New works inspired by Hildegard’s life, music and works of art

A Hildegard Symposium on visual music

Performed by Trinity Choir and the National Sawdust Ensemble

Jeffrey Zeigler, Music Director of the National Sawdust Ensemble

Experience the profound depth of Hildegard’s visions, evoking the same sense of wonder as gazing at a starlit night or standing before a towering masterpiece. Given Hildegard’s enduring appeal across a wide range of fields such as music, medicine, natural sciences, and philosophy, this concert offers a stunning exploration of what it means to be human, spiritual, and connected to the world we share.

// The Hildegard Commission is generously supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, Endeavor Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Cultural Development Fund.

// This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org.

ABOUT CHE BUFORD - WINNER

che ali is an experimental interdisciplinary artist based in new york city. che primarily performs and creates music as a violinist and composer while also integrating objects, voice, movement, and poetry. their practice often deals with themes of memory, place, the quotidian, exploring humaness through a somatic lens and in dialogue with poetic possibility and conceptual inquiry. their work is deeply interested in the exposure of timbral details, resonance, introspection, interiority, and starkness, realized through improvisational performance, acoustic and electroacoustic sound worlds. che has collaborated with artist’s including Adama Delphine Fawundu, Deborah Jack, Torsten Lang, Dafna Naphtali & James Ilgenfritz. They have received commissions from Midori, The Museum of Modern Art, icarus Quartet, Castle of our Skins, Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy, and others.  

che holds a bachelor's degree in violin performance from the boston conservatory at berklee. they are currently a DMA candidate at columbia university in music composition, where they've studied with Marcos Balter, George Lewis, Zosha Di Castri, and Georg Friedrich Haas. in their free time, che enjoys taking long walks, eating and cooking plant based food, thrifting, and traveling.

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ABOUT LĪVA BLŪMA - WINNER

Līva Blūma is a Latvian composer who works at the intersection of concert music, opera and performance art. Her work inhabits concert halls, churches, swamps and hospital hallways and has been performed by Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, Riga Project Choir, Youth Choir “Kamēr...”, mezzo-soprano Helēna Sorokina, trio ART-i-SHOCK, vocal ensemble “Putni” and Bridger Brass Quintet.

Līva’s first chamber opera “Monstera Deliciosa” (2023) explored the intricate connections between ecology and society through stories of Baltic women and their relationship with plants. The Renaissance-polyphony inspired score of her second chamber opera “Cantus Firmus” (2025) follows four women contemplating their options in the face of a potential ecological Catastrophe.

Līva holds a Bachelor’s degree in composition from Jazeps Vitols Latvian Music Academy and has studied at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. She completed her Master’s in Composition at the Peabody Institute Of Johns Hopkins University in 2021. In 2026, Līva is found in the Triangle area of North Carolina, where she composes, sings early music and occasionally takes pictures with her film camera.

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‍ABOUT FJÓLA EVANS - WINNER

Fjóla Evans is a Canadian/Icelandic composer and cellist. Her work explores the visceral physicality of sound while drawing inspiration from patterns of natura phenomena. Commissions and performances have come from musicians such as eighth blackbird, the Aizuri Quartet, and the Residentie Orkest of the Netherlands. Her work has been featured on the MATA Festival, Bang on a Can Marathon, Gaudeamus Music Week, and the Cello Biennale Amsterdam 2020. Fjóla holds a doctorate in composition from Columbia University where her research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Recent and upcoming projects include Hraunflæði: a new work for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Íslenzk Ferðaflóra: a song cycle for Dúplum duo based on a taxonomy of Icelandic plant life, the release of violinist Maiani da Silva’s recording of Bloom on Sono Luminus, the score for Clement Virgo’s film Steal Away which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and the German premiere—as performed by Ensemble Sjaella, Leipzig Ballett, and the Gewandhaus Orchestra—of Varð henni ljóð á munni: a piece for vocal sextet and chamber orchestra inspired by the women of the Icelandic sagas. www.fjolaevans.com

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ABOUT MARIA-EDUARDA MENDES MARTINS - WINNER

Maria-Eduarda Mendes Martins is a composer living in Toronto, ON. Her compositional output explores connections between present and past musical eras, foregrounding humanistic and multidimensional aspects of contemporary art. Originally from Brazil, Maria-Eduarda completed an undergraduate degree at UFRGS, a master’s degree at University of Victoria, and a doctoral degree at University of Toronto (all of which in music composition). Maria-Eduarda has shared stages with artists (and ensembles) such as Lang Lang, Gemma New, Louise Bessette, Victoria Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic, Brno Philharmonic, in festivals such as the Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL) and Académie Francis Poulenc (FR). She is the 2026 recipient of University of Toronto’s prestigious Tecumseh Sherman Rogers Graduating Award.

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ABOUT ALIAYTA FOON-DANCOES - FINALIST

Aliayta Foon-Dancoes is a New York based, Vancouver born composer and violinist who grew up in a red house on the east side. She has made work for concert halls, festivals, galleries, homes, close friends, and the internet. Aliayta is best described as a court jester*, residing at the intersection between disciplines where confrontations, roundabouts, and accidents occur. Her work obsessively fixates on the collision of daily joy and the simultaneous erosion of faith in tomorrow, explored through satire, despair, willful ignorance, desire, and hysteria. Recently Aliayta has been making cubes - paper cubes, 3D model cubes, and 125 cubes that together made a singular omnicube. Sometimes she sees cubes when they aren’t there. *the court jester historically was more than a comedian and entertainer, using humour as a form of critique - lampooning authority, and mocking the king.

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‍ABOUT ANNA JOHNSON - FINALIST

Anna Johnson is a composer, performer and visual artist. Her sound unites electroacoustic improvisation with backgrounds in medieval folk traditions and sacred music. Based in drone and hypnotic repetition, she is particularly invested in vocal expression as a portal to somatic presence. Anna’s performances often integrate projection installations of her experimental film work. Her approach to live work is ritualistic; she seeks embodied and communal experiences of vulnerability and spiritual catharsis. She is drawn to the meeting points between personal and mythical, present and ancient.

Anna is based in Chicago and originates from Minnesota, where she was raised with Celtic and Anglo folk traditions and sacred choral music, and studied both Western classical as well as traditional Eastern European polyphony with Mila Vocal Ensemble. She holds an MFA from the Performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Studio Art from Macalester College. Anna tours regularly in North America and Europe, and was awarded an Outer Ear Session at Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio in spring 2026 to record new work. Her debut EP was released in 2025 by UK label Industrial Coast and her debut LP is anticipated in fall 2026.

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ABOUT QIUJIANG LEVI LU 卢秋江 - FINALIST

Qiujiang Levi Lu / 卢秋江 is an experimental musician, composer, creative technologist, and lecturer in music at the University of Pennsylvania. Based in the United States, Lu has been described by I Care If You Listen as “brutally cohesive.” Their practice spans live performance, electroacoustic instrument design, installation, chamber and experimental composition, film scoring, and multimedia collaboration. Across these forms, they create works in which tenderness and violence are held in the same body, using sound to transform listening into an encounter with vulnerability, force, and altered perception.

A central part of Lu’s work is the invention of self-made electroacoustic instruments, including intraoral microphone-speaker feedback systems, amplified laptop interfaces, motion-sensing electronics, and custom tools that extend the body as a site of transhumanist sound-making. Their ritual-inflected performances bring Chinese lineages into conversation with noise, embodied technology, queerness, spirituality, and transformation.

Lu is one half of Warp Duo with violinist Scott Li. Their work has been presented internationally at La MaMa, MATA Festival, Music Gallery Toronto, Send + Receive, High Zero Festival, Zagreb Academy of Music, Threading Festival, and Temple Dongjingyuan.

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ABOUT SARAH PARKER - FINALIST

According to a plethora of Facebook hate comments, Sarah’s practice centers around “devolving the saxophone with attention-seeking gimmicks,” some of which include: modifying instruments with tubes, animal calls, and electronics; turning a preserved heart specimen into an electronic instrument; and performing fake dental surgery on unsuspecting audience members. Through her “attention-seekings,” Sarah aims to redefine the performer-instrumental relationship by inventing scenarios which expand music-making into a curiosity-centered, interdisciplinary process. As a composer, performer, and educator, she believes that exploration challenges us to listen, and to live, in radically new ways. Sarah is a Baltimore-based composer and saxophonist and performs regularly with her trio Sophie Rollover and as a member of Wieldflower Arts. She earned a Master of Music in Composition from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, where she studied with Sky Macklay, and a Bachelor of Music in Composition from the Berklee College of Music, where she studied with Marti Epstein and Nomi Epstein. 

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ABOUT DARCY COPELAND - HONORABLE MENTION

Darcy Copeland is an American composer whose work explores sound as a living, relational phenomenon through composition and artistic research. Working at the intersections of ecology, philosophy, and experimental music, she creates immersive and expressive sonic environments that investigate material agency, memory, and more-than-human forms of being. Her compositions treat sound as an evolving ecosystem, where acoustic, electronic, and found materials interact through processes of emergence, transformation, and decay.

Copeland is a PhD candidate in Music Composition at Harvard University, where her research examines composition as world-making. Her work has been presented internationally by ensembles and festivals across Europe, North America, Brazil, Australia, and Japan. In summer 2026, she will serve as a composer-in-residence at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence.

instagram: @darcyc0eland

website: https://www.darcycopeland.com/

linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darcy-c0peland/

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ABOUT TRINITY CHOIR

Peerless, Grammy–nominated interpreters of both early and new music, The Choir of Trinity Wall Street has changed the realm of 21st–century vocal music, breaking new ground with an artistry described as “blazing with vigour...a choir from heaven” (The Times, London). This premier ensemble, under the direction of Julian Wachner, can be heard in New York City and around the world in performances described as “thrilling” (New Yorker), “musically top-notch” (Wall Street Journal), and “simply superb” (New York Times). The choir leads the liturgical music on Sundays at Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel, while performing in Bach at One, Compline by Candlelight, and many other concerts and festivals throughout the year. Critically acclaimed annual performances of Handel’s Messiah and Trinity’s annual Twelfth Night and Time’s Arrow Festivals have become a tradition for many New Yorkers. The Choir has toured extensively throughout the United States, making appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Berkeley Early Music Festival, BAM Next Wave Festival, and the Prototype Festival, and recent seasons have seen performances at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and London’s Barbican Theatre. The Choir has been featured with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the New York Philharmonic, and with the Rolling Stones on their 50th anniversary tour. Trinity’s long-term commitment to new music is evident in their collaborations with living composers including Du Yun, Paola Prestini, Ralf Gawlick, Elena Ruehr, and Julia Wolfe. The Choir collaborated on Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Angel’s Bone, which was presented in Trinity Church in 2014 and at the Prototype Festival in 2016.