Jane Marshall (b. 1924) is a composer of choral music, a hymnist, poet and teacher. A longtime member of the Meadows School of the Arts theory faculty and the Sacred Music graduate faculty at Perkins School of Theology at SMU, she is now teaching in the summer continuing education program there and is active as a clinician for choral organizations around the country. A distinguished alumna of SMU, Jane has been honored twice by the Southern Baptist Musicians Conference and recently by the Fellowship of United Methodist Musicians for her contributions to church music.

She is the author of Grace, Noted, a collection of homilies, essays and hymns published by Hope Publishing Company. She and clergyman/poet John Thornburg have collaborated in two newly released hymn collections titled Can God Be Seenin Other Ways, published by Abingdon Music Press, and What Gift Can We Bring, published by Wayne Leupold Editions.

Jane and her husband Elbert Marshall, who was an engineer with Texas Instruments for thirty-eight years, have three children.

To support himself as a composer, James McCullough (b. 1939) worked for twenty years at Boston State College (now the University of Massachusetts Boston campus) as Head of the Curriculum Materials Research and Resource Center. As their Literature and Curriculum Materials Specialist, he also taught the undergraduate and graduate courses in Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

Later, returning full-time to music, he held a professional position at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Then, for five years he also served as the Arts Administrator of the Music, Literature, and Folk Life programs at the Massachusetts Council for the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences (now the Massachusetts Cultural Council).

During that time he continued to perform locally as a tenor soloist, and to compose music for many national and local Boston music organizations. A student of Daniel Pinkham and Undine Smith Moore, his complete music titles to date with their publishers are listed in The Boston Composers Project, which is published by the MIT Press, (1986).

James McCullough is also a poet, writer, actor, and avid book and CD collector. Now semi-retired, he has amassed a collection of over seven thousand CDs that he catalogs and listens to at his homes in Massachusetts and Virginia.

Kirke Mechem is the composer of more than 250 published works in almost every form. His three-act opera, Tartuffe, was performed 18 times by the Vienna Kammeroper in its "20th Century Classics" series to rave reviews and "frenetic applause". It has had some 300 performances in six countries. Songs of the Slave, a suite for bass-baritone, soprano, chorus and orchestra from his opera, John Brown, has been performed in every part of the country, most recently by the Detroit and Baltimore symphony orchestras.

ASCAP registered performances of Mechem's music in 42 countries last year. Mechem was guest of honor at the 1990 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and was invited back for an all-Mechem symphonic concert by the USSR Radio-Television Orchestra in 1991. The concert was recorded by Melodiya and released on the Russian Disc label. Mechem was born and raised in Kansas and educated at Stanford and Harvard universities. He conducted and taught at Stanford and was for several years composer-in-residence at the University of San Francisco. He lived in Vienna for three years where he came to the attention of Josef Krips, who later championed Mechem's music as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony.

Mechem's talents have been acknowledged through numerous honors, including retrospectives, grants, commissions and special anniversary performances. They have come from, among many others, the United Nations, the National Gallery, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Choral Directors Association, the Music Educators National Conference, and the National Opera Association (Lifetime Achievement Award).

Vocal music is at the heart of Mechem's work. He has been called the "dean of American choral composers." Seven doctoral dissertations have been written on his choral music. What the Choral Journal called "characteristic Mechem style: singing lines, imaginative and varied use of rhythm and texture for expressive ends" describes his instrumental music as well. His comic opera, The Newport Rivals, an American adaptation of Sheridan's classic play, The Rivals, will be premiered in 2006 by Lyric Opera San Diego, followed by performances by a consortium of other companies. The premiere of John Brown, a large-scale opera about the American abolitionist, is scheduled for the 2007-2008 season at Lyric Opera Kansas City to celebrate the company's 50th anniversary and the opening of its new opera house. Mechem is currently composing an opera based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
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Boston-based composer Marjorie Merryman has been commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, The New England Philharmonic, The American Guild of Organists, the Pappoutsakis Foundation, 20th Century Consort, Collage New Music, and many others. Her music has been played throughout the United States, as well as in England, France, Poland, Greece, Russia, Israel and Taiwan. Among her awards are prizes from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Boston League-ISCM, and the WBZ Fund for the Arts. She has received fellowships and grants from Tanglewood, the Radcliffe Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts – Meet the Composer program. Her works are published by CF Peters, G. Schirmer, E.C. Schirmer, and APNM; and recorded on the New World and Koch International labels.

An active teacher, Marjorie Merryman has taught at Harvard, MIT, and New England Conservatory and has been on the faculty of Boston University School for the Arts since 1979. She received her Ph.D from Brandeis University, and studied composition with Seymour Shifrin, Martin Boykan, Betsy Jolas, and Gail Kubik.

