2025 Contemporary Collaboration Certificate
OAcademy’s pilot Contemporary Collaboration Certificate has paired 7 Composing Studio Fellows and 7 Orchestra Institute Fellows to create and workshop original pieces for solo instruments and chamber ensembles. Together, they’ve pushed creative boundaries, blending genres, and building bridges across borders.
Composer: Ethan Resnik
Performer: Victoria Witmer
Composer: Telmo Sans Ruiz
Performer: Natalia Ramírez Aranday
Composer: Katie Semro
Performer: Alondra Abas
Composer: Nacho González Nappa
Performer: Renee Qin
Composer: Andrés Ballesteros
Performer: Alenka Eržen
Composer: Derek Weagle
Performer: Lucy Rubin
Composer: Daniel Regnier
Performer: Ciara Wheeler
Three Sweet Serenades is a composition for solo viola that depicts serenity within everyday life. The piece consists of three short movements.
1. Evening Serenade - peaceful, serene
2. Bar Serenade - folk-like, more energy, quirky, playful
3. Morning Serenade - calm, lyrical, soothing
United States
United States
Nostalgia is a piece I had the pleasure of writing for a great musician from Mexico, Natalia. The chosen instrument: the vibraphone. Thanks to the rich harmonics and sustain that the instrument provides, I created a long musical phrase that extends time and tries to build a long bridge across the ocean, bringing both cultures a little closer, making them not seem so far away.
Spain
Mexico
Lúcaro was written for the Venezuelan Double Bassist Alondra Abas based on her own personal story. It’s an emotional and dramatic journey for a beautiful and dramatic instrument.
United States
Venezuela
El zaguán (“The hallway” or “entrance hall”) is a musical threshold—a space of transition between public and private, outside and inside, memory and presence. Inspired by the architecture of Latin American homes, where the zaguán often serves as both an antechamber and a guardian of memories, this piece evokes the act of crossing into another world.
In El zaguán, the harp becomes a storyteller—inviting us to pass through a sonic doorway into moments of nostalgia, mischief, and stillness.
Composed for Renee Ruiyi Qin as part of the Gabriela Ortiz OAcademy Fellowship, El zaguán is both a personal offering and a shared passageway.
Uruguay
Canada
Fragments, Echoes draws its melodic material from music across Slovenia's history as the sounds metaphorically go back in time. Halfway through the piece, the performer switches from contemporary flute to the reconstruction of the Neanderthal flute (RNP in the score, based on its Slovenian name). The original is approximately 55,000 years old, a cave bear femur punctured with two distinct holes. According to the Narodni muzej Slovenije (National Museum of Slovenia), it is "the oldest musical instrument in the world, a 60,000-year-old Neanderthal flute."
United States
Slovenia
Charms is an exploration of various folk magic traditions from around the world. Each movement or charm is a short vignette capturing a different ritual, incantation, or sacred object. Sonically, the set aims to uncover the full beauty and extensive timbral possibilities of each instrument in such a unique trio with each player taking the lead in different rituals. The work is designed to be a modular experience, able to be performed in any order, and open-ended so that more vignettes may be added in the future. The first set of Charms includes explorations of Icelandic Ljóðaháttr, chant incantation; Peruvian Ikaros or medicine songs; Ecstatic Dance rituals; Greco-Roman Defixiones, clay tablets with curses inscribed; Mesopotamian Šurpu, purification rituals involving fire; and Citrinitas, the awakening of the soul’s radiance during Alchemy’s Magnum Opus.
United States
United States
–with the collaboration of Jack Rittendale (viola) and Bakari Williams (double bass)
Parmenides’ Voyage is based on the thought of the Presocratic philosopher Parmenides (5th-6th cent. BC). In the first part, the philosopher puzzles – to the point of frustration – about the intelligibility of reality. In the second part, he is taken on a night voyage to the abode of a goddess who will reveal the nature of truth to him.
Canada
Canada