Outside the Box

March 18 through April 19 | 2024

Now in its seventeenth year, Outside The Box builds on its legacy as an exceptional annual new music festival and concert series. Composers and performers of international acclaim join forces with members of the SIU School of Music performance faculty to create an atmosphere of exciting, engaging, contemporary concert music. This year, Outside The Box will take place as an extended concert series throughout March and April. All events are free and open to the public. Please join us!

Schedule of Events»

Featured Artists

The Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra

The Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra (“LGCCO”) was founded in 2000 by its artistic director and conductor Chih-Sheng Chen. The LGCCO has since matured into an ensemble of both technical and artistic proficiency. A strong musical force in Taiwan, it represents a new generation of Chinese orchestral music. It strives to demonstrate the energy and passion of its dedicated musicians with every performance. The LGCCO breathes new life into an art form that holds ancient roots, and devotes itself to promoting Chinese music on the world stage. Since 2002, the LGCCO has been producing the series “Generations”, “Silk & Bamboo Chamber Music”, and “The Young Masters”. It currently offers a full season of approximately sixty concerts a year at the most prestigious venues in Taiwan, presenting both the full orchestra of over one hundred musicians and smaller chamber ensembles throughout the year. In recent years, the orchestra has presented large-scale interdisciplinary projects, combining theatre and multimedia with orchestral music. In addition, the LGCCO regularly presents educational performances, introducing thousands of young audiences to Chinese music.

The LGCCO has toured throughout China. Its international appearances include multiple tours in Europe, Asia, and North America. The LGCCO has collaborated with numerous international soloists and ensembles, including Amsterdam’s Nieuw Ensemble (2014) and Canada’s Turning Point Ensemble (2018). It has commissioned and premiered new works from composers from China, Singapore, Holland, Korea, Mexico, US, Canada, and Finland.

Website: https://littlegcco.com/en/about/

Chih-Sheng Chen

One of the most prominent conductors in Taiwan, Chih-Sheng Chen founded the Little Giant Chinese Chamber Orchestra (LGCCO) in 2000. Acting as the music director and conductor, the orchestra strikes to present Chinese music of the highest quality to a wide range of audiences. Chen has produced/conducted more than one thousand concerts, including the orchestra’s national and international tours and a full season at Taiwan’s National Concert Hall. He also presents educational programs throughout Taiwan, and collaborates with various organizations. Under his leadership, the LGCCO was nominated by the Taishin Arts Awards for the Best Performing Arts category in Taiwan 2011.
　
Chen is active on the international stage as a conductor, educator, and arts administrator, crossing between the disciplines of Chinese music, cross-cultural music, and western contemporary music, and in both orchestral and chamber music settings. He has been a guest conductor in Netherlands, Canada, United States, China and Taiwan. He has been frequently invited to conduct the ensembles at various universities throughout China. He was the executive director of the Quanta Philharmonic Orchestra. In addition, Chen gives lectures and master classes on arts administration, ensemble training, and orchestral development.
　
Chen holds a master degree in conducting from Taiwan’s Fu Jen Catholic University, under the guidance of professor Lian-Chang Kuo. He started his musical training as an erhu (Chinese violin) player at the age of ten. He studied conducting with Ying Lee. At the same time, Chen holds a Ph. D from the Institute of Microbiology and Biochemistry of the National Taiwan University. His solid musical trainings, many years of performance experiences, knowledge of diverse genres and styles, and organizational skills from his science background all contribute to his success in building and managing one of the largest and most active Chinese orchestras in the world. “Chinese music is my true calling in life,” he says.

Website: https://littlegcco.com/en/music-director/

Sampen and Bunce Duo

John Sampen is recognized as an outstanding artist in contemporary music literature. He has commissioned and premiered over 80 works, including compositions by Albright, Bolcom, Cage, Subotnick and Ussachevsky. In 1970, he was a recitalist and certificate winner at the International Geneva Concours in Switzerland. A recipient of several NEA consortium and recording awards, Sampen has been involved with commissions, premieres and/or recordings of new music by Adler, Albright, Babbitt, Beerman, Martino, Mays, Shrude, Subotnick and Wuorinen. He regularly performs contemporary and traditional saxophone repertoire in recital with pianist/composer Marilyn Shrude. Currently a Distinguished Research Artist Professor at Bowling Green State University, Dr. Sampen is former president of the North American Saxophone Alliance and clinician for the Conn-Selmer Company and Légère Reeds.

Mark Bunce is a composer, and former recording engineer/electronics technician for the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music and the director of Recording Services at BGSU. He holds degrees from BGSU and Olivet College. A veteran of the recording industry for over 35 years, Bunce has engineered innumerable compact discs and recordings for such labels as Newport Classics, Centaur Records, Opus One, Sony Classics, Koch International, Albany, AMP Records, Orion, Neuma, Vox and Capstone. He has also engineered more than a dozen contemporary music series for public radio, and composed and engineered soundtracks for award-winning corporate videos and PBS signatures.

