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.
Grigore Cudalbu is a composer, associate professor at the National University of Music Bucharest. He is also a member of the vocal music department of the Union of Composers and Musicologists of Romania and vice-president of the Romanian National Association of Choral Music. He defended his doctoral thesis in 2006: Fundamental elements of musical language used by Romanian composers in a cappella music or in choral works with instrumental accompaniment after the Second World War. He composed numerous choral works and wrote the book Romanian miniatures, madrigals and choral poems after 1945 (2014). He was invited to the International New Music Week (Bucharest, 2013, 2014, 2015) to promote his own creations with Prelude Chamber Choir, as guest conductor.
Smiljka Kitanović, PhD, is a freelance writer and family history researcher, with a focus on the Balkans, including Danube German genealogy. She was awarded second place for published article category in the 2013 Excellence-in-Writing-Competition, offered by the International Society of Family History Writers and Editors. In 2000 she received a doctoral degree in Biomedical Sciences from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, New York, and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in microbiology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. She writes articles on genealogy, history, and science topics for magazines such as Family Chronicle, Internet Genealogy, and Dig.
Valentina Sandu-Dediu studied musicology at the National University of Music, Bucharest, graduating in 1990. She has taught musicology and stylistics at the university since 1993. She has written over 30 studies, 300 articles, and 10 books, including Rumänische Musik nach 1944 (2006); Alegeri, atitudini, afecte: Despre stil și retorică în muzică [Choices, Attitudes, Affects: Style and Rhetoric in Music] (2010); and În căutarea consonanțelor [Searching for Consonances] (2017). She has authored series of programmes for Radio Romania, and plays the piano in chamber music recitals (CDs released in Romania with Aurelian Octav Popa, in Germany (Neos) with Dan Dediu, and in Boston (Albany) with Ray Jackendoff).
Valentina Sandu-Dediu has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and has been rector of New Europe College, Bucharest, since 2014. She is the recipient of the Peregrinus-Stiftung Prize of the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften (2008). In 2010, she founded Musicology Today, the journal of the National University of Music Bucharest.