BMP: NEXT GEN, CYCLE 2, ROUND 1BMP: NEXT GEN, CYCLE 2, ROUND 1

Gabriel Fynsk is a composer and writer whose work plays with and interrogates the shifting thresholds between music and language. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family of philosophers and raised in Aberdeen, Scotland, Fynsk’s creative practice is deeply informed by his background in philosophy, philology, critical theory, and psychoanalysis, which he continues to study at the European Graduate School. His compositions often engage with other literary, poetic, and visual works, creating dialogues that push the expressive and conceptual limits of musical form. Through this process, Fynsk's sonic language is marked by silence, trace, hospitality, and mimesis—recurring themes that shape both his compositional output and his current writing toward a forthcoming book, Music as Language.

His music has been performed internationally by members of renowned ensembles including Contemporaneous, Ensemble Intercontemporain, FontanaMIX Ensemble, Klangforum Wien, and the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra. This summer, he was selected to attend the Acadèmie Voix Nouvelles by the Fondation de Royaumont to study with George Lewis and Frédéric Durieux. There his piece Diaphonie, a musical explication and rethinking of listening as mishearing was premiered by the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and Ensemble Orbis.

Fynsk is the recipient of the 2023 Prix Ravel from the Maurice Ravel Foundation and has been recognized by ASCAP, Beth Morrison Projects' Next Gen, and the National Young Composers…

Elizabeth Gartman (b.1996) is a composer and soprano currently based in New York City. With compositions described as “refreshingly absurd” (The Washington Post) and “innovative” (Twin Cities Arts Reader), Elizabeth’s music frequently explores illusion and surrealism, as well as vocalism and process through performance. Elizabeth has been commissioned by Washington National Opera, Beth Morrison Projects, New Chamber Ballet, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra Percussion Ensemble, Guerilla Opera, InfraSound Ensemble, confluss, Bronx Arts Ensemble, Ensemble Chemie, Experiments in Opera, the Why Collective, NYC Virtuoso Singers, Pax Duo, soprano Kirsten Voss, flutist Steph Dressler, clarinetist Ford Fourqurean and others. Her work has been received internationally at venues from National Sawdust, Mark Morris Dance, Salzburg Stadtgalerie Lehen, the Cell Theatre, to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Elizabeth’s hometown of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, among others.

Last year, Elizabeth was selected as part of the Women Opera Makers conference at Festival Aix-en-Provence. She has served as composer-in-residence at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity since 2024, and was a member of the 2024-26 Writers’ Room Residency at Experiments in Opera. In 2023, Elizabeth was selected as a composition fellow with American Opera Projects at the Kennedy Center. Later that year, Elizabeth received Honorable Mention for the Darmstadt Ferienkurse Kranichsteiner Musikpreis. In 2022, Elizabeth was named Runner-Up of Beth Morrison Project’s Next Gen Competition for emerging opera composers with her one-act opera It is a Comfort to Know, written with frequent collaborator librettist Susan Bywaters. The year prior, Elizabeth was awarded the William Schuman Prize for Most Outstanding Score in the BMI Composer Awards for her work [Weight], another collaboration with Bywaters. Additional accolades include Manhattan School of Music’s Carl Kanter Prize for Orchestral Composition (First Place), the Giampaolo Bracali Award for Composition, three finalist awards with the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Competition, the Theodore Presser Undergraduate Music Award, the Judith Life Ikenbery Award, the Geraldine B. Cooke Opera Scholarship, and the Ruth DeYoung Kohler Scholarship for Artistic Excellence.

As a performer, Elizabeth is dedicated to the contemporary dramatic stage, with a background in classical voice and a current emphasis on new works. She has been received as both a principle and ensemble singer on the dramatic stage and as a concert soloist. Elizabeth has been received as a soprano soloist and chamber ensemble member at the Hochschule für Musik in Dresden, the LGBT Center in New York, and the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center. In 2018, Elizabeth was featured as the principle role of "Bibi" in a workshop production of PRISM; a three-act opera written by Ellen Reid and produced by Beth Morrison Projects. Later that year, Elizabeth attended Songfest in Los Angeles as a Young Artist and Vivace Summer Opera in Vancouver.

The 2025-2026 season includes premieres and performances with Experiments in Opera (and Hypercube), the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity, One Ounce Opera, New Chamber Ballet, mezzo-soprano Kirsten Voss, and clarinetist Ford Fourqurean. Projects with librettists Susan Bywaters and Melisa Tien are in development for future seasons. Elizabeth serves as a faculty member in composition and theory at Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School.

