Michael Beckerman is an internationally known performer, scholar and writer. He is a specialist on the music of Dvorak, Janacek and other Czech and Central European topics. He has been a frequent guest on PBS’ Live From Lincoln Center. He has made radio programs for NPR’s Morning Edition, WNYC’s Soundcheck, and the BBC. His television and film activity includes several appearances on Czech, German and Japanese television.

His scholarly work comprises six books, including most recently Janacek and His World (Princeton, 2003); New Worlds of Dvorak (W.W.Norton, 2003) and Martinu’s Mysterious Accident (Pendragon Press, 2007), and over fifty articles on subjects ranging from Czech music to Mozart, Brahms, Schubert, film music, Roma (Gypsies) and Arthur Sullivan, and most recently, music under totalitarian oppression.

He is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at New York University.

Johann Buis, Associate Professor of Musicology, Wheaton College, Illinois, held positions at the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR), Columbia College Chicago and the University of Georgia, where he was tenured in musicology. He holds degrees and diplomas from London University, Ball State University, the University of Cape Town, and the Orff Institute, Mozarteum Academy, Salzburg, among others. He has had articles and reviews published in College Music Symposium, Ethnomusicology, Early Music America, MLA Notes, Issue: A Journal of Opinion, and other periodicals, and he was a co-author of Shout Because You're Free! The Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia (University of Georgia Press, 1998).

Kyle Dzapo, an award-winning teacher, performer, and scholar, has been a pre-concert lecturer for the Chicago Symphony and the Civic Orchestra since 1996. In addition to her work as Professor of Music at Bradley University, she has taught courses in London and Salzburg and has presented programs for the British, German, and American flute societies and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Kyle serves as principal flutist of the Peoria Symphony and has performed recitals in London, Denmark, and on live broadcasts for WFMT and Wisconsin Public Radio. She earned a Doctor of Music degree from Northwestern University where she was a student and teaching assistant of Walfrid Kujala. She also holds degrees from New England Conservatory and the University of Michigan.

Stephanie Ettelson has led popular seminars at the Newberry Library since 2007, on topics ranging from Bach to Russian Modernism. A longtime adjunct faculty member of the Music Center of the North Shore (now the Music Institute of Chicago), she has presented preconcert lectures for the Highland Park Strings, Chamber Music Society of the North Shore, Northbrook Symphony Orchestra and Lake Forest Symphony, among others. She also has given individual programs or mini- series for Oasis, the Chamber Music Society of Chicago, the College of Lake County and a long list of study groups, libraries, high school and college classes, and organizations. A violinist with the Highland Park Strings, formerly with the Evanston Symphony Orchestra, Ettelson is an active chamber musician and former music critic and arts writer for community papers.

Anthony Garton has taught music at all levels (college, secondary, elementary) for 35 years. In 2004 he retired from the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley, where he was Senior Lecturer on the music faculty. He holds Bachelor of Music from the University of Wisconsin and Master of Arts from Columbia University. He has great memories of studying at Tanglewood in 1967, where he sang in the Tanglewood Choir for Verdi's Requiem, with the Boston Symphony under Erich Leinsdorf. For the last 3 seasons he has lectured for the Lyric Opera. Garton has been a recipient of the following National Endowments: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Harvard Institute in Arts Administration, 1977; and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, Dartmouth College, Literature and Music, 1998.

Angela Hewitt is a phenomenal artist who has established herself at the highest level over the last few years not least through her superb, award-winning recordings for Hyperion. Completed in 2005, her eleven-year project to record all the major keyboard works of Bach has been described as “one of the record glories of our age” (The Sunday Times) and has won her a huge following. She has been hailed as “the pre-eminent Bach pianist of our time” (The Guardian) and “nothing less than the pianist who will define Bach performance on the piano for years to come” (Stereophile). She has a vast repertoire ranging from Couperin to the contemporary. Her discography also includes CDs of Granados, Beethoven, Rameau, Chabrier, Olivier Messiaen, the complete solo works of Ravel, the complete Chopin Nocturnes and Impromptus, and three discs devoted to the music of Couperin. Her recordings of the complete solo keyboard concertos of J.S. Bach with the Australian Chamber Orchestra entered the billboard charts in the U.S.A. only weeks after their release, and were named Record of the Month in Gramophone magazine. The first of a series of CDs featuring the music of Schumann was released in November 2007.