Till MacIvor Meyn earned his Bachelor of Arts in Music from the University of California at San Diego, a Master of Music in Composition from Indiana University, and the Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition from the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. He studied composition with Frank Ticheli, Roger Reynolds, Rand Steiger, Frederick Fox, and Don Freund, among others.

Dr. Meyn has taught at the University of Southern California, Pepperdine University, Saddleback College, and Irvine Valley College. Since 2001, he has held the position of Assistant Professor of Music Composition and Theory at Youngstown State University’s Dana School of Music, where he is a member of the Graduate Faculty.

Dr. Meyn is an active composer, and a member of the Cleveland Composer’s Guild. His compositions have been widely performed; recent highlights include performances at the 2005 National Flute Association Convention in San Diego, at Cleveland State University (September 2005), at the Manhattan School of Music (January 2005), at the 2004 Intercollegiate Men’s Choruses National Seminar at Harvard, at the 2004 Midwest Regional ACDA Convention in Indianapolis, at the 2002 National Flute Association Convention in Washington, D.C., and at the 2002 MENC National Convention in Nashville. His fanfare for symphonic winds, Anthem, was commissioned as Youngstown State University’s theme music, and is used frequently in promotional pieces aired on both radio and television. Dr. Meyn’s flute music is published by Alry Publications, and he has upcoming releases from ECS Publishing and C. Alan Publications.

Dr. Meyn is also a baritone singer, and has performed with numerous choral ensembles, notably the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the University of Southern California Chamber Singers, and the Indiana University Pro Arte Early Music Ensemble.

Alan Mills was born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1964. After studying piano at the Ulster College of Music, he went on to earn an MA in music at Cambridge University (England), studying composition with Hugh Wood and Robin Holloway. For the next two years he studied at the Guildhall School of Music in London, England.

In 1988, Mills was awarded the Lloyds Bank Young Composer Prize and in 1993 the Lower Machen Festival Prize. His music has been broadcast by BBC Radio 3, Radio Ulster, and radio stations in
France, Holland and Germany; a CD recording featuring selections of his piano music has recently been issued. Mills currently works as a pianist, lecturer and singing coach in the Greater London area and occasionally abroad.

Henry Mollicone

A graduate of the New England Conservatory, Henry Mollicone has studied composition with Donald Martino, Ron Nelson, Daniel Pinkham, Gunther Schuller, and Seymour Schifrin. He has been a professor at Santa Clara University (1985-1999) and is currently teaching at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, CA.

His one-act operas, Emperor Norton, Starbird, The Face on the Barroom Floor, and The Mask of Evil, commissioned by the Central City Opera, Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, the Kurt Herbert Adler Award Fund, and The Minnesota Opera, have been performed extensively. The Face on the Barroom Floor, a recipient of the American Composers' Recording Award, is one of America 's most oft-performed contemporary operas, and has also been produced in various European countries.
 
Mr. Mollicone has been a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow since 1997, and has served on various panels for The National Endowment for the Arts. He is associate director of the Ernest Bloch Music Festival in Newport, Oregon, and director of its composers' symposium, and in the summer of 1999, he was composer-in-residence at the Brevard Music Festival.

In addition to opera, Mr. Mollicone has written works for orchestra, voice, chorus, ballet, and various chamber combinations, as well as music for film, television, and theater, including the Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis) and the Old Globe Theater (San Diego). His works have been performed by many distinguished artists, including JoAnn Falletta, Frederica Von Stade, Erie Mills, and Maria Spacagna.

Mr. Mollicone has guest-conducted at several American opera companies including those in Baltimore, Portland, Augusta, Lake George and Central City. In 1976, Mr. Mollicone was a musical assistant to Leonard Bernstein for the show 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and from 1971 to 1976 was an assistant conductor at the New York City Opera. He is music director of the Winchester Orchestra of San Jose.
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Sally Ann Morris

Sally Ann Morris (b. 1952), lives and works in North Carolina. In 1990, she discovered the joy of composing hymn tunes, and since that time has written about 100, most of which appear in two collections from GIA Publications, Giving Thanks in Song and Prayer (1998) and …to sing the Artist’s praise…(2009). She has hymn tunes (and a Mass setting) in Gather Comprehensive II , the New Century Hymnal of the United Church of Christ, The Hymnal 21 in Japan, the 2005 Hymnal of the Church of Scotland and in other collections, hymnal supplements and recordings. Other publications include hymn and choral anthems by The Pilgrim Press, and in the forthcoming 2010 catalog of ECS Publishing.

She appears frequently as a guest artist, clinician, composer, cantor and conductor in churches nationwide, and at national conferences including The Presbyterian Association of Musicians Worship and Music Conferences at Montreat, NC, the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, and The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada.

Sally serves as Director of Music Ministries at Parkway Presbyterian Church in Winston-Salem, NC.