Jessica Speak

Contemporary music specialist Jessica Speak has premiered new works at International Festivals in United States and Europe as well as in her hometown of Orlando, Florida. She holds the position of Principal Clarinet with the highly acclaimed Bach Festival Society Orchestra and performs regularly with many area ensembles like the Orlando Contemporary Chamber Orchestra, Southern Winds Symphonic Band, Walt Disney World Orchestra, Orlando Philharmonic, and Brevard Symphony. She performs regularly as a soloist, presenting new and adventurous works. She is committed to utilizing extended performance techniques in her solo playing as well as incorporating them into her teaching as a means to help her students build strong playing fundamentals. She maintains a private studio of some of the top young clarinetists in the state, presents master classes, and serves as an adjudicator for various events throughout Florida. She is also on the faculty at Stetson University where she teaches applied clarinet, pedagogy for winds and percussion, orchestral excerpts, conducts the clarinet choir, and coaches woodwind chamber music.

Jessica is a founding member of The Sunshine Clarinet Quintet and Persimmon Ensemble. Both groups have commissioned and premiered several compositions and consistently explore new collaborations with diverse composers. She performed on the album, Pulse, A Musical Monument, in collaboration with The Velez Quartet playing new works by contemporary composer, Carlos Velez that commemorate the lives lost in the Pulse Nightclub shooting. An ardent advocate for new music in the Central Florida area, she serves as president of the performance board of the Orlando Contemporary Chamber Orchestra, where she coordinates operations, collaboration with local composers, and programming efforts to grow the organization and continue their mission of performing new compositions written by active composers.

Jessica continues to develop her lifelong passion for maintaining physical health as a musician for herself and her students through study toward certification in Body Mapping and Alexander Technique. She is also a dedicated long-distance runner.

Jessica received her DM in clarinet performance from Florida State University, her MM in clarinet performance from SUNY Purchase College and a BM in clarinet performance from Stetson University. Her primary teachers include Deborah Bish, Ayako Oshima Neidich, and Lynn Musco.

Website: https://www.stetson.edu/other/faculty/jessica-speak.php

Joe Bauer

Joe Bauer is a Chicago-based double bassist and curator. He is currently a tenured member of the Quad City Symphony, founding member of the Versa’tile Chamber Ensemble, former Fellow in the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and returning performer in the Outside the Box New Music Festival in Carbondale where he was previously on faculty at the SIU School of Music during his time in Southern Illinois. As a chamber musician Joe Bauer has performed with the 5th Wave Ensemble, Unsupervised, Civic Piano Quintet, CHAI, Après L’Histoire, and others. As a curator, Joe has created his own projects, combining contemporary and 20th century works with a variety of other media that give a narrative form to his concerts. Joe Bauer is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music where he studied with Albert Laszlo and Florida State University where he received a Masters studying with George Speed.

Website: https://jobaur.net/

Kathleen Ginther

Kathleen Ginther is a Chicago-based composer, educator and passionate new music advocate. Her works have been praised as ‘music of ethereal delicacy’ and ‘otherworldly rapture’; ‘haunting, gauzy and mysterious music, creating a realm of strangeness, as if we were genuinely traveling through the sleeping corridors of the mind.’ Her music is searching and contemplative in nature, but often displays a streak of playfulness and whimsy.

Performances of her music have taken her to Italy, England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Thailand, Singapore, China, Japan and Brazil, as well as New York, Boston, Washington, Cleveland, Aspen and Los Angeles. She has been a Visiting Composer at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Bowling Green New Music Festival, the Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University, Festival of Women Composers at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Donne in Musica (Fuiggi, Italy), the Utrecht Conservatory, Nigata University (Japan). In 1989 she presented lectures and performances of her music at three Chinese universities (Northeast Normal University in Changchun, Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, and Xian University) at the invitation of the Chinese government.

In Chicago her music has been performed widely in concerts at the Ravinia Festival, The Art Institute of Chicago, Symphony Center, Northwestern University, DePaul University, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Constellation, Experimental Sound Studio, Epiphany Center for the Arts, MoMing Performing Arts Center and Artemisia Gallery, among many others.

Dr. Ginther received her M.M. in Composition from DePaul University, where she studied with George Flynn, and her D.M.A. in Composition from Northwestern University, where her teachers were Alan Stout and M. William Karlins. She spend the summers of 1984 and 85 at the Aspen Music School studying composition and working in the Electronic Music Studio, and attended the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik during the summer of 1988. She has been an Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts for three residencies (June, 1989, Associate of Jacob Druckman; March, 1998 and March, 2002, Associate of Bernard Rands).

Throughout her career, Dr. Ginther has worked with a series of composer-based advocacy groups in an effort to help expand performance opportunities for underrepresented composers and to expand the audience for new music. As President and Program Director of American Women Composers Midwest in Chicago, she presented concerts and worked with other performing and presenting groups to integrate works by little known women composers into their repertoires. While at Southern Illinois University she founded and directed an annual festival of new music called ‘Outside The Box.’ A long-time member of the innovative Chicago Composers’ Consortium she now serves as President of that organization.

Website: https://www.kathleenginther.com/

Gregory Glancey

At an early age, Greg Glancey discovered a deep passion for making beautiful noise on the electric guitar. With one hand on the fretboard and the other on the stylus of his parents’ Dumont record player, he learned how to transcribe and play anything and everything that grabbed his attention. This was his serendipitous conservatory. Later, while performing professionally in various Milwaukee-based cover and original bands, his insatiable drive to create music ultimately led him to study music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There he had the great fortune of studying composition with the late Joel Naumann and Stephen Dembski. Glancey soon ventured on to complete a Masters and Ph.D. in composition from Stony Brook University in New York under the guidance of composers Daria Semegen, Sheila Silver, Daniel Weymouth, and Perry Goldstein.

Glancey’s music embodies a unique blend of traditional and progressive musical elements, and expresses a fervent harmonic language, coloristic textures, and intricate formal designs. A background in and affinity for all popular styles and film music infuse his writing with sonic freshness and rhythmic energy. His music has been programmed throughout the United States and Europe, as well as featured in a number of independent films.

He has received commissions and performances from many new music groups and soloists, such as the Stony Brook Chamber Players, the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, the East Lansing Orchestra, the Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Nemø Ensemble, Ensemble Parallax, pianist Junghwa Lee, and flutists Rogier de Pijper, Orlando Cela, and Sarah Brady to name just a few. Glancey was a programmed guest composer at the 2015 Universidad Nacional de San Juan Guitar Festival, San Juan, Argentina; the 2016 12th Adams International Flute Festival and the 2017 One Day Flute Festival at Adams Muziekcentrale, Ittervoort, The Netherlands; the 2018 Composers Conference directed by the late Mario Davidovsky; the 2018 and 2022 Outside The Box New Music Festival at Southern Illinois University; the 2021 Charlotte New Music Festival; the 2021 Great Lakes Concert Series Great Spaces & Arts, Grace Cathedral, Topeka, Kansas; the 2022 College Music Society Southern Regional Conference at Delta University; and most recently in August 2022, at Kint Pianos in Ghent, Belgium.

Glancey has been actively teaching music in higher education for more than 20 years. He taught music theory, composition, and music technology at Vanguard University of Southern California from 2002-2015, where he also formed and directed the Vanguard University Guitar Ensemble. Currently, he lives in the Boston area with his wife and two daughters. He is a Professor of Composition at the Berklee College of Music, where he teaches composition, tonal harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, form and analysis, music technology, and modern composition techniques for film scoring. Formerly he served as the Assistant Chair of Composition at Berklee from 2015-2020.

Website: https://college.berklee.edu/people/greg-glancey

Zoe Lin

Zoe (Yi-Cheng) Lin is a composer and software engineer with a specialization in digital music and related compositions. Her electronic music has garnered international acclaim, exhibited in 18 countries across Europe, Asia, North and South America, including 25 prestigious international music festivals. Zoe holds a doctoral degree in composition from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Previously, she served as the Chief Music Officer in the area of artifical intelligence, leading AI music generation research and development efforts while integrating AI with commercial music. Currently, Zoe is a full-time composer and an assistant professor at National Taiwan Normal University.

Zoe specializes in visual-auditory synesthetic electronic music composition, 3D immersive electronic music composition and mixing, and the practical use of ambisonic system multichannel sound projection. Her electronic music has been showcased globally, with selections at prominent events such as SiMN 2023 (Brazil), MUSLAB 2023 (Ecuador), MiRNArte 2023 (Venice, Italy), SICMF2023 (Seoul, South Korea), NIME 2023 "Mixed Realities Workshop" (Mexico), NYCEMF 2023 (New York), Spatial Audio Conference 2023 (United Kingdom), NoiseFloor 2023 (United Kingdom), Earth Day Art Model 2023 (hosted by Indiana University, USA), MOXsonic Festival 2023, SICMF2022, Atemporánea Festival 2022 (Argentina), ICMC 2022 (Ireland), IRCAM-Forum 2022 (New York), and more, totaling 22 international exhibition events. Her works are also set to feature prominently in upcoming albums associated with SiMN 2023 and the Phonographic Production of MUSLAB 2023 - Cero Records - PLANETA COMPLEJO project.

Website: https://archive.ncafroc.org.tw/composer/composer_file?id=bd9eba067574a0cd017592da6f7c01d4&lang=en

2024 Concert Featured Performers from SIU School of Music Faculty: