Aidan Gold is a composer, conductor, and percussionist from Seattle, Washington. His music is widely varied, but focuses on musical characterization, narrative and storytelling, and performer agency / interaction. He is fascinated with the idea of music as a social act – a game or ritual that we perform to allow us to communicate and connect with one another, defining, challenging, and expanding our individual and collective identities.

Aidan is currently pursuing a DMA in Composition at the Juilliard School. He studies with Andrew Norman. Aidan has a Master of Music in Composition from the Thornton School of Music, as well as a Bachelor of Music in Composition and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Washington. Aidan’s past composition teachers and mentors include Nina Young, Frank Ticheli, and Huck Hodge. He has written for a wide variety of ensembles including orchestra, wind ensemble, string quartet, percussion ensemble, fixed and interactive electronics, remote live ensemble, and many others. Aidan’s music has been played by the Seattle Symphony, the Juilliard Orchestra, the UW Wind Ensemble, the State Symphony Orchestra of Turkmenistan, the Student Symphony Orchestra of USC, the JACK Quartet, the Aizuri Quartet, the UCSB Ensemble for Contemporary Music, the UW Percussion/Modern Ensembles, the Talea Ensemble, the Inverted Space Ensemble, the Mivos Quartet, and others.

Some of Aidan’s pieces include: Ripple the Ocean of Eyes, a interactive orchestra piece in which the orchestra must react in real time to decisions made by the conductor and by each other; I’m Actually Just Making Stuff Up, a musical game about finding out who is improvising and who isn’t; Hard Weather, a song cycle about the melting glaciers and the effect of climate change on the ecosystems and characters dependent on the glaciers in collaboration with the poet Erin Lynch; Transmission Fog, a live remote performance project that examines communication and the struggle to understand each other across barriers; The Paradox of Stillness, a piece that explores stillness and repetition through a process-based accumulation of repeated patterns; For Whom do We “Perform”?, a piece for indeterminate instrumentation which features the musicians interacting with each other in many different ways, from playing a musical board game to trying to imitate each other’s lines in real time; and Parting Memory, a piece that explores the idea of musicians as actors portraying characters with distinct personalities that interact to tell a story. 

Aidan is also interested in how music works with other interactive artistic mediums. He is one of over 50 composers around the world to write music for Celeste: Strawberry Jam, a community mod for the game Celeste. He composed three tracks that each interact with the gameplay in a different way, including synchronizing blocks with asymmetrical meters and polyrhythms.

Aidan is also a conductor, and is passionate about working closely with performers from many different backgrounds to explore and innovate methods of performance and connections between musicians. He was the assistant music director of the Student Symphony Orchestra of USC from 2020-2021, where he created and led a remote improvisatory ensemble that explored new methods of making music together live remotely. Aidan has also conducted the UW Percussion Ensemble and UW Modern Ensemble in concert. He has studied conducting with Larry Livingston, Julia Tai, and Timothy Salzman.

Aidan also enjoys performing as a percussionist. He studied percussion with Bonnie Whiting at the University of Washington. He has performed as a percussionist with the Student Symphony Orchestra of USC, Thornton Edge, UW Orchestra, the UW Wind Ensemble, the UW Percussion Ensemble, the UW Modern Ensemble, the Northwest Mahler Festival Orchestra, Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, the Northwest Symphony Orchestra, and the Seattle Youth Symphony. Aidan also was the Percussion Coach for the young percussionists in the Bellevue Youth Symphony.

Aidan’s non-musical interests include Computer Science, Origami, and Orienteering. In his childhood he also was an avid mountain climber with his family, climbing Mt. Rainier in Washington when he was 7 years old, and visiting Everest Base Camp in a trip to the Himalayas when he was 8. Some of these trips serve as inspiration for his music, such as the piece Ladakhi Call, based on the landscape of Ladakh, an arid Himalayan region in North India where he and his family hiked during the summer of 2015.

Jonah Cohen (b. 2004) is a composer, pianist, and cellist from Farmington Hills, MI and currently based in New York City. His compositions tend to revolve around his fascinations with space, time, motion, and stagnation, and how they are relevant in the here and now.  He strives to write music that is accessible yet unafraid to explore sonic realms that may be uncomfortable. One of his most central pursuits is balancing risk with safety and security in his music to create memorable and impactful experiences for the audience. 

Jonah has received recognition from ASCAP, National YoungArts Foundation, Tribeca New Music, Foundation for Modern Music, Interlochen Center for the Arts, National Young Composers Challenge, Chicago College of Performing Arts, Music Teachers National Association, and many others for his work. He has been lucky enough to attend numerous composition programs and festivals, including Yellow Barn Young Artist Program, Boston University Tanglewood Institute, Atlantic Music Festival, Interlochen Arts Camp, and Curtis Young Artists Summer Program. He also participated in Salastina’s Sounds Promising Young Composers Program, through which he was mentored by Derrick Skye. Jonah has had the privilege of working with such luminaries as Martin Bresnick, Gabriela Lena Frank, Melinda Wagner, Ellen Reid, Pierre Jalbert, Reiko Fueting, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Frank Ticheli, Nico Muhly, Julia Adolphe, Chaya Czernowin, and many more. Jonah recently graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy, where he majored in composition and studied with Dr. Cynthia Van Maanen. At the Academy, Jonah was honored to receive the Neil Rabaut Memorial Composition Scholarship as well as the Young Artist Award. Jonah is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Music in Composition degree at The Juilliard School, studying with Dr. David Ludwig.

As a conductor, Jonah began his formal studies at Interlochen Arts Academy, where he participated in the Advanced Conducting course and worked extensively with Dr. Matthew Schlomer. During his time at Interlochen, Jonah also founded and directed the Interlochen Modern Music Project, which was a chamber orchestra dedicated to reading and rehearsing works written in the last century. Jonah is a current participant in the New York Youth Symphony’s Robert L. Poster Apprentice Conducting Program, where he studies with Music Director Andrew J. Kim and Assistant Conductor Adrian Rogers.

Dedicated to supporting future generations of young composers, Jonah is the founder and Program Director of The NowBeat Project, a nonprofit organization which has provided free opportunities for over 50 participants from 17 US states and 5 countries.