhythmic drive and a deep-rooted sense of groove, who embrace complexity with fire. Works like Black Noise and Seven Kings showcase his ability to fuse intricate orchestration with visceral, improvisation-inflected energy. His collaborations with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, JACK Quartet, and the Meridian Arts Ensemble reflect a composer equally at home in the concert hall and the jazz club.

V-Reel, with the Pittsburgh Collective

Sanford has received commissions from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Speculum Musicae, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, the Fromm and Koussevitzky Foundations, and the Barlow Endowment; his works have been performed by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra under Kent Nagano, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra under Marin Alsop, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and the Chicago Symphony Chamber Players among others.

His honors include the Rome Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Radcliffe Institute, and he was the arranger for cellist Matt Haimovitz’s Grammy Award-nominated album Meeting of the Spirits. The title track of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s recording of the composer’s works, Black Noise, was named one of “The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2019” by the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/arts/music/best-classical-music.html).

He received degrees in theory and composition from the University of Northern Colorado, New England Conservatory, and Princeton University, and is currently Elizabeth T. Kennan Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College and the director of the David Sanford Big Band.

At June in Buffalo 2025, Sanford brings his singular voice as both a composer and mentor. His presence at the festival is an invitation to engage with a musical language that is electrifying, deeply considered, and always evolving. We look forward to his input at this year’s festival!

Sampler of Sanford's Recordings