Trio Sirènes (flutist Marcia Kämper, violist Karin Brown, and harpist Jacqueline Pollauf) collaborate frequently on diverse recital repertoire. With performers drawn from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as well as the UMBC faculty, Trio Sirènes enjoys pushing boundaries and highlighting the diverse sonic possibilities of their wind, string and percussion instruments. their November 9, 2016 recital at UMBC focused on music written in the last twenty years, with music by Anna Clyne, Hannah Lash, Robert Paterson, Hilary Tann, and a recent commission by Dolf Kämper. Upcoming projects include recording a CD in 2017.

Iron Composer is an instant composition contest.

Five composers are invited to compete in person. On the morning of the event, the finalists are assigned an instrumentation and a secret musical ingredient. They have just five hours to write a piece of music that incorporates those two elements. Their work is then performed and judged on a public concert that same evening.

ANALOG arts established Iron Composer in 2007. In 2009, they relocated the contest from Omaha to Cleveland, where it has been hosted by Baldwin-Wallace College ever since. WCLV 104.9 FM broadcasts every competition live to its broad audience in Northeast Ohio, and people from around the world can tune into the simulcast on WCLV.org.

We are currently working on the eighth iteration of the international competition, and we are also planning to have a satellite Iron Composer competition in Baltimore for area composers and musicians.

I was the surprise performer for the 2007 and 2011 competitions. Filling the role as a performer for this event is very demanding, as it implies sight reading of new music and a live stream on a major radio station!

This long-running project has also benefited from collaborations with premier performers and composers from all around the world. Baltimore's own Monument Piano Trio was a surprise performer one year, and we've also had Baltimore composers as finalists.

The original idea for Iron Composer came from Lucky Mosko’s composition workshops at CalArts where composers were just as likely to get a bag of carrots as a secret musical ingredient as they were a motif.

ARTSaha! 2006 highlighted the Samuel Beckett centenary with a program of several short plays, including Quad, Nacht und Träume, Breath, Come & Go, Not I, Rockaby and Act Without Words II. In the attached trailer for the 2006 Artsaha, you can hear me playing piccolo for the modern reworking of Jean-Philippe Rameau's The Festivities of Hebe. Other events of ARTSaha festivals included a concerts of electronic music in the Mallory Kountze Planetarium, a full-scale production of Antheil's Ballet Mechanique, The Iron Composer composition competition, an Aeolian Kite-In, and a realization of John Cage's ASLSP.

The ARTSaha festivals enjoyed fruitful collaborations with principal members of the Baltimore Symphony, the Omaha Symphony, as well as a production partnership with the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

I am a co-founder and Co-Artistic Director of ANALOG and the ARTSaha festivals. My involvement included artistic planning as well as deep artistic involvement every year.

As a co-founder and co-director of ANALOG, I am amazed at the vast resources needed to produce a festival every summer and thankful to everyone that participates. I always enjoy performing in these concerts after all the hard work has been done to make them happen.