Gunilla Törnfeldt
(born in Stockholm, 1980, resident Stockholm/Sweden), is a jazz vocalist and composer. She grew up in a musical family with both parents being classical musicians and music teachers. Singing has always been her natural way of expression, but early on she also began playing the piano and later the cello, even though the acoustic guitar replaced the cello in her twenties. Among her more significant influences, musicians and composers like Joni Mitchell, Kurt Weill, Kenny Wheeler, Nancy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Frisell, Keith Jarret and Maria Schneider. Törnfeldt studied voice, piano, improvisation, arranging and composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm in 2001- 2006 with final graduation in 2008. She has been featured as a soloist with Monica Dominique Quintet as well as together with Carl-Axel Dominique Trio and different choirs when performing Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts. She have also been featured with the Laudaensemble and Georg Riedel, Jan Allan and Ove Lundin, for several tribute concerts and with late Swedish saxophone player Lars Gullin. She performed as the second soloist part in several productions of the musical African Madonna. Törnfeldt became a member of the jazz vocal sextet Vocation in 2007 and participated on their second album, which was released in 2008. Vocation played a lot of concerts and toured Sweden, Denmark and Germany, but Törnfeldt left the group in 2010 to focus on her solo career. She released her debut solo album with her own music, lyrics and arrangements, A Time for Everything in 2009. In 2010 she was awarded a working grant from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and started t write new music for her next album.
Selected recordings: Just Friends – Vocation, 2008, GASON Rec.
Awards, selection: 2004 Royal Academy of Music; 2006 Anders Sandrew's foundation; 2006 Fasching's Vänners Musikstipendium (Friends of Jazzclub Fasching Music grant).
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Helena Tulve
(born in 1972, in Estonia), composer. Her influences are diverse. She studied at the Paris Conservatory and at IRCAM; with György Ligeti and with the patriarch of Estonian composers, Erkki-Sven Tüür; and has made herself intimately familiar with Gregorian chant and with folk music of the East. She is first of all a master of sculpting sound. In Ithaka, for female voice, violin, and piano, the voice and violin lines are so intimately and sensuously entwined that it's frequently hard to believe that only one human voice is singing. Il neige, for harpsichord and kannel, a Scandinavian stringed folk instrument, is a delicate and restlessly inventive exploration of the percussive timbres that can be produced by plucked strings. Each of the six works here is fully engaging, but the real knockout is Sula (Thaw) for large orchestra and didgeridoo, an elemental evocation of the melting of a glacier.
Selected works: il neige; Beholders; Ithaka; Sula
Awards: in 2000, the same year she was awarded the music prize of the Estonian Music Council and the Cultural prize of the R epublic of Estonia for her achievements in 2004. In 2005, Estonian Radio honored Helena Tulve with the title of the Musician of the Year.
Hilary Tann
Hilary Tann (1947, South Wales, UK) lives in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in Upstate New York where she is the John Howard Payne Professor of Music at Union College, Schenectady. She holds degrees in composition from the University of Wales at Cardiff and from Princeton University. From 1982 to 1995 she held a number of Executive Committee positions with the International League of Women Composers and was recently Composer-in-Residence at the 2011 Eastman School of Music Women in Music Festival. Her music is influenced by her love of Wales and a strong identification with the natural world. A deep interest in the traditional music of Japan has led to private study of the shakuhachi and guest visits to Japan, Korea, and China. Many works are available on CD and her compositions have been widely performed by ensembles such as the European Women’s Orchestra, Tenebrae, Lontano, Meininger Trio, Thai Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, BBCNOW, and KBS Philharmonic in Seoul, Korea.
