John Aylward, Artistic Director

John Aylward’s music has been recognized by leading arts institutions as engaging, refined, and imaginative. As the Artistic Director of Ecce, Aylward has overseen the premieres and performances of numerous works by composers of our time, and as the Director of the Etchings Festival, he has mentored emerging composers from around the world in the culturally enlivened community of Auvillar, France.

Aylward’s music has been awarded by the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, 2011, and the Walter Hinrichsen Award, 2018), the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, the Fulbright Foundation (Germany), the International Society for Contemporary Music (First Prize), the MacDowell Colony, Tanglewood, the Aspen Music School, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and many others.

johnaylward.com

Jean-Philippe Wurtz, conductor
Musical Director, Etchings Festival

Over the span of his career, Jean-Philippe Wurts has conducted Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Linea, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Ensemble Plural, Ensemble Smash, Ensemble Accroche Note, Orchestre National des Pays de Loire, Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine, and many others.

His commitment to teaching music has led to regular collaborations with the music schools (Musikhochschulen) of Bremen, Essen, Karlsruhe, in Germany, the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et Danse (National Conservatory of Music and Dance) in Paris, the Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin, the Strasbourg conservatory and the Eötvös Foundation in Hungary.

As a conductor he has performed many premieres, among them pieces by Klaus Huber, Péter Eötvös, Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Jarrell, Wolfgang Rihm, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Unsuk Chin, Raphaël Cendo, Francesco Filidei, Alberto Posadas, Mark André, Frédéric Durieux, etc.

In September 2015 he was appointed artistic director of the Voix Nouvelles program at the Royaumont Foundation.

Laine Rettmer | Video Artist, Director

Laine Rettmer is a video artist and opera director whose work explores performance, gender, and methods of social control. Her work has been shown at The Clay Arts Center (2018), the Museum of Fine Art (2017), the Boston Independent Film Festival (2017), FPAC (2017), Manifesta (2016), Yuan Art Museum (2016), Yve Yang Gallery (2016), Perkins and Ping (2016), Present Company (2015), NADA NY, NADA Presents, (2014). For the past four years she was the resident stage director for the New York based company LoftOpera, with whom her Macbeth last December received a Freddie Award for best new production, and her Barber of Seville was named one of the top 10 classical music productions of 2014 by the New York Times. She has also worked extensively on new opera with companies such as New York City Opera, Ecce Ensemble, Guerrilla Opera, Rhymes with Opera, and Fresh Squeezed Opera. Recent awards received include a MAP Fund grant for a collaborative opera, Standby Snow: Chronicle of a Heat Wave, a Fellowship from the Center for Arts Design and Social Research, a Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, an Art School Alliance Fellowship from HFBK Hamburg and a residency at Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts in Iceland. Rettmer is currently a Residential Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and teaching at Northeastern University. She holds a BFA from New York University and a MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts.

Hassan Anderson, Special Projects Coordinator

Oboist Hassan Anderson is a graduate of The Juilliard School of Music in New York City. He recently received his Master of Music degree in Oboe Performance under the tutelage of Nathan Hughes and additional studies with Pedro Diaz, Elaine Douvas and Linda Strommen. A native of Jacksonville, Fl Mr. Anderson received his Bachelor of Music degree from Stetson University, studying with Ann Adams. Mr. Anderson has also served as an oboe fellow at the Marlboro Music Festival in Marlboro, Vermont for the last three consecutive summers on a full tuition scholarship. With a tremendous dedication to music education and pedagogy, Mr. Anderson is currently in his second year as a Teaching Artist with Jazz House Kids. In a partnership between Jazz House Kids and Link Community School of Newark, NJ Mr. Anderson teaches a 7th and 8th grade curriculum with a concentration in Jazz Music History, Tonal Harmony/Theory, Functional Piano, and Show Choir. In his free time Mr. Anderson enjoys reading, reed making, running and enjoying the company of his wonderful friends and family.