Elizabeth received her Master of Music degree in composition from Manhattan School of Music after earning Bachelor’s of Music degrees in both composition and vocal performance at the University of Illinois. Compositional instructors and mentors have included Susan Botti, Missy Mazzoli, Dr. Reynold Tharp, and Dr. Carlos Carrillo. Voice instructors include Lucy Shelton and Dr. Ollie Watts Davis.

Eli Greenhoe is a composer, producer, conductor, and guitarist whose music is characterized by its close attention to the materiality, topography, and movement of sound, alongside an affinity for lyricism and overt emotion, and is guided by a desire to find ecstatic ways to coax unity and focus out of complexity. A prolific lyricist, his music is attentive to the poetics of form, and his vocal works often explore the hybridity of words as sound, meaning, and history, as well as the nature of repetition and memory.

His concert works have been commissioned and performed by Ensemble Dal Niente, Bergamot Quartet, Miranda Cuckson, Aki Takahashi, loadbang, and Contemporaneous, among many others, and performed at festivals including the Taproot New Music Festival at UC Davis, Village Trip Festival, Corcoran Music Festival at George Washington Univerisity, and Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend. In 2018 he was awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2021 he was selected as a finalist in the Beth Morrison Projects “Next Generation” program. Additional fellowships, residencies, and recognition have come from I-Park, ASCAP, Bang on a Can, and Yale University.

As a songwriter and producer, he collaborates regularly with musicians in a wide variety of traditions. Primarily, he records music and performs as half of a project he co-leads with composer/multi-instrumentalist Hans Bilger. The duo released their debut Orchids on Adhyâropa records in 2025, which was described by The Fader as “elegantly fusing both [experimental composition and acoustic pop]” and Belgian radio BRF 1, who called the album “a vibrant burst of blossoms ... very fascinating.”

As a performer, Eli works in a multitude of musical spaces. He plays regularly in the improvising sextet Locomotive, co-led by Adam O’Farrill and David Leon, and alongside violinist/composer Ledah Finck in the avant-folk duo Freddy and Sally. Other notable recent engagements as a guitarist include performances with Contemporaneous, the Yale Philharmonia, and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. As a conductor, he recently premiered Patricia Brennan’s Of the Near and Far, an evening-length work for improvising ensemble, at the Jazz Gallery in New York.

Eli is also active in interdisciplinary collaboration: his film and commercial music has been featured in Vogue Magazine online and as an official selection of the 2020 Maryland Film Festival. A frequent collaborator with filmmaker Max Bowens, the pair’s most recent project, Looking at You Looking at Me, was selected for participation in the 2026 Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, France.

Eli is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree at the Yale School of Music, where he has studied with Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, and Christopher Theofanidis. Other important mentors include Reiko Füting, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Stephen Coxe.

Gabrielle Herbst is a composer and vocalist. 

She’s received commissions from Roulette and the Jerome Foundation, the Nouveau Classical Project, Duo Noir, Experiments in Opera, Fresh Squeezed Opera, The Knights, and contributed to the opera Magdalene as part the Prototype Festival 2020 in NYC. She’s been composer-in-residence at the Watermill Center, Exploring the Metropolis, Inc., Atlantic Center for the Arts, Avaloch Farms, Roulette and Pioneer Works.

She has had her compositions presented at venues including National Sawdust, The Stone, Issue Project Room, HERE Arts Center, the National Guitar Society, MATA, and Lincoln Center Atrium.

Under the moniker GABI she released her debut album Sympathy on Software Recording Co. in 2015. Tour highlights included David Byrne’s Meltdown Festival, London, Pop Kultur Festival, Berlin, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam, The Great Escape, Brighton, UK, Marfa Myths Festival, TX, The Wick presented by Pitchfork, and a series at Roulette with Missy Mazzoli curated by Meredith Monk.

She released her second GABI album, Empty Me, on Double Double Whammy in 2018 and toured the US opening for the band Mutual Benefit.

She was a 2021-2023 fellow with the American Opera Project’s Composers & the Voice program and a 2023 Composition fellow at the Aspen Music Festival.

She graduated from Bard College where she studied composition with Joan Tower, and the Yale School of Music where she studied with Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Chris Theofanidis, and David Lang.

Jens Ibsen, composer/baritone, is a multidisciplinary artist whose vocal talents have led him to performances from Dubai to Shanghai as a principal soloist and the first African-born member of the world-renowned Vienna Boys Choir. His music is equally globe-trotting, with performances from The Polish Hearth in London to the San Francisco Symphony.

Ibsen’s music seeks to liberate the definition of metal music from the confines of the metal band. He natively composes music in this style for traditional classical ensembles while infusing the musical knowledge of his multicultural upbringing including Western classical and avant-garde music, Arab and Turkish music, and African diasporic music. Rooted in the ethos of “progressive” music such as prog metal, Ibsen endeavors to craft new sounds from the synthesis of tradition with the innovations of the youthful, ever-evolving metal scene. He seeks to interrogate the role of musical genre in the post-streaming era, where humanity’s collective musical history is available at the push of a button, and utilize polystylism as a language through which to pursue questions of queerness, ancestry, and structural power.

Ibsen’s latest piece, Scene Symphony, was a string orchestra piece inspired by pop-punk premiered by the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. Also an active opera composer, HWAEL-RAD, premiered at Beth Morrison Projects’ 2026 PROTOTYPE Festival, was a site-specific performance fusing opera and metal in Times Square featuring poetry by Julian Talamantez Brolaski, community choir, and an all-star band with members from across the metal, industrial, and new music scenes. Ibsen also has collaborated with librettist Cecelia Raker on two operas including Bubbie and the Demon for the Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative, and Rumpelstiltskin and the Unlovable Children for the Glimmerglass Opera Festival. Ibsen was the 2022 winner of the San Francisco Conservatory's Emerging Black Composers Project, which culminated in the premiere of his piece Drowned in Light for the San Francisco Symphony in November 2023.

Ibsen has been commissioned by numerous festivals including the Oregon Bach Festival Composer Symposium and the São Paolo Contemporary Composers Festival, as well as the Mary Pickford Foundation for a partial score for the film A Little Princess. Upcoming projects include a new work for flutist Emily Duncan, and the premiere of the half-hour Scene Variations for veteran new music pianist Kathleen Supové.

Ibsen completed his B.A in Music Composition at Pepperdine University under N. Lincoln Hanks while studying voice under Louise Lofquist. He received his M.M. in Music Composition at the Mannes School of Music under Missy Mazzoli while studying voice under Stephen Powell. Other composition teachers have included Randall Woolf, Matthew Brown, and Matthew Cmiel. His voice teachers have included Julia Nielsen, Eva Lindquist, and Sheri Greenawald.

‍

Laura Jobin-Acosta is of Indian heritage, raised in a Puerto Rican and American family, and has spent her life — and her entire compositional portfolio — exploring the musical voice that lives in her DNA. That search has taken her from Hindustani music in college to South India to study Carnatic music at its source, from Spanish and Latin liturgy to the nearly extinct Coptic language, from the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to poems written by girls in a Honduran orphanage. Every piece she writes is another step in that exploration: music made from the in-between place, for anyone who has ever lived there.

​

Laura grew up between languages, between liturgies, between musical worlds — and she has never stopped writing from that place. Her music tries to make people feel less alone, more seen, and more alive to beauty. In it, she seeks to finds truth.

​

As a soprano and a composer, Jobin-Acosta has always lived in two musical worlds at once, singing and writing in constant conversation with each other. That duality sharpens both: the voice informs the page, and the page shapes what she hears when she performs.

​

Her work has taken her to the Kennedy Center with Washington National Opera, to Brooklyn's National Sawdust with Beth Morrison Projects, and to Opera America as a Composer-in-Residence. She recently served as Composer-in-Residence with Choral Chameleon, and collaborated with the Grammy-nominated Lorelei Ensemble resulting in world premieres across New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Maryland in Winter 2025. She is currently writing a youth opera for Prelude Opera as their first commissioned composer.

​

Her compositions have been premiered by Canterbury Choral Society, Voices of the New (Voices of Ascension), Holy City Arts and Lyric Opera, Interreligiöser Chor Frankfurt, Western Wind Ensemble, Five Boroughs Music Festival, Ensemble Pi, Cassatt String Quartet, Calvary-St. George Church, and Brick Church, among others. Press coverage includes The Washington Post, Twin Cities Arts Reader, Christianity Today, OperaGene, and Culture South.

​

She is based in New York and available for commissions, collaborations, and conversation.

Maya Miro Johnson is a composer-performer-director whose multidisciplinary work explores the visceral intersections of the social and physical body with illness, technology, movement, and dramatic storytelling. Notable for synthesizing diverse training in composition, dance, theater, classical violin, conducting, and multimedia from a disability lens, her work has been presented across the world, from the Colorado River of southern Utah to Svalbard, Tokyo, Paris, and New York City by leading artists and ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, De Orkest Ereprijs, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sarasota Festival, loadbang, Tanglewood Music Center, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, baritone Evan Gray, Next Festival of Emerging Artsts, members of Ensemble Moderne, soundSCAPE, Rock School of Ballet, Barnes Foundation, Moab Music Festival, Baltic Sea Festival, Beth Morrison Projects, Kronos Quartet, Lucerne Festival, Kajimoto, Line Upon Line, Arctic Chamber Orchestra, CUNY Dance Initiative Residency, and Copland House.

