Miguel Zenón – 2008 MacArthur Fellows

Miguel Zenón is a young jazz musician who is expanding the boundaries of Latin and jazz music through his elegant and innovative musical collages. As both a saxophonist and a composer, Zenón demonstrates an astonishing mastery of old and new jazz idioms, from Afro-Caribbean and Latin American rhythmical concepts to free and avant-garde jazz. Beginning with his 2001 recording Looking Forward, Zenón has exhibited a high degree of daring and sophistication in the manipulation of conventional jazz forms. His third album, Jíbaro (2005), illuminates his intense engagement with the indigenous music of his native Puerto Rico. Forgoing the Afro-Caribbean sound that characterizes most Latin jazz, Zenón was inspired by la música jíbara – string-based folkloric music popular in the Puerto Rican countryside. Unlike other attempts to fuse jazz and jíbaro, which have retained the traditional instrumentation with little harmonic variation, in Zenón’s hands the essential elements of jíbaro serve as the compositional and rhythmic underpinning of his contemporary jazz arrangements. The result is a complex yet accessible sound that is overflowing with feeling and passion and maintains the integrity of the island’s music. This young musician and composer is at once reestablishing the artistic, cultural, and social tradition of jazz while creating an entirely new jazz language for the 21st century.

Miguel Zenón received a B.A. (1998) from the Berklee College of Music and an M.A. (2001) from the Manhattan School of Music. His additional recordings include Ceremonial (2004) and Awake (2008). He has performed at venues and in festivals throughout the United States and abroad, including the Jazz Standard, the Village Vanguard, and Carnegie Hall.

Leila Josefowicz – 2008 MacArthur Fellows

Leila Josefowicz is a young violinist who is captivating audiences with her technically precise and emotionally resonant performances of both traditional and contemporary works. Since her Carnegie Hall debut at the age of sixteen, Josefowicz has blossomed into one of today’s preeminent soloists, performing around the globe with the world’s most prestigious orchestras and conductors. Her recent recording of Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 and Violin Sonata (2006) features eloquent interpretations of these haunting and sorrowful pieces, written in Stalinist Russia. Not content to simply master the standard repertoire of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, Josefowicz is stretching the mold of the classical violinist in her passionate advocacy of contemporary composers and their work. She is a close and regular collaborator with the leading composers of the day, often premiering their new compositions. Through her performances, recordings, and recital programs, she introduces traditional, classical music audiences to noteworthy new works, illustrating the excitement and beauty that emanates from the juxtaposition of the avant-garde and eclectic with the more traditional. Josefowicz’s genuine commitment to the music of today, coupled with her keen musical intelligence and virtuosity, is inspiring new compositions for the violin and significantly broadening the instrument’s repertoire.

Leila Josefowicz received a B.Mus. (1997) from the Curtis Institute of Music. She has performed with orchestras throughout the United States and internationally, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the London Symphony.

Tara Donovan – 2008 MacArthur Fellows

Tara Donovan is an inventive young sculptor whose installations bring wonder to the most common objects of everyday life. Donovan’s site-specific, sculptural works transform ordinary accumulated materials into intriguing visual and physical installations. Choosing a single object – such as a transparent drinking straw, scotch tape, a Styrofoam cup, or a paper clip – Donovan experiments with assembling it in different ways. Sensitive to the specific needs of her materials and the nature of her exhibit spaces, her installations are often arranged in ways reminiscent of geological or biological forms. For her 2003 installation entitled “Haze,” Donovan stacked over two million clear plastic drinking straws against a 42-foot-long gallery wall. The resulting effect, with its shifts in color, form, light, and surface, was that of a fog bank or a diaphanous cloud, providing the viewer with a compelling, perceptually transformative experience. In a 2007 untitled work, Donovan created a 50×60-foot installation using over three million seven-ounce plastic drinking cups in rows of different heights, resembling a serene, iridescent ice field. This singular artist is creating a dazzling body of work that will enrich the fields of contemporary sculpture and installation art for years to come.

Tara Donovan received a B.F.A. (1991) from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and an M.F.A. (1999) from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

Walter Kitundu – 2008 MacArthur Fellows

Walter Kitundu is a young sound artist and inventor of original musical instruments that navigate the boundary between live and recorded performance. Inspired by hip-hop, other modern musical forms, and traditional Asian and African instruments, Kitundu’s phonoharps are hybrids of turntables and stringed instruments. At once highly sculptural art objects and functional instruments, the phonoharps offer a wide range of melodic possibilities and are surprisingly versatile in performance. The turntable’s pickup collects and amplifies any sound transmitted to it, allowing the performer to employ percussion and string resonance as well as digital manipulation, or sampling, of prerecorded material. Kitundu takes full advantage of the phonoharp’s flexibility in electro-acoustic compositions that seamlessly incorporate experimental, jazz, and pop music influences. Many of Kitundu’s artistic pursuits, including ambitious proposals for public installations of his instruments, reflect his ongoing interest in the interaction between technology and the natural world. His elemental phonoharps, for example, draw on natural forces such as wind, waves, light, and the movement of birds to produce unique sound sculptures. An experimental instrument builder, composer, and musician, Kitundu’s interdisciplinary approach to music-making and performance is inspiring a wide range of musicians and audiences.

Walter Kitundu has been affiliated with the Exploratorium Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception since 2003, where he is currently a multimedia artist. In 2008, he is the Wornick Distinguished Visiting Professor of Wood Arts at the California College of the Arts and artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His work has been exhibited and performed at such national and international venues as the Singapore Arts Centre, the Gunnar Gunnarsson Institute, Iceland, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Craft and Folk Art. He has also created instruments for and performed with the Kronos Quartet at several venues across the U.S.

Alex Ross – 2008 MacArthur Fellows

Alex Ross is a critic whose
writing captures the often-elusive aesthetic and technical aspects of
classical and contemporary music with clarity, grace, and wit. A staff
writer for the New Yorker, his frequent essays display an
expansive knowledge of music and a facility for guiding his readers,
who range from professional musicians to scholars to the general public
alike, to a richer experience of the complex pieces and artists he
explores. With a finely tuned grasp of a full spectrum of styles, he
places works by a broad variety of artists – from Mozart to Schoenberg
to Bob Dylan – within a continuum and sets aside categories and
classifications that impede the appreciation of works on their own
terms. In each article, Ross strives to demonstrate how a specific
piece of music, be it centuries or months old, conveys meaning and
feeling in the present. In addition to his work in essay form, he
recently published the book The Rest Is Noise (2007), a
cultural history of 20th-century music that journeys through pre-World
War I Vienna, Paris of the 1920s, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia,
and New York of the 1960s and 1970s. Through a widely read blog of the
same title (www.therestisnoise.com),
he further expands the reach of his interpretive skills and enthusiasm
for championing overlooked composers and out-of-the-way ensembles. In
an era when many proclaim the imminent demise of concert halls due to
waning attendance, Ross offers both highly specialized and casual
readers new ways of thinking about the music of the past and its place
in our future.

Alex Ross received a B.A. (1990) from Harvard University. He has been the music critic for the New Yorker since 1996 and served previously as a music critic for the New York Times (1992-1996). His writing has also appeared in the New Republic, Slate, Lingua Franca, and the London Review of Books.