Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media Presenters
Don Lee
Senior Director, Arts and Culture
Don Lee leads Minnesota Public Radio’s initiative to expand music, arts and cultural programming. Prior to MPR, Lee worked for NPR for 18 years, serving as executive producer of NPR’s Performance Today, during which time the show received a Peabody Award (1998), the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Broadcast Award (1996) and the New York Festival gold medal (1992). He was also associate producer of NPR’s arts unit, host of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra broadcasts, and a newscaster and producer for NPR’s Sunday Show.
Mary Lee
Project Director, Classical Music Initiative
Mary Lee has over 20 years of experience in creating space on the radio for classical musicians and listeners to connect. She currently is project director for American Public Media’s Classical Music Initiative in addition to being Executive Producer of Saint Paul Sunday. Her work on Saint Paul Sunday has been awarded with a Peabody Award for excellence, the AWRT "Gracie" award and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. She has been instrumental in the creative growth of the program by leading commissions of new music including commissions for Nicholas Maw and Aaron Kernis, by developing a series of CD compilations from performances on the program and through a series of chamber music concerts and Saint Paul Sunday events around the country. Her other production work has included programs such as "A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols," Great Pianists of the 20th Century, and recently American Mavericks, the regional and national broadcasts
of the World Choral Spectacular, and the inaugural season of the Music@Menlo chamber music festival.
Sarah Lutman
Senior Vice President, Cultural Programming and Initiatives
Sarah Lutman manages Minnesota Public Radio's regional and national programming departments that create music and cultural programming for MPR's regional stations, as well as a strong family of national cultural and classical music programs. She won a Peabody Award for the radio and Web program American Mavericks and has created new partnerships for MPR and APM with the San Francisco Symphony, the Music@Menlo Festival, the BBC, the EBU and several regional cultural organizations. Previously, Lutman was senior program officer at The Bush Foundation, where she led program development and evaluation in arts, public broadcasting, environment, and pre-collegiate education programs. Lutman also helped found an early online experiment, Artswire to convene the national arts and cultural communities.
Brian Newhouