
Brian Balmages
Brian Balmages is known worldwide as a composer and conductor who equally spans the worlds of orchestral, band, and chamber music. His music has been performed by groups ranging from professional symphony orchestras to elementary schools in venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, Sydney Opera House, Toronto Centre for the Arts, and many more. He is a recipient of the A. Austin Harding Award from the American School Band Directors Association, won the 2020 NBA William D. Revelli Composition Contest with his work Love and Light, and was awarded the inaugural James Madison University Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Visual and Performing Arts.
In the same year, he was commissioned by his other alma mater, the University of Miami, to compose music for the inauguration of the institution’s 6th president, Dr. Julio Frenk. His music was also performed as part of the 2013 Presidential Inaugural Prayer Service, which was attended by both President Obama and Vice President Biden. As a conductor, Mr. Balmages enjoys regular engagements with all-state and regional ensembles as well as university and professional groups throughout the world. Notable guest conducting appearances have included the Midwest Clinic, Western International Band Clinic, Maryborough Music Conference (Australia), College Band Directors Conference, American School Band Directors Association National Conference, numerous state ASTA conferences, Teatro dell’Aquila (Italy), and others. He is an elected member of the American Bandmasters Association and has taught instrumental conducting at Towson University where he also served as Assistant Director of Bands and Orchestras. Currently, he is Director of MakeMusic Publications and Digital Education for Alfred Music and MakeMusic.
Richard Gordon Flauding
(February 2, 1954 – July 26, 2021)
Richard Flauding is an American arranger, composer, songwriter, and classically trained guitarist who has recorded several contemporary jazz and pop music albums and received an ASCAP Plus Award. His commissions include arrangements for guitar and orchestra, jazz ensembles, big band, contemporary jazz instrumentals, as well as choral and symphony productions. He has written, arranged, and recorded in many styles, including jazz and classical, and conducts professional and amateur jazz ensembles.


Adam Gorb
Adam Gorb (born 1958) studied Music at Cambridge University and Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he graduated with the highest honors including the Principal’s Prize, in 1993. His compositions include orchestral, ensemble, chamber, solo and choral works, and have been performed, broadcast, and recorded world-wide. In the UK, his compositions have had performances at contemporary music festivals in Huddersfield, Cheltenham, Hampstead, and Highgate, Spitalfields and Canterbury, and he has had concerts entirely devoted to his music in the UK, the USA and Canada.
He has been featured composer at Luton and Bromsgrove music clubs and Chetham’s International Summer School. His concert band composition Metropolis has won several prizes, including the Walter Beeler Memorial Prize in the USA in 1994. Three other Wind Ensemble works: Towards Nirvana, Adrenaline City and Farewell have won British Composer awards. His works have been performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Maggini Quartet, the BBC Singers, the Tokyo Kosei Wind Ensemble, the Royal Marines and the Liverpool 10/10 ensemble.
In 2010 a CD devoted to his works was released on the NMC label, and in the same year a large-scale work Eternal Voices was premiered in Exeter cathedral. His first opera Anya17 (2012) was premiered in Liverpool and Manchester to great acclaim – there have subsequently been productions in Germany in and the USA. 2016 saw the premiere of In Solitude, for Company by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and the release of another CD Dancing in the Ghetto. His second opera The Path to Heaven was given its first performances in Leeds and Manchester in 2018 with further productions in the USA in 2019 and 2020. In 2022 a CD of piano music: 24 Preludes and Velocity was released on the Toccata label with the pianist Clare Hammond.
Professor Adam Gorb is Head of School of Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. He has a PhD in Composition from the University of Birmingham and has taught at universities in the USA, Canada, Japan, and many European countries.
Oswald Huynh
Oswald Huỳnh is a composer whose works navigate Vietnamese aesthetics and tradition, language and translation, and the relationship between heritage and identity. Huỳnh writes music that explores timbre and texture to create evocative soundscapes rooted in storytelling, culture, and memory. Huỳnh has collaborated with artists such as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, American Composers Orchestra, Akropolis Reed Quintet, and Tacet(i) Ensemble. He has received honors from the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, Musiqa, and New Music on the Bayou. Huỳnh holds a BA from Lewis & Clark College and a MM from the University of Missouri.


Victor López
Victor López is an American composer, conductor and administrator.
Dr. López holds music education degrees from the University of Florida and Florida International University, including a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree in Educational Administration and Supervision.
For sixteen years he served as director of bands at Mays Junior High School and Miami Senior High School, and for the past nineteen years, he has worked as an administrator in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. He was the principal at G. W. Carver Middle School, which under his leadership received the National Blue Ribbon School of Excellence Award and Miami Senior High School, his alma mater.
Mr. López also served as Executive Director of the Division of Life Skills and Special Programs in MDCPS. He has also achieved much success in music performance and education. Among many of his accomplishments, Dr. López was named the “1978 Miami-Dade County Public Schools Teacher of the Year” and the “1979 State of Florida Teacher of the Year.”
In addition to being the former lead trumpet player and arranger for the Miami Sound Machine, he has recorded and performed with various artists and has appeared in numerous music videos. Although always busy, Dr. López has found time to serve his community as a councilman in the Doral Community Council in Miami, Florida. He has also participated in the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTACS) committee, which drafted model arts education licensing standards and supporting materials for national certification. Additionally, he was a founding board member of the Florida Schools Music Association, a non-profit organization that oversees all of the music activities in the state of Florida. He is in constant demand as a guest speaker, clinician/conductor, adjudicator, and commission writer across Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Major publishing companies have published his compositions and he currently serves as an exclusive composer, arranger and clinician for Alfred Music Publishing Company with over 450 publications to his credit. Dr. López has recently joined the Fischler School of Education and Human Services staff at Nova Southeastern University as Senior Director/Program Professor in the Office of Licensure and Compliance.
Doug Spata
Though he is a clarinetist by training, Doug Spata’s experience as an orchestra teacher has led him to compose primarily for strings. His unique style and focus on playing skills have made his works favorites among teachers, students and audiences and his award-winning music has been performed around the U.S. and the world. Besides music for student musicians, Mr. Spata has composed many other orchestra and chamber works for ensembles of all sizes.

Doug Spata was born in St. Louis, Missouri but spent a short span of his childhood in Kandy, Sri Lanka – an experience that sparked his lifelong interest in world cultures that informs much of his music. Mr. Spata’s other interests include art, movies and history, all of which have influenced his compositions. He currently lives in Ohio.

Stephen Michael Reich
Stephen Reich (born October 3, 1936) is an American composer known for his contribution to the development of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich’s work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay, “Music as a Gradual Process”, by stating, “I am interested in perceptible processes.
I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” To do so, his music employs the technique of phase shifting, in which a phrase is slightly altered over time, in a flow that is clearly perceptible to the listener.
His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns, as on the early compositions It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), and the use of simple, audible processes, as on Pendulum Music (1968) and Four Organs (1970). The 1978 recording Music for 18 Musicians would help entrench minimalism as a movement.Reich’s work took on a darker character in the 1980s with the introduction of historical themes as well as themes from his Jewish heritage, notably Different Trains (1988).
Reich’s style of composition has influenced many contemporary composers and groups, especially in the United States. Writing in The Guardian, music critic Andrew Clements suggested that Reich is one of “a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history”.
John Towner Williams
John Williams (born February 8, 1932, Queens, New York, U.S.), American composer who created some of the most iconic film scores of all time. He scored more than a hundred films, many of which were directed by Steven Spielberg.
Williams was raised in New York, the son of a percussionist in the CBS radio orchestra. He was exposed to music from a young age and began studying piano as a child, later learning trumpet, trombone, and clarinet. He started writing music early, trying to orchestrate his own pieces as a teen.

In 1948 Williams moved to Los Angeles with his family, where he studied composition privately and also briefly at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1951 he was drafted into the U.S. Air Force, and during his service he arranged band music and began conducting.
After leaving the air force in 1954, Williams briefly studied piano at the Juilliard School of Music and worked as a jazz pianist in New York City, both in clubs and for recordings. He later returned to California, where he worked as a Hollywood studio pianist for such films as Some Like It Hot (1959), West Side Story (1961), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). During that time he also began composing for television, writing songs for such shows as Wagon Train and Gilligan’s Island.
In the early 1970s Williams made a name for himself as a composer for big-budget disaster films, including The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and Spielberg, then an aspiring director, asked Williams to score his first feature, The Sugarland Express (1974). Thus began a decades-long partnership between the two, with Williams scoring some of Spielberg’s best-known films, including shark-attack thriller Jaws (1975), sci-fi flicks Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the rollicking Indiana Jones series (1981, 1984, 1989, 2008), dinosaur action movie Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequel The Lost World (1997), Holocaust biopic Schindler’s List (1993), war drama Saving Private Ryan (1998), biopic Lincoln (2012), and many more.
Throughout his extensive career Williams created some of the most memorable music in movie history, including the scores and iconic theme songs for nine of the Star Wars films (1977, 1980, 1983, 1999, 2002, 2005, 2015, 2017, and 2019) and the first three Harry Potter films (2001, 2002, and 2004). He also composed themes for some of the NBC network’s news programs and for the 1984, 1988, 1996, and 2002 Olympic Games. He was known especially for his lush symphonic style, which helped bring symphonic film scores back into vogue after synthesizers had started to become the norm.
In addition to his film work, Williams was well known as a concert composer and conductor. He composed symphonies as well as concertos for various instruments. In 1980 he became the conductor of the Boston Pops, touring and recording extensively and sometimes leading the orchestra in live renditions of his popular film scores. After his retirement in 1993, Williams remained a laureate conductor for the Pops and guest conducted for such orchestras as the London Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 2009 he composed and arranged a song for the inauguration ceremony of U.S. Pres. Barack Obama.
Williams received many honors and awards for his work. He was nominated for more than 50 Academy Awards and won 5: for his adaptation of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1971), for Jaws (1975), for Star Wars (1977), for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and for Schindler’s List (1993). He was also the recipient of 3 Emmy Awards and more than 20 Grammy Awards. In 2004 he was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor, and in 2009 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to an artist by the U.S. government, for his achievements in symphonic music for motion pictures.