The Attic - Composer's Corner The Attic

Alice Coltrane, born McLeod, was an American jazz pianist, organist, harpist, and composer. One of the few harpists in the history of jazz, she recorded many albums as a bandleader, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s for Impulse! Records and Universal Distribution.

Octavian Nemescu is a composer of orchestral, chamber, choral, electroacoustic, multimedia, metamusic, imaginary and ritual works that have been heard throughout Europe and elsewhere. Throughout many years, from his youth, he contributed decisively to the development of the avant-garde in Romanian music. Nemescu and his colleagues launched the spectral current in Romanian music (Illuminations for orchestra 1967), with an orientation towards the usage of the ison (drone).

A prolific producer of electronic music for more than two decades, Frankfurt born Peter Kuhlmann was one of the most influential figures of electronic and ambient music, with a significant - if not radical - contribution to this colorful and often misunderstood music genre. Namlook is Koolman spelled backward.

Costin Miereanu was born in Bucharest in 1943, but naturalized French citizen in 1977. Miereanu evolved his compositional style featuring a sensuous sonic fabric by combining Satie's techniques with an abstraction of Romanian traditional music. Many of his complex and often virtuoso works include visual components.

Ornette Coleman was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s, a term he invented with the name of an album released in '61.

Coleman was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (genius grant) in 1994. His album Sound Grammar received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for music.

Ornette Coleman has sadly passed away on June 5, 2015, at 85.

Iancu Dumitrescu began composing his mature works in the early 1970s. In 1976 he founded the Hyperion Ensemble, described as "a multimedia group dedicated to experimental music". Several of Dumitrescu's early works for solo contrabass were recorded by the noted avant-garde bassist Fernando Grillo. Dumitrescu describes his music as "acousmatic", but disclaims a relationship with the Acousmatic music of French musique concrete pioneer Pierre Schaeffer. He accepts the "spectralist" label, though he distinguishes his work from some others in the spectral school in that it is not serial.