Dimitri Conomos is a Byzantine musicologist who lives in Oxford, England. He has taught Medieval and Contemporary musicology at several universities in Europe, North America and Australia. He has written several books and a large number of articles on various theoretical and historical aspects of Eastern Church music (see Dimitri E. Conomos, The Late Byzantine and Slavonic Communion Cycle: Liturgy and Music, Dumbarton Oaks, 1985; Dimitri E. Conomos, Byzantine Hymnography and Byzantine Chant, Hellenic College Press, Brookline MA, 1984).  Every year he visits the Holy Mountain where he continues his research in the Romanian, Greek, Russian and Serbian archives.

Maria Grăjdian (born in Bucharest) is Associate Professor of media studies, aesthetics of popular culture(s)/subculture(s) and cultural anthropology at Hiroshima University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She holds a PhD in Musicology from Hannover University of Music, Drama and Media. She teaches and researches on Japanese media (Takarazuka Revue, Ghibli Studio, Haruki Murakami), the history of knowledge (Japanese encyclopedias) and the dynamics of identity in late modernity. Her most recent publications include a number of research articles in academic journals as well as books on contemporary Japanese culture. Currently, within the research project Takarazuka Revue’s Metamorphosis from a Local Stage Art towards a Global Medium funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology – in which she acts as principal investigator –, she is preparing two books: The Archaeology of Desire: How Takarazuka Revue Has Impacted the World, and Beautiful New World: The Poetics and Pragmatics of the Japanese Cultural Imperialism.

After graduating in piano and musicology from the National Music University of Bucharest in 1990, Professor Valentina Sandu-Dediu turned to two main areas of research in the following decades: one interdisciplinary, in which she studied aspects of musical stylistics and rhetoric and proposed a definition of mannerism in musical culture (Stylistic and Symbolic Hypostases of Mannerism in Music, Bucharest, 1997), and another in which she studied the history of post-war music in communist Romania and the ideologies that determined it. The other direction in which Sandu-Dediu is active involves reassessing and reformulating the history of post-war Romanian music: Romanian Music between 1944-2000, printed in Bucharest in 2002, with a German version in 2006 (Pfau, Saarbrücken); New Histories of Romanian Musics (Bucharest, 2020), edited by Sandu-Dediu and Nicolae Gheorghiță, and Histories and Ideologies: the Bucharest Philharmonic (1868-2018), edited by Sandu-Dediu (Bucharest, 2023). Since 2014 she is rector of New Europe College Bucharest, Institute of Advanced Study.

Thomas Beimel, composer, musicologist, violist was born in 1967 in Essen, Germany. Starting as a viola player, he finalized music studies and instrumental pedagogics at Hochschule für Musik im Rheinland. In 1989 he founded together with other musicians the ensemble Partita Radicale, specializing in the field between improvisation and composition. Since 1993, the ensemble worked with outstanding Romanian composers (there are two CDs with contemporary Romanian music released by sonoton, Munich).
Since 1991, Thomas Beimel has made several musicological researches resulting in book publications on the music of the Belgium composer Jacqueline Fontyn, and of the Romanian composer Myriam Marbe. Since 1998, he conceived many broadcasts on topics like contemporary music in Romania and Latin America, classical modern music in Eastern Europe, music and rhetoric.
Since 1994 Thomas Beimel works also as composer. In the summer of 1997 he studied privately composition with Myriam Marbe, Bucharest. In 1999, his first opera was premiered at Stadttheater Mönchengladbach, Germany. Stage activities were continued in June 2001 by the theatre music for the first integral drama adaption of Franz Kafka’s novel In der Strafkolonie, opera house, Wuppertal. In 2002, faltenbalg, a stereophonic composition for five orchestras of accordions, was premiered.
Thomas Beimel received a special award for composition, Impulse, 2004. He was 2005-2006 composer-in-residence, Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia, Bamberg.