Berthold Hoeckner, Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, is a music historian specializing in 19th- and 20th-century music. Research interests include aesthetics, Adorno, music and literature, music and visual culture, and the psychology and neuroscience of music. Awards and fellowships include the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society (1998), a Humboldt Research Fellowship (2001/2), and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship (2006/7). His book Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment was published by Princeton University Press in 2002. Ph.D., Cornell, 1994; at Chicago since 1994.

Phillip Huscher has been the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1987. He studied piano at the Aspen School of Music and music history at the University of Chicago. A former music critic, he was contributing editor for Chicago Magazine for more than a decade. He has written liner notes for several Grammy® Award-winning recordings, scripts for televised concerts on PBS, and program notes for many organizations including Carnegie Hall, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Santa Fe Opera. He has participated in public conversations with many leading music personalities, including Sir Georg Solti, Pierre Boulez, Daniel Barenboim, and Yo-Yo Ma. He is the author of The Santa Fe Opera: An American Pioneer, published in 2006.

Janet L. Johnson is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where she is working on a book entitled “Berlioz Between Two Worlds: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Dante’s Giulietta.” After earning her PhD in Musicology at the University of Chicago, she taught for two years at Columbia University in New York and was for twenty years a professor of music history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Oregon, Eugene. Among her publications are the reconstruction and critical edition of Rossini’s long-lost opera Il viaggio a Reims, composed in 1825 for the Parisian Théâtre Italien and performed today in major opera houses around the world (Fondazione Rossini, Pesaro); and chapters in the Cambridge Companions to Berlioz and Rossini.

Lucia Marchi received a degree in piano performance from the Conservatory of Como (Italy) as well as a Ph.D. in music history from the University of Pavia (Italy). She has taught at Roosevelt University, Northwestern, Northeastern Illinois University, and Concordia University, and her articles on medieval and Renaissance music have appeared in international musicology journals. For five years she compiled materials for the thematic catalogue of Gioachino Rossini's works and worked on the new critical edition of his music.

Gerard McBurney joined the staff of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as artistic programming advisor and creative director of Beyond the Score® in September 2006.

A native of Cambridge, Gerard McBurney studied in England and at the Moscow Conservatory before returning to London, where he worked for many years as a composer, arranger, broadcaster, teacher, and writer. In addition to original compositions, he has reconstructed lost and forgotten works by Shostakovich, and has published widely in the field of Russian and Soviet music. For 20 years, he created and presented programs on BBC Radio 3, and wrote and researched nearly 30 television documentaries. McBurney was a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music in London for 12 years, and has acted as advisor and collaborator with many orchestras and presenters, including Lincoln Center, the Emerson Quartet, the Hallé Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Paul Paccione is Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Western Illinois University, Macomb. He holds degrees from the Mannes College of Music, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Iowa, where he received the PhD in 1983. He joined the faculty at Western Illinois University in 1984. During his teaching career at Western, he has received six Faculty Excellence Awards and was named the 1988 Outstanding Teacher in the College of Fine Arts. He was named Western Illinois University's Distinguished Faculty Lecturer for 2002. He is co-founder and co-director of Western's annual New Music Festival, now in its twenty-second year.

Paul Paccione is an active composer whose works are widely and frequently performed, both nationally and internationally. His music is published by Frog Peak Music. Recordings of his music are available on the Frog Peak and Capstone labels. He has lectured and written numerous articles on various aspects of modern music and particularly on the interplay of cultural conditions and compositional thought in the 20th and 21st centuries. His writings on music have appeared in Perspectives of New Music, ex tempore, College Music Symposium, American Music, the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy and New World Records.

