Dr. Baljinder Sekhon
Associate Professor of Composition, Head of the Penn State Composition Program
“Clearly knowing the power of sonority” (Philadelphia Inquirer), the music of Baljinder Sekhon has been presented in over 500 concerts in twenty countries. From works for large ensemble to solo works to electronic music, Sekhon’s demonstrate a wide range of interests and styles. Sekhon’s compositions for saxophone and percussion instruments are widely recognized as pioneering work in those genres with numerous presentations, CD recordings, and guest lecture appearances.
Sekhon serves as Associate Professor of Composition at the University of South Florida where he received a 2017 Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher award, he and holds the PhD and MA from the Eastman School of Music where he is a three-time recipient of the Howard Hanson Orchestral prize and served as president of the highly acclaimed OSSIA New Music Ensemble. Sekhon also holds a BM from the University of South Carolina. Additional honors include the Wayne Brewster Barlow Prize, New Music USA’s Composer Assistance Grant, Audio Inversions, Percussive Arts Society Composition Competition, Brian M. Israel Prize, Boehmler Foundation Commission, Met Life Creative Connections Grant, Belle Gitelman Prize, Barbara B. Smith Prize, multiple awards from ASCAP including the Morton Gould Young Composer Award (2006), and he was named the MTNA/FSMTA Commissioned Composer of 2012. His numerous appearances as a percussionist include those at the L.A. Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series in Walt Disney Hall, Festival Spazio Musica in Cagliari, Italy, and at the Bang On a Can Marathon in New York City.
Dr. Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice
Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Composition, Head of the Penn State Music Technology Program
Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice is an assistant professor of composition and music technology at Penn State’s School of Music; she also coordinates ROARS (Research of the Arts, Recording, and Sound). Burghart Rice holds a Ph.D. in composition from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Robert Morris and Allan Schindler.Championed internationally by ensembles such as the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra (Marin Alsop, director), her “evocative” (Resonance) music has won acclaim and inspired intense debate. Burghart Rice’s dramatic works for voice have attracted particular attention; her Murmurs from Limbo took 1st Prize in the 2005 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award and her “genuinely original, fresh, and socially conscious” (Tyler Youth Orchestra) Wake Nicodemus received the ASCAP/Morton Gould Young Composer Award. Dr. Burghart Rice recently recorded her gargantuan piece The Hardscrabble with Dr. Tonya Mitchell-Spradlin and the Penn State Symphonic Wind Ensemble for a forthcoming release on Neuma Records.Active in the production and performance of electronic music, Burghart Rice served as an audio engineer and technician for the Eastman Computer Music Center, and in this capacity produced and performed hundreds of works with musicians as diverse as ensemble eighth blackbird, carillonneur Tiffany Ng, composer Tristan Murail, and the avant garde jazz Cuong Vu Trio.Dr. Burghart Rice’s research includes developing approaches to applied music composition through mathematics, alternative music theories, and computer-assisted methods; developing models for the perception of rapid sound patterns, such as transients, with applications to artificial intelligence; elucidating the semiotics of racist tropes in music; theories of music and politics; and the intersection of electronic musicianship and education.
Kevin Sims
Director, Penn State Other Arts Ensemble
Lecturer, Music Technology
Kevin Sims is a percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and filmmaker living in Aaronsburg, Pennsylvania. He is also the founder and artistic director of, and regular performer with, Open Music, an open-instrumentation experimental music ensemble and concert series in central Pennsylvania.Kevin’s recent work includes the percussion album Yarrow Canon (Orb Tapes 2023); a film for violin duo Du.0’s piece Fantasy on “Item de Virginibus” Hildegard of Bingen; the multimedia documentary projects Battle Hymn of the Public (Orb Tapes 2020) and Our Sense of the Real; a collaboration with composer Scott Wollschleger and poet Abby Minor on a percussion monodrama titled We Have Taken and Eaten; and many recordings and performance as one half, along with James Searfoss, of the improvisation duo Moth Bucket.Kevin studied percussion at Manhattan School of Music in New York and on a DAAD fellowship at the Musikhochschule Freiburg in southwestern Germany. He was a founding member of the contemporary music ensemble Red Light New Music in New York, and of the international percussion group Ensemble XII.
Joshua Mallard
Lecturer, Video Game Music & Sound
Mallard’s works have been selected for many festivals including The 2022 UNK New Music Festival, Electronic Music Midwest 2022, NYCEMF, NSEME 2020, MuSE Sound of Arts Festival, and more. Mallard holds an MM in Music Composition & Theory from The Pennsylvania State University.
Tucker Johnson
Lecturer, Penn State Young Composers Institute
Tucker Johnson is a composer, performer, and educator whose music has been concertized and honored at festivals and events, including the Dot-The-Line new music festival (Seoul), Longy Divergent Studio (Boston), soundSCAPE Festival (Cesena), Composing in the Wilderness (Prince William Sound & NYC), Shastra Rhythm Workshop (New Jersey), and the Penn State New Music Festival (State College). More recently, his thesis work, Circumnutation, was awarded the Belle S. Gitelman prize from the Eastman School of Music. Tucker completed his BM at Penn State, where he studied with Dr. Baljinder Sekhon and Dr. Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice, and he completed his MA at the Eastman School of Music under the instruction of Dr. Robert Morris and Dr. Matthew Barber.
Affiliated Faculty:
Curtis Craig
Associate Professor of Sound Design, Head of the Penn State Sound Design Program (School of Theatre)