Vox Lumina

About the ensemble:
Theresa Wong (voice, cello, electric guitar)
Theresa Wong is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and intermedia artist active at the intersection of composition, improvisation, and the synergy of multiple disciplines. As a cellist and vocalist, Wong has forged a unique vocabulary on her instruments through extensive explorations in new playing techniques, alternative tunings, and the timbral merging of singing and playing together. Wong is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition, her works include Fluency of Trees for cello and voice, which premiered at the Other Minds Festival, She Dances Naked Under Palm Trees, commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill, and The Unlearning, a multi-media song cycle released on Tzadik and premiered at Roulette Intermedium. Her long-standing collaboration with Long String Instrument inventor Ellen Fullman includes Harbors, chosen as one of Wire’s top 50 releases of 2020, and Soundless, presented at the Volume Festival in Sidney and MOCA Los Angeles. Commissioned works include pieces for Del Sol Quartet, Splinter Reeds, Long Beach Opera, NakedEye Ensemble, and San Francisco Girls Chorus. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Roco Córdova (voice)
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Roco Córdova is a vocalist, composer, producer, and improviser based in the San Francisco Bay Area. They possess a B.Mus. in Composition from the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and an M.A. in Composition from Mills College in Oakland, California. Their music has been described as “slow-boiling, apparently timeless” with “an odd momentum of its own” (The Washington Post). Cordova's work fuses diverse influences with electronic media, chance operations, gradual processes, noise, improvisation, and timbral techniques of composition. Voice is at the core of their music making: they incorporate extended techniques like throat singing, overtone singing, falsetto, and vocal clicks and pops into live performances that emphasize the electronic processing of these sounds. As a touring vocalist and improviser with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, they have performed extensively around the world and have collaborated with numerous composers.

Danishta Rivero (voice)
Danishta Rivero is an improviser, performer, and sound artist based in Oakland, California. She explores the artifacts resulting from heavy processing of the voice and their relationship to its acoustic resonance. As a soloist, Rivero often performs as Caribay, conjuring the eponymous mountain spirit, whose laments cause avalanches. She is a member of electro-acoustic duo Voicehandler with percussionist Jacob Felix Heule. She is also half of Las Sucias, a feminist tropical noise duo with Alexandra Buschman-Román.

Giacomo Fiore (electric guitar)
Guitarist and musicologist Giacomo Fiore has premiered more than three dozen new works for justly-tuned, electric, and classical guitars, and released several recordings for Other Minds, Populist, Cold Blue, Pinna, Spectropol, Paper Garden Records, and his own impressum. As a scholar his research focuses on U.S. experimental music, intonation, and performance; he has published articles in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the Society for the American Music, and TEMPO, and writes occasionally for Classical Guitar and SFCV. He teaches a wide range of historical and practical music courses at the University of San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz. Giacomo is a member of experimental doom trio Harjo, and of chamber music group Wild Rumpus; he also performs regularly with New Music Works, sfSound, and other Bay Area organizations.

Kanoko Nishi (bass koto, koto, keyboard)
Kanoko Nishi is a performer currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Though classically trained on piano, receiving a BA in Classical Music Performance from Mills College, her recent interest has primarily been in performing 20th century and contemporary musical compositions for piano as well as for koto (Japanese 13-string zither), and free-improvisation in various contexts, with musicians, as well as dancers, poets, and visual artists.

Haruka Fujii (percussion)
Multi-percussionist Haruka Fujii has become one of the most prominent solo percussionists and marimbists of her generation. She has won international acclaim for her interpretations of contemporary music, having performed numerous premieres of works from luminary composers. Since 2010 Ms. Fujii has performed as an artist of the Grammy Award winning Silkroad Ensemble, joining a group of international musicians founded by Yo-Yo Ma and now serves as the Associate Artistic Director alongside with the artistic director Rhiannon Giddens.

Vocalists from Peninsula Women's Chorus, conducted by Anne Hege
Dr. Anne K. Hege creates musical worlds that invite an awareness of an attention to the body and our present moment. In her work as a conductor, composer, vocalist, instrument builder, and scholar, she explores the roots of musicality in the intersection of ensemble interaction, technology, embodiment, and expression. In 2014, she completed her Ph.D. in Music Composition at Princeton University, where she studied the role of the body in the creation of meaning in musical performance. Working as a choral conductor since 1999, Hege studied conducting with Melvin Strauss, Marika Kuzma, Judit Hartyanyi, among others. She founded and directed Folk3000 (1999-2001), Albany Community Chorus (2000-2004), Cuatro Vientos (2004-2006), and Celestial Mechanics (2007-2010). She is currently the Artistic Director of the Peninsula Women's Chorus.

Since 1966, the Peninsula Women’s Chorus (PWC) has become synonymous with artistic excellence in choral music. Known for its adventurous programming and recognized as one of the leading women’s choruses in the U.S. and beyond, the PWC is dedicated to commissioning new works, discovering rarely performed works, and keeping classical choral masterpieces for treble voices alive. Comprised of a diverse group of auditioned singers who share an enthusiasm for challenging repertoire, the PWC has commissioned 48 new works and released seven CD recordings over the last ten years. Among the PWC honors are: third place winner of The American Prize in 2023 in Virtual Performance, first place winner in Choral Performance in 2015, and second place winner in 2011; third prize in the 2006 Béla Bartók 22nd International Choir Competition in Debrecen, Hungary; two Chorus America/ASCAP Awards for Choral Excellence; and second prize at the 1994 Tallinn International Choral Competition in Estonia. Other noted performances include four appearances (in 2016, 2001, 1993, and 1987) at American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) conferences and an appearance at the closing ceremony of the Chorus America Conference in 2023. In addition to extensive performances throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, the chorus has been heard on National Public Radio, has appeared on television both nationally and internationally, and has participated in international choral festivals in Spain in 2023 and Argentina in 2015.