Thomas Buckner
Biography Thomas Buckner
Thomas Buckner
For decades, baritone THOMAS BUCKNER has dedicated himself to the performance and promotion of new and improvised music, collaborating with a host of new music luminaries including Robert Ashley, Noah Creshevsky, Tom Hamilton, Earl Howard, Matthias Kaul, Leroy Jenkins, Bun-Ching Lam, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, Chinary Ung, Christian Wolff, and many others. Buckner has appeared at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berlin Spring Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Prague Spring Festival, and the Angelica Festival of Bologna, among others. He is featured on over 50 recordings, including six solo albums. For the past 31 years, Buckner has curated and produced the Interpretations New Music Series in New York City, seeking to support the relationship between composers and the growing community of virtuoso new music interpreters.
Bun-Ching Lam
Described as “alluringly exotic” (The New York Times), and “hauntingly attractive” (San Francisco Chronicle), the music of Bun-Ching Lam has been performed worldwide by such ensembles as the Macao Orchestra, American Composer’s Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, The Vienna Radio Orchestra, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, and the Albany Symphony. Born in Macao, Lam served as the composer-in-residence of the Macao Orchestra from 2008-2016. She began her piano study in her native city, then further pursued her music education in Hong Kong and the United States. She holds a B.A. in Piano Performance from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California at San Diego. She has taught at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and served as Visiting Professor at the Yale University School of Music and at Bennington College. She has been recognized with numerous awards including a Rome Prize, the highest award at the Shanghai International Composers’ Competition, two NEA grants, fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received commissions from the American Composers Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, Macao Orchestra, Chamber Music America, CrossSound Festival, Bang On a Can Festival, Sequitur, Continuum, Ursula Oppens, and the Arditti String Quartet. She also served as the Music Alive! Composer-in-Residence with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Lam’s work has been recorded on Mutable Music, CRI, Tzadik, Nimbus, and Koch International. She now divides her time between Paris and New York.
