Past Residents

David Hertzberg

Musician in Residence, Spring 2023

While at Dumbarton Oaks, David will continue to delve into "Grand Hotel," a site-specific operatic fugue in four acts for the Los Angeles-based company The Industry.

Described as “utterly original” by The New York Times, David Hertzberg is a composer from Los Angeles. His opera The Wake World, co-presented by Opera Philadelphia and the Barnes Foundation in 2017, won the Music Critics Association of North America’s Best New Opera Award, and the work’s debut recording, released in 2020 on Tzadik, was listed among The New York Times’ "Best Classical Albums" of that year. In 2018 his chamber opera "The Rose Elf" premiered in the catacombs of Green-Wood Cemetery and was named WQXR’s Opera Event of the Year. In 2020 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He studied at The Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute. 

inti figgis-vizueta

Musician in Residence, Fall 2022

Called “wonderfully strange” (Pioneer Press) and “a cauldron of subtle sounds” (All About Jazz), the “smooth and serrated melodies” (New York Times) of composer inti figgis-vizueta invite listeners into elemental sonic worlds that reveal “structure and simplicity within a cacophony of sound and complicated texture” (Strad Magazine). She is the recipient of the Fred Ho Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the National Sawdust Hildegard Award, and the American Composers Orchestra’s CoLABoratory Fellowship. inti enjoys weaving classical aesthetics and improvisational approaches into spontaneous, interactive works that highlight the transformative power of communal listening. The Washington Post says her music “feels sprouted between structures, liberated from certainty and wrought from a language we’d do well to learn.”

inti’s work has been commissioned and performed by leading American musicians and ensembles such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco and Oregon symphonies, the Kronos, Attacca, and JACK quartets, Roomful of Teeth, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Dal Niente, Talea Ensemble, and Orchestra of St. Lukes. European commissions have come from groups such as Crash Ensemble, Ensemble Reflektor, and more. Recent highlights include the premiere of her cello concerto, Amaru, written for Jay Campbell and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni; and a Carnegie Hall debut featuring the Kronos Quartet premiering her played-in-the-dark piece, music by yourself. inti wrote quiet city (& easter bells from the bowery) for violinist Jennifer Koh, featured in her 2022 GRAMMY award-winning album, Alone Together.

Upcoming projects include a new concerto for the GRAMMY award-winning Attacca Quartet and American Composers Orchestra, a new interdisciplinary work for vocal octet with the GRAMMY award-winning Roomful of Teeth and animator Rose Bond.

Committed to cultivating the next generation of free and creative music-makers, inti regularly teaches with the Luna Composition Lab, founded and run by composers Missy Mazzoli & Ellen Reid, and the Wildflower Composers Festival. Both programs work to increase access and opportunities for young gender expansive and women composers.

Tanner Porter

Early-Career Musician Resident, Spring 2022

Tanner Porter is a performer and composer of chamber, dramatic, and orchestral works. In her “original art songs that are by turns seductive and confessional” (Steve Smith, The New Yorker), Porter explores her passion for storytelling. Her recent works have been premiered by the Albany Symphony, at Carnegie Hall by the New York Youth Symphony, and on the American Composers Orchestras Connecting ACO Community virtual series (a new song for Aoife O’Donovan and Eric Jacobsen). Porter holds degrees in composition from the University of Michigan’s SMTD (BM) and the Yale School of Music (MM). 

Layale Chaker

Early-Career Musician Resident, Fall 2021

During her residency at Dumbarton Oaks, Layale Chaker will be developing Ruinous Gods: Seven Suites for Sleeping Children, an opera in collaboration with librettist and playwright Lisa Schlesinger. This new piece is about seven displaced children who have uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome, a rare trauma response to the state of living in the limbo of displacement. Until recently, uppgivenhetssyndrom was only diagnosed in Sweden but it is now evident in several refugee camps around the world. The sufferer, once vibrant and alive, falls and into a nonresponsive sleep. One survivor describes it as “being trapped in a glass box.” This opera uses elements from myths and fairy tales to create a twenty-first-century fantasia on “sleeping beauties.” The performance is based on documented testimonies from survivors and families of those afflicted by the syndrome and seeks to transform trauma into hope. In resistance to the many dystopian narratives in popular culture, this opera creates space for imagination and agency.

Deemed a “Rising Star” by BBC Music Magazine and raised on the verge of several musical streams since her childhood, violinist, composer, and 2020–2022 Jerome Hill Fellow Layale Chaker’s musical world lies at the intersection of classical contemporary music, jazz, Arabic music, and improvisation. She has collaborated with Oxford Orchestra, the New World Symphony, Babylon Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Ziad Rahbani, Johnny Gandelsman, Holland Baroque, International Contemporary Ensembleperforming at the London Jazz Festival, Alderburgh Festival, Morgenland Festival Osnabrueck, Junger Kunstler Festival Bayreuth, the Lucerne Festival for Contemporary Music, Impuls’ Festival, Beethoven Festival Bonn, and Avignon Festival, among others, and concert halls such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Abbaye de Royaumont, Hancher Auditorium, the Stone, National Sawdust, the Banff Centre, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Wigmore Hall. Her debut album with her ensemble Sarafand was listed as “Top of The World” by Songlines with a 5-star review, rated #2 on NPR’s “10 Best Releases,” #1 for several weeks on the World Charts of iTunes and Amazon Music, and has received praises by the BBC Music Magazine, the New York Times, the Strad, Strings Magazine, and Jazz World, among others. A winner of the Silkroad Seeds inaugural 2020 award and a Nadia et Lili Boulanger 2019 laureate, Chaker is also a finalist of the Rolex Mentor & Protege 2018 Prize, the recipient of the Diaphonique Franco-British Commission Prize 2019, the 2018 Arab Fund for Arts and Culture Grant, the Royal Academy of Music 2018 Guinness Award, and the winner of the Ruth Anderson 2017 Competition.

David Crowell

Early-Career Musician Resident, Spring 2021

During his fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks, Crowell focused on a new work for string quartet called Cloud Forest, to be premiered by Argus Quartet in fall 2021, and a new percussion quartet to be premiered by Sandbox Percussion at Dumbarton Oaks in spring 2022. Both works explore rhythmically complex, energetic worlds and juxtapose them with spacious, melodic textures. Post fellowship, Dumbarton Oaks has commissioned David to write a new work for the string orchestra A Far Cry, to premiere in April 2022 for the 75th anniversary celebration of their music program.

Composer, instrumentalist, producer, and multimedia artist David Crowell has been praised for compositional work that is “notable for its crystalline sonic beauty” (Boston Globe) and which “pulses with small, ecstatic fibrillations” (New York Times). His music has been performed internationally at festivals and venues including the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), Lucerne Festival Spotlights Series, Library of Congress, MATA Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Marathon, Phillips Collection, Dumbarton Oaks, London Jazz Festival, Mizzou New Music Festival, Cleveland International Classical Guitar Festival, Da Camera Society, Walled City Festival, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Festival (Brooklyn Academy of Music), Cortona Sessions for New Music, American Music Festival, Tribeca New Music Festival, Festival for New American Music, and National Sawdust; by commissioning ensembles such as the JACK Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, New Morse Code, NOW Ensemble; and by longtime collaborators Sandbox Percussion. He has released music on New Amsterdam, Innova, National Sawdust Tracks, Coviello Classics, and Skirl. His ensemble, Empyrean Atlas, has been featured numerous times on WNYC's New Sounds, including a live performance and interview with John Schafer. From 2007 to 2016, he toured internationally on woodwinds as a member of the Philip Glass Ensemble.

Jessie Montgomery

Early-Career Musician Resident, Fall 2020

Montgomery will work on an orchestra piece for the National Symphony Orchestra that will celebrate the life of literary genius Toni Morrison. With her figure as guide and inspiration, Montgomery will connect this work to musical influences of the African diaspora as it relates to her own identity.

Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and her works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of twenty-first-century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (Washington Post).

Viet Cuong

Early-Career Musician Resident, Spring 2020

Called “alluring” and “wildly inventive” by the New York Times, Viet Cuong’s music has been performed on six continents by ensembles including Sō Percussion, Eighth Blackbird, Alarm Will Sound, Sandbox Percussion, the PRISM Quartet, JACK Quartet, Minnesota Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony, and Albany Symphony, in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and Library of Congress, among many others. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and Peabody Conservatory, he is currently finishing his PhD at Princeton University.

Through his music Viet enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and his recent works include a solo snare drum piece, a double reed quintet, and, most recently, a tuba concerto. His upcoming projects include a double oboe concerto for the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, as well as a new work for Sandbox Percussion that will be premiered at Dumbarton Oaks in March.

Robyn Bollinger

Early-Career Musician Resident, Fall 2019

American violinist Robyn Bollinger is a young artist on the rise. Recently out of conservatory, Bollinger is building a career as a soloist and chamber musician. Already recognized for her creativity, rich tones, emotional depth, and technical mastery, she received a prestigious 2016 fellowship from the Leonore Annenberg Arts Fellowship Fund for her multimedia performance project entitled “CIACCONA: The Bass of Time,” which she began touring in 2018. Bollinger made her Philadelphia Orchestra debut at age twelve, and has since performed with orchestras and at festivals nationwide, among them the Boston Pops, the Grand Tetons Music Festival Orchestra, and the music festivals of Aspen, Lake Champlain, Maui, Marlboro, and Rockport.

During her Early-Career Musician Residency, Bollinger is creating a new original multimedia recital entitled “Encore! Just One More . . .” Lighthearted and thought-provoking, it tells the story of that most indulgent musical tradition, exploring the legends, controversies, emotions, and practices of encores throughout history.

Celil Refik Kaya

Early-Career Musician Resident, 2017–2018

Since his concert debut at the age of 6, Celil Refik Kaya has performed in many concert halls and festivals around the United States and Turkey, and has received many accolades, including as the youngest winner of the 2012 JoAnn Falletta International Guitar Concerto Competition. In 2017 he was awarded “Rising Young Musician of the Year” by the Donizetti Classical Music Awards in Istanbul. Mr. Kaya has recorded four albums with Naxos Records, including, during his residency, two of Agustin Barrios Mangore.

Besides a concert soloist, Kaya is also a composer. During his residency at Dumbarton Oaks, he composed a string quartet and a quintet for guitar and strings. He also composed several chamber music works that include unique Turkish instruments such as the rebab, a solo violin suite featuring Turkish makams and rhythms, as well as concert études for the oud. Some of these works will be performed in 2019 at Dumbarton Oaks.

Matthew Aucoin

Early-Career Musician Resident, 2015–2016

Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, writer, and pianist, and was the 2015–2016 Early-Career Musician in Residence at Dumbarton Oaks. He is a 2012 graduate of Harvard College, where he studied with the poet Jorie Graham, and a 2013 graduate of the Juilliard School, where he studied with composer Robert Beaser. Shortly before he graduated from Harvard, Aucoin was hired as the youngest assistant conductor in the history of the Metropolitan Opera, where he worked with Thomas Adès, James Levine, and Valery Gergiev.

From 2013 to 2015, Aucoin was the Solti Conducting Apprentice at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he studied with Riccardo Muti. In the 2014–15 season, Aucoin conducted the premieres of two of his operas. In October 2016, pianist Conor Hanick and the Alabama Symphony performed Aucoin’s first piano concerto, commissioned by the Gilmore Foundation. Aucoin conducted the premiere of his orchestral work Evidence, commissioned by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Last season, his song cycle Merrill Songs (set to texts by James Merrill) was premiered by tenor Paul Appleby at Carnegie Hall, which co-commissioned the work with Wigmore Hall, London. Violinist Jennifer Koh commissioned and debuted Aucoin’s solo violin work Resolve for the New York Philharmonic Biennial and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. In early 2017, Aucoin’s dramatic cantata The Orphic Moment had its European premiere at the Salzburger Landestheater, with the composer conducting.

Dumbarton Oaks and First Nights, with the support of the Fromm Music Foundation, co-commissioned Violin Sonata: Its Own Accord, which premiered at the European Month of Culture at Dumbarton Oaks concert on May 21, 2017. Violinist Keir GoGwilt was accompanied by Aucoin on piano.

Caroline Adelaide Shaw

Early-Career Musician Resident, 2014–2015

Caroline Adelaide Shaw was the inaugural Early-Career Musician in Residence at Dumbarton Oaks. Trained as a violinist, Shaw is also a singer in the Grammy Award–winning Roomful of Teeth. In 2013, she became the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Partita for 8 Voices. As a violinist, Shaw performs primarily with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME).

As well as being a New York–based musician, Shaw was a doctoral candidate in composition at Princeton University. She previously studied at Rice (BM, violin) and Yale (MM, violin), and she held a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship in 2004–2005.

For Dumbarton Oaks’ seventy-fifth anniversary, the institution commissioned Shaw to compose Plan & Elevation (The Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks), a string quartet that was premiered by the Dover Quartet in the Dumbarton Oaks Music Room on November 1, the historic anniversary date.