DelawareScene: New Music Delaware: Onishi-Beis Duo and Miles Brown @ University of Delaware, Gore Recital Hall in the Roselle Center for the Arts

New Music Delaware: Onishi-Beis Duo and Miles Brown

A faculty-led new music initiative of the UD School of Music, New Music Delaware explores new works by modern, living composers. This event is part of the residency by Santiago Beis, composer and member of Onishi-Beis Duo, an electroacoustic improvisation duo of which Yoshiaki Onishi, Assistant Professor of Music Composition takes part. In this all-improvisation concert, Onishi-Beis Duo collaborates with Miles Brown, Assistant Professor of String Bass and Jazz.

Juan Santiago Beis (b. 1990) is an Uru-Brazilian composer, pianist, audio designer, arranger, and artistic researcher. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Composition from the Escola de Música e Belas Artes do Paraná (UNESPAR), where he collaborated with diverse ensembles such as the Orquestra de Câmara da Cidade de Curitiba and the Orquestra à Base de Sopro de Curitiba. As a producer with Composteira Casa de Criação in Curitiba, he organized composer-in-residence workshops featuring prominent Brazilian artists like Marcos Balter, Paulo Rios Filho, Alex Buck, Alexandre Torres Porres, Mossa Bildner and Jorge Antunes.

Beis completed his Master of Music in Composition at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 2023, where he studied under Yoshiaki Onishi and Stefan Freund. During this time, he worked with ensembles such as the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, [Switch~ Ensemble], the University of Missouri Philharmonic (as part of the Sinquefield Composition Prize 2021), the Sheldon Arts Foundation, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, and the JACK Quartet (JACK Studio 2022).

Recent works include Color Utterance for Alarm Will Sound and intus ergo foris for the Talea Ensemble. His piece Spletna had its public premiere with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra at the Edward T. Cone Composition Institute in 2024. Beis is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Composition at the City University of New York Graduate Center, studying under Dr. Jeff Nichols.

Yoshiaki Onishi is a Japanese-American composer, conductor, and clarinetist. As a composer, he is interested in exploring a wide range of instrumental timbres and finding ways to incorporate them in musical syntaxes and forms that disrupt the sense of expectation. Noted by a New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini for its "varied, eerily alluring sounds," Onishi’s music has been performed worldwide by organizations such as New Japan Philharmonic, Asko|Schönberg Ensemble, Klangforum Wien, Nieuw Ensemble, Distractfold Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Quatuor Diotima and JACK Quartet. With his 2010 work Départ dans..., Onishi became the laureate of the Gaudeamus Prize 2011. He is named a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow. Other recent honors include the Fromm Commission in 2018 and an artistic residency fellowship from Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy. His works are published by Edition Gravis in Berlin, Germany.

As a conductor deeply engaged in promoting the music of today, Onishi served as Assistant Conductor then Director to the Mizzou New Music Ensemble at the University of Missouri. Recent conducting engagements include a residency at Stanford University with the Ensemble Kujoyama from Kyoto, Japan in October 2023, a portrait concert of Makoto Shinohara at Tokyo Opera City in July 2021. He was one of the founding members of Ensemble Exophonie Tokyo and served as its Artistic Director/Conductor/Composer Associate, as well as a member of IKTUS+, a collective of musicians initiated by Iktus Percussion Ensemble of New York. Onishi has conducted Nieuw Ensemble, ECCE Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, Yale Philharmonia, Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, Columbia University Orchestra and the University Philharmonic Orchestra of the University of Missouri.

As clarinetist and improviser, Onishi has collaborated with composers George Lewis, Carolina Heredia, Oswald Huỳnh, Bret Bohman, and Andrew Crossley. Together with Santiago Beis, he plays in the Onishi-Beis Duo, an electroacoustic improvisation duo.

Onishi received his doctorate in music composition from Columbia University in New York in 2015. Onishi has held teaching positions at Columbia University and Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo, Japan, and the University of Missouri School of Music. Since fall of 2023, Onishi is Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the University of Delaware School of Music. (LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/YoshiakiOnishi)

Bassist, composer, performer and teacher Miles Brown comes from a musical family and began playing the bass at an early age. He attended the Eastman School of Music for his undergraduate degree, earning a Bachelor of Music in Music Education and Jazz and Contemporary Media. In 2003, he received a Master of Music in String Bass Performance from Mannes College of Music and earned a Doctorate in Jazz Performance from Eastman in 2012.

A versatile musician, Dr. Brown is the bassist for the new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound and has had his compositions performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. He has performed with Regina Carter, Dave Ballou, Sean Jones, Bill Dobbins, Walt Weiskopf, Gary Smulyan, Sam Rivers and Steve Wilson. In 2008, Miles was the Interim Gussman Director of Jazz at Cornell University. From 2009–2018, Miles was the jazz program coordinator at Oakland University, where he taught jazz classes and applied lessons. For the 2017–2018 academic year, Miles taught jazz classes at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. In Fall 2018, Miles joined the University of Delaware's full-time faculty as assistant professor of string bass and jazz where he teaches applied string bass lessons, jazz history, jazz arranging, and global improvisation.