Featured Composer

We are thrilled to introduce you to Minato Sakamoto, the winner of our 2020 8SW Composer Competition for his trio, Rondo Americano. A native of Japan, Minato is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Duke University. His description of Rondo Americano is short and succinct: “A Japanese train buff’s imaginati...

Douglas Anderson is among one of the first composers to have written a work for Eight Strings & a Whistle. Commissioned in 2000, his Chamber Symphony No. 3 has received numerous performances since its premiere. Our recording of it was released by Ravello Records in 2016 on Douglas Anderson, Cham...

I think we became familiar with Mark Winges’ work fairly soon after Eight Strings & a Whistle was formed. Our introduction was through a work entitled Dusk Music II, for alto flute, viola and cello. It was my excuse for purchasing my first alto flute and I will always be grateful to Mark for thi...

Ina, Matt and I are very excited to introduce you to our first ever 8SW Composer Competition winner, Jorge Amado. Jorge is currently a student at ISA (Instituto Superior de Arte) in Havana, Cuba. His submission to the competition, Eidos II, is a very well crafted, powerful and energetic example...

I am very excited to introduce you all to the wonderful flutist and composer Pamela Sklar. Pamela has had an extraordinary career performing with the likes of Dave Brubeck and touring as a soloist with the ever popular Claude Bolling, just to name a few. We are honored that Pamela composed her work,...

A few years ago, one of Ina’s teaching positions included a chamber music class at The City College of New York. It was structured such that the students who signed up for the class got placed in one, maybe two or even three ensembles. The class time itself consisted of a combination of rehear...

Merrill Clark composed Sinfonia Ternion Gestalt for us in late 2009/early 2010. It is a five movement through-composed work, centered around a lamenting non-vocal setting of William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming. Yeats used Christian imagery in his 1919 poem, evoking post World War ...

Peter Jona Korn’s Aloysia Serenade, Op. 19 is one of the works included on Albert’s Window, our recent release on Ravello Records. We began performing the Serenade long after Korn had died, and our initial research revealed very little other than a website dedicated to his ...

Many years ago, in fact far longer ago than I care to remember, I had a teaching position at Turtle Bay Music School, a community music school in midtown Manhattan. Although I left Turtle Bay a long time ago, I am still in touch with several students I taught there and one faculty member. ...

I am very excited to be posting this next featured composer interview with Scott Brickman. Initially, all we knew about him was that Dr. Brickman is the music faculty of the University of Maine at Fort Kent. Mysteriously, he was never in Fort Kent when we performed in the area.  But over t...

My initial contact with Martin Rokeach, who lives near San Francisco, began while coaching a chamber work of his for one of my classes at NYU. Not long thereafter, Marty started sending me other pieces he thought would be of interest. I found all of them to be rhythmically lots of fun, alternating b...

Our annual concert at the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York City is coming up on November 22. One of the pieces included on our program will be Conversations by Australian composer and bassist, Robert Davidson. In short, this work is a beautiful and joyous celebration of life. We got to...

Every summer I head up to Maine, to a wonderful (and until recently, forgotten) old fishing village called Lubec. Lubec is the eastern most point of the United States and lies across from Campobello Island, where one can find the former summer residence of the Roosevelt family. I still remember the ...

The beauty and the beast of contemporary technology lie in how easily it puts in touch us with the rest of the world, and how easy it makes it for people to find us –– whether we want them to or not!  Many years ago I joined LinkedIn.  Many people I knew were using it...

Dawn Avery is a composer, cellist, vocalist, educator and nominated GRAMMY Award performer. One of our first commissions, Dawn’s Hi’iaka was composed for us in 2003. We recorded it for TULPE (Okenti Records), a CD of music by Dawn and Sarah Davol in 2008. You can visit our Video ...

During the fall of 2002, an envelope addressed to Matt showed up in our mailbox. It was from Oxford University Press and contained a copy of Hilary Tann’s The Walls of Morlais Castle for oboe, viola and cello. Even though the instrumentation was not quite right, we decided to read through ...

We are very excited to be performing Tom Flaherty’s Moments of Inertia during our 2011-12 season. The piece was commissioned by Dinosaur Annex for its 26th season and premiered in Boston on May 4, 2003. We found out about it in the same way we find many works that have not been composed sp...

Commissioned in 2000, Douglas Anderson’s Chamber Symphony No. 3 was officially premiered in Merkin Concert Hall in New York, in May, 2001. During the summer of 2009 we performed it again on tour in Maine and then throughout the northeast the following fall, culminating with a performa...

In 2010 we had the great pleasure of premiering Edmund Cionek’s Bad Robots. In October of 2007, Ina and Matt were asked to perform and record Ed’s Concerto for Oboe and String Orchestra with the Bar Harbor Music Festival Orchestra. Soon after, Ed invited the Trio to perform on the Bar...