Recipient of a 2026 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Award and the 2026 Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Prize in the BMI Foundation Composer Awards, semi-finalist in BMP’s 2021 Next Gen competition, runner-up in the 2024 Élan Awards, honorable mention in 2024 NYYS First Music commissions, and winner of both 2020 BMI Schuman and Surinach Prizes (a historical first), she appears on HOCKET’s #What2020LooksLike, Johnny Gandelsman’s This is America, Inna Faliks’ Manuscripts Don’t Burn, and Katelyn Bouska’s Hildegard and Her Sisters; a debut solo album with Catalan record label Protomaterial Records is forthcoming. She has also served as a cover conductor for the Minnesota Orchestra in 2022, including BIS Records’ Mahler Symphony No. 8 with Osmo Vänska.

Major works include a violin concerto for Emma Meinrenken, an opera with Christina Herresthal, and an ongoing collaboration with choreographer Claude “CJ” Johnson.

Born in Salt Lake City in 2001, Maya had her first composition lessons in high school with Devin Maxwell and through Luna Composition Lab, after which she attended the Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Nick DiBerardino, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Amy Beth Kirsten, David Ludwig, and Steve Mackey, and graduating in 2024 with her Bachelor of Music in Composition and the Charles Miller Prize/Alfredo Cassella Award for Composition. She received her Master of Music in Composition in 2026 from the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Katherine Balch, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, and Christopher Theofanidis, and was awarded the school’s highest excellence award, the Emily Anne Payne Dean’s Prize, upon graduation. During her academic career at Yale, she also received the Ezra Laderman Prize for best composition for voice or music theater, the Harriet Fox Gibbs Memorial Prize for best first-year academic work, and an Audience Choice Prize in the Creative Entrepreneurship category at Startup Yale 2025 for her medical humanities/opera project, Patience. Maya will begin PhD studies in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University in the autumn of 2026.

She is published in the BabelScores Catalog, an online library based in Paris. Her favorite song is Rock’n’Roll Suicide by David Bowie, and in her pain-free spare time she studies Gaga and other movement languages that are adaptable to hypermobile bodies.

Described as "stark" by WNPR and "darkly lyrical" by the New York Times, a winner of the Second International Hildegard commission award and a 2019 recipient of Opera America's Discovery Grant, Niloufar Nourbakhsh's music has been performed at numerous festivals and venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center. A founding member and co-director of Iranian Female Composers Association, Nourbakhsh is a strong advocate of music education and equal opportunities. She is currently a Teaching Artist at Brooklyn Music School, an adjunct faculty at Molloy College, and a co-director of Peabody Conservatory Laptop Ensemble, while finishing her doctorate at Stony Brook University.

Timothy Peterson’s music has been performed internationally at venues ranging from galleries and distilleries to National Sawdust and Lincoln Center. His works, which draw inspiration from a breadth of subjects including micrometeorology and interspecies encounters, have been featured at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, BMP: Next Gen (Beth Morrison Projects), the Hear Now Music Festival (Los Angeles), and La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest.

Past projects include commissions from the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (Composing Earth initiative), the National Association of Teachers of Singing, Cincinnati Song Initiative, and a song cycle for soprano Grayen Gardner (LA Master Chorale) that explores alternate tuning systems and incorporates archival texts from the Civil War.

Timothy is pursuing a DMA in Composition at the University of Southern California. He also holds a MM in Composition from USC and undergraduate degrees in composition and comparative literature from the University of Michigan.

Huan Sun is a contemporary music composer who is inspired by Chinese ancient culture (literature, visual art, and music), Peking Opera, Chinese folk music and Western music. Her musical style transcends the boundaries of ancient and modern; east and west. Huan Sun’s chamber art song won the first prize in “The 9th Yanhuang Art Song Composition Competition”. Her first orchestral work The Garden of Arcadia has been premiered and performed by China Youth Symphony Orchestra. Huan Sun was born in Qinhuangdao, China in 1994. She had a strong interest in music at a very early age. She received a Bachelor degree from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Huan Sun moved to the United States to further her education, entering the composition program at the Mannes School of Music with a merit scholarship, under the study of Dr.