Lincoln Ballard received his PhD in Music History from the University of Washington in 2010 under the guidance of Stephen Rumph, and his research has focused on popular music and twentieth-century art music, especially the works of Alexander Scriabin. Ballard’s dissertation offered the first comprehensive study of Scriabin’s reception history in Russia and in the West. His publications have appeared in American Music, The Journal of the Scriabin Society of America, Performance Practice Review, and Popular Music. Ballard has taught at the University of Washington, University of Puget Sound, Southwestern College, and Cascadia Community College.

Nicolae Coman was born in 1936 in Bucharest. He studied music since 1947 with Mihail Jora (music theory, harmony) and Florica Musicescu (piano) and continued at the National University of Music in Bucharest (1953-59) with Mihail Jora and Leon Klepper (composition). He was a researcher at the Brailoiu Institute of Ethnomusicology and Folklore in Bucharest (1960-63). Since 1963 he has been teaching harmony and composition at the National University of Music in Bucharest. He published various articles in important Romanian art journals, as well as poems, opera librettos and lyrics for vocal, choral and vocal-symphonic works. He was awarded the Prize of the Union of Romanian Composers and Musicologists in 1969. He gave numerous lectures, conferences, he participated in radio and TV broadcasts. He wrote vocal, vocal-symphonic, symphonic and chamber music, as well as pop music songs.

Lena Vieru Conta was born in Moscow into a family of musicians. She studied piano in Bucharest, Salzburg, Moscow and Geneva with Gabriel Amiras, Carlo Zecchi, Lev Naumov and Harry Datyner. She also pursued studies in drawing and painting with Gyuri Glauber and Clarette Wachtel. Her repertoire includes classical and contemporary works. She performed in Romania, Germany, France, Switzerland, Holland, the U.S.A. and Canada. She recorded for the Romanian Radio, France Musique and CBC Canada and can be heard on a CD in the Romanian Music Anthology, produced by the Romanian Union of Composers and Musicologists and the Romanian Radio. Lena Vieru Conta is also a visual artist; she exhibited paintings, drawings and decorative art in group and individual shows in Romania, Holland, the U.S.A. and Canada; her works can be found in private collections in Canada, in the United States, Japan, Israel, Russia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland and Romania. She defended summa cum laude an interdisciplinary doctorate thesis (musicology, theory and history of art, psychology) in 2004. While pursuing her work as a pianist and an artist, Lena Vieru Conta taught piano in Romania, Switzerland and Canada; presently she also teaches interdisciplinary classes at the National University of Music in Bucharest.

Anna Levy, native of Sofia, Bulgaria, pianist and musicologist, received her Doctor of Musical Arts from the Moscow Conservatory in 1990. On immigrating to Canada she has appeared both as a soloist and chamber musician championing contemporary music in North America and Europe. She has appeared as soloist at Princeton University, Ohio State University, the University of Illinois, University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University, in performances of the music of Scriabin, Alfred Schnittke, Nikolai Korndorf, and numerous Canadian composers. In 2003 she formed the Yarilo Music Ensemble in collaboration with fellow pianist Jane Hayes, and the ensemble has been featured in CBC broadcasts. Noted for her innovative approaches to performance, Levy recently toured Europe where she performed on stages in Zurich, the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, and the Felicia Blumenthal Center in Tel Aviv, Israel. She also participated in the Sofia Music Weeks International Festival, where she was broadcast on Bulgarian television.

Gregory Myers holds a MLIS and a PhD in historical musicology degrees from the University of British Columbia. An independent scholar, publisher, translator and bibliographer, he currently holds the Dietrich Reinhart OSB Fellowship in Manuscript Studies at the Hill Museum and Manuscript library, St. John’s University, in Minnesota. Myers is a specialist in the music of Eastern Europe, specifically Russia and the Balkans, and researches, publishes extensively and lectures on issues of medieval music (Byzantium and the Slavs) and the post World War II musical developments of these countries. Myers has held research fellowships at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington DC, Ohio State University, the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana and recently, the Center for Advanced Study in Sofia, Bulgaria.