Valerie Coleman was named Performance Today's 2020 Classical Woman of the Year, and described as one of the top 35 female composers in classical music by critic Anne Midgette of the Washington Post. She is among the world's most played composers living today. The New York Times observes her compositions as “skillfully wrought, buoyant music”.

For more info on Valerie Coleman’s life and music, go to https://www.vcolemanmusic.com/

J. Kimo Williams was born in NY, and spent much of his childhood divided between Air Force bases, and on his grandparents’ sharecropper farm in North Carolina. Moving to Hawaii with his father in 1967, he joined the military and was deployed to Vietnam in 1970.

As a composer, he has released four CDs of original works. His symphonic works have been performed by symphonies in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam, Czech Republic and others. His string quartet “Into the Liquid” was commissioned by the New York-based Ethel quartet and premiered at the 2013 BAM Next Wave Festival.

For more info on Williams’ amazing life and music, click on the link below.

Robert Nathaniel Dett was a great composer, choir leader, pianist, teacher, poet, and writer. During his lifetime, he was lauded as the first American composer to fuse Negro folk music with the European art music tradition in a sophisticated way. As a seminal figure in the preservation and study of spirituals, both as a writer and choral leader, and as a great teacher and inspirer of African-American musicians in later generations, he is acknowledged to be one of the most important musicians in American history.

Learn more about Nathaniel’s works, his life story and contributions to American History and American music.