Ryan Ebright serves as an Associate Professor of Musicology at Bowling Green State University, where he also leads the DMA in Contemporary Music program. His work, which centers on opera and experimentalism, has appeared in Cambridge Opera Journal, American Music, Contemporary Music Review, and Journal of the Society for American Music, as well as the edited volumes Rethinking Reich and Contemporary Opera in Flux. As a public-facing scholar, he has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Opera News, and NewMusicBox; has given talks and provided essays for Opera Philadelphia, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Opera, Toledo Opera, and other organizations; and appears in the 2025 documentary Monk in Pieces. His in-progress book is titled Reform: Making American Opera after Einstein.

Andrea Zarafshon Moore is Associate Professor of Music at Smith College. Her current work is centered on new music’s participation in cultures of commemoration, both as a form of monumental response to crisis and as counter- or non-monumental performance. Other work has addressed questions of musical value and prestige, globalization and representation, and contemporary Bach culture. Her book Audible Loss: New Music and the Crisis of Memory, was published in 2025 by Fordham University Press.

Robert Fink is Professor of Musicology and Music Industry, and the director of the Berry Gordy Music Industry Center. Trained as a music theorist and musicologist, his primary areas of interest include musical analysis, avant-garde and minimal music, popular music studies, timbre and rhythm in music, and the history of electronic dance music.

He has published widely on contemporary and popular music in academic journals, and is the author of Repeating Ourselves, a 2005 study of American minimal music as cultural practice; and The Relentless Pursuit of Tone, an interdisciplinary survey of research into the “sound” of popular music, awarded the American Musicological Society’s Ruth Solie Prize for best edited collection in 2018. Professor Fink also has extensive experience as a forensic musicologist in copyright litigation; a list of clients and fee structure is available upon request.

Joy H. Calico is professor of musicology and chair of the Department of Musicology. Her scholarship focuses on interdisciplinary Cold War cultural politics, opera since 1900, and Arnold Schoenberg. Her current projects include a theory of twentieth- and twenty-first-century opera according to scene type, built on Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (under contract with University of California Press), and an article about the Arnold Schoenberg Gesamtausgabe as cultural diplomacy and intimate history in the Cold War. Her most recent publication is a co-edited volume for OUP entitled Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900 (2026). She and Daniel Chua launched the California Studies in Global Musicology (CSGM) book series in 2024.

She is the author of two monographs published by California: Brecht at the Opera (2008; paperback 2019) and Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe (2014; expanded Italian edition published in 2023 and Russian translation published in 2025). Calico has published articles and book chapters on Joan La Barbara, music encoding and pedagogy, atonal music and human flourishing, Olga Neuwirth, Kaija Saariaho, Helmut Lachenmann, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Schoenberg and noise, and East German opera directors, among other things. Recent publications include a chapter theorizing dramaturgies of trauma and sound design in Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite Now for Contemporary Opera in Flux, edited by Yayoi Uno Everett (University of Michigan Press, 2024), and an essay for the book/CD release of Sivan Eldar’s opera Like Flesh, entitled “An Operatic Queering of Ecological Grief” (2025).

Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Radcliffe Institute, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Sacher Stiftung, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation, the DAAD, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. In winter term 2019 she was Gerstein Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies and the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto.

Calico is a member of the working team of the international Black Opera Research Network (BORN) and serves on the editorial board of its journal, Journal of Black Opera and Music Theatre (JBOM). She hosted the Opera | Black | Queer symposium at UCLA in October 2026 as a BORN initiative. She was on the Nashville Opera board for nearly a decade. Calico is former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society as well as a former Director-at-Large for the AMS board (2019-21). She was co-founder and coordinator of the Music and Sound Studies Network of the German Studies Association and served on the GSA’s board (2013-2016), during which time she was also Director of the Max Kade Center for European and German Studies at Vanderbilt University. She was on the faculty at Vanderbilt for twenty years before coming to UCLA in 2023.

Mark Kligman is the Inaugural holder of the Mickey Katz Endowed Chair in Jewish Music at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music where he is a professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology. He specializes in the liturgical traditions of Middle Eastern Jewish communities and various areas of popular Jewish music. He has published on the liturgical music of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn in journals as well as his book, Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (Wayne State University, 2009), which shows the interconnection between the music of Syrian Jews and their cultural way of life. His other publications focus on the intersection of contemporary Jewish life and various liturgical and paraliturgical musical contexts. Orthodox Popular music is the subject of his current work. He is the academic Chair of the Jewish Music Forum and co-editor of the journal MusicaJudaica. From 2014-2016 he was on the board of the Association for Jewish Studies. Presently, he is the Chair of the Jewish Studies and Music Group for the American Musicological Society. Professor Kligman is the Director of the Lowell Milken Center for Music of American Jewish Experience.