Stephen Press is a professor of music history at Illinois Wesleyan University where he teaches the two-part survey of music history and upper division period styles courses. He received the Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and subsequently taught at Illinois State University and Arizona State University. Dr. Press has made many presentations on the subjects of Sergey Prokofiev and Russian music over the years in various venues including the Rotterdam Gergiev Festival, the Manchester "Prokofiev 2003" Symposium, professional society meetings, and local ballet schools and continuing education centers. In addition, he has been interviewed several times by the BBC and the British Arts Council for radio programs and educational films about Prokofiev. He is the author of the book Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev (Ashgate, 2006) and a recent article on Prokofiev’s early career in the U.S. for Prokofiev and His World (Princeton University Press, 2008). Press has articles and reviews published in Music and Letters, The New York Times Book Review, Slavic and East European Journal and Russian Review. He is presently working on a reception study of Russian concert music in the United States. Press claims to be an “occasional bassist.” Prior to his music career he was for ten years an air traffic controller in Chicago and San Juan. He resides in Lincoln, Illinois.

Lawrence Rapchak is the music director of the Northbrook (Ill) Symphony, and served for five seasons as music director of Chicago Opera Theater, conducting the Chicago premieres of Berlioz's Beatrice and Benedict and Ullmann's Der Kaiser von Atlantis as well as the company's acclaimed recording of Menotti's The Medium.

Mr. Rapchak has served as Director of Educational Projects for Chicago Philharmonic, conducting Stravinsky's complete Firebird ballet and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique as part of Ravinia Festival's Outreach program. He also led Copland's Appalachain Spring for Ravinia's Kraft Saturday Morning Series.

He has conducted outreach concerts for the Rochester (NY) Philharmonic, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and the Marion (IN) Philharmonic, and has led the Czech Radio Orchestra of Prague and the Louisville Orchestra in concerts and recordings of his own works.

In 1996, he composed Saetas on commission from the Chicago Symphony, a work which has also been played by the Helsinki Philharmonic and the Cincinnati Symphony. His music has also been performed by the Detroit Symphony, the Omaha Symphony, and the National Orchestral Association in Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Rapchak is listed in the authoritative Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, and is currently in his 15th season as pre-concert speaker for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Jesse Rosenberg received his Ph. D. from New York University, and in 1998 joined the faculty of Northwestern University, where he is now Coordinator of the Musicology Program. As a scholar, he specializes mainly in 19th-century opera, especially Italian, and is the author of numerous publications on Verdi, Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini. His research interests, however, extend well beyond that field, and he has become known as a popular lecturer on a variety of musical topics. His current research project involves the intersection of opera and Jewish identity.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, born in Helsinki, studied at the Sibelius Academy and made his conducting début with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1979. In 1985 he was appointed Chief Conductor of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he remained for 10 years, and also in 1985 took up the post of Principal Guest Conductor of The Philharmonia, which he held until 1994. Salonen has been Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra since 1992.

Salonen’s orchestral guest engagements include appearances with the Helsinki Philharmonic, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Bayerischer Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Esa-Pekka Salonen is also recognized as an accomplished composer.

Dr. Jonathan Saylor is currently Professor of Music at the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music, where he teaches music history and bassoon. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology from Boston University. His most recent publication was a critical edition of Henri Brod’s two wind quintets, published in 2008 as part of the series, Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Professor Saylor has presented numerous pre-concert lectures, including those at Symphony Center, Wheaton College Artist Series and the Canterbury Concert Series in Dixon, IL. Dr. Saylor is also very active as a free-lance bassoonist in the Chicago area, including performances with the Metropolis Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Opera Theater, Apollo Chorus, Chicago Chorale, North Shore Chorale Society and Handel Week Festival. Dr. Saylor and his wife Susan have two daughters and reside in Wheaton, where in their spare time they are avid gardeners.

William White is a composer, arranger and conductor active in the Midwest. Mr. White received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in composition and was subsequently hired onto his alma mater’s conducting staff as Music Director of its Chamber Orchestra. He served concurrently as Music Director of the Hyde Park Youth Symphony and held a variety of church and choral music positions in and around Chicago.

Mr. White is currently pursuing a Masters’s degree in Orchestral Conducting at Indiana University. Still an active composer, he conducted the premiere of his large-scale oratorio Thy King Cometh in February of 2008, and continues to collaborate with a variety of performers throughout the U.S. April 2009 will see the first release of one of his compositions on a professional record label, an a cappella choral piece to be released by Chicago’s Cedille Records.