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Eclectic Australian-American musician Erik Griswold fuses experimental, jazz and world music traditions to create works of striking originality. Specializing in prepared piano, percussion and toy instruments, he has created a musical universe all his own that is “sincere” (neural.it), “playful” (igloo magazine), “colourful and refreshingly unpretentious” (Paris Transatlantic). Griswold performs as a soloist, in Clocked Out Duo (with percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson), and collaborates with musicians from diverse backgrounds as well as visual artists, writers, dancers and circus performers.

Ongoing interests in Minimalism, Jazz, Op Art, Free Improvisation, Dada, Latin percussion and Chinese traditional music have all influenced his work. Since 2000 he has pursued studies of Sichuan Opera percussion and folk music traditions during artistic residencies at Sichuan Conservatory and Sichuan University. Most recently he has created a number of new works for diverse instruments including percussion ensemble, pipe organ, and miniature music boxes.

Griswold has appeared in major international venues such as Melbourne Jazz Festival, Queensland Music Festival, London Jazz Festival, Sydney Opera House, Big Sur Experimental Music Festival, Tonic (N.Y.), The Empty Bottle (Chicago), Chengdu Arts Centre, Improvisa Festival (Barcelona), Nordic House (Reykjavic) and El Cruce (Madrid). He has recorded three solo albums, two Clocked Out Duo albums, and appears on several compilations (Clocked Out Productions, Room:40, Accretions/Circumvention, Newmarket). In addition, his compositions have been performed and recorded by adventurous musicians such as Margaret Leng Tan, Steven Schick, Anthony Burr, Topology, and Gabriella Smart.

He has received grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland, and the AsiaLink Foundation. He currently teaches at Queensland Conservatorium and Queensland University of Technology and holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego.

Ge Gan-Ru, born in 1954 in Shanghai, has been called China’s first avant-garde composer. He received degrees in both violin and composition at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, where he also served as Assistant Professor of Composition. In 1982, when China was still largely unfamiliar with 20th-century Western music, he wrote a controversial piece called Yi feng for solo cello which used unorthodox extended techniques to produce timbres simulating Chinese percussive instruments. In 1983, he was awarded a fellowship to attend Columbia University where he studied with Chou Wen-chung and Mario Davidovsky.

Ge has composed music for theatre, dance, and documentary and feature films as well as concert music. The New York Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, BBC Orchestra, Tokyo Philharmonic, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Kronos Quartet, and many other ensembles have performed his works. He is a board director of Meet the Composer. Ge’s music reflects his deep interest in amalgamating Eastern and Western musical aesthetics. He writes, “While in Western music, composers are deeply concerned with the relationships between pitches, in Chinese music what is important is the particular pitch and its microtonal and timbral character. I try to combine contemporary Western compositional techniques with my Chinese feeling and experience along with Chinese musical characteristics inherited from thousands of years ago, so as to set up a universal music world expressing natural and primitive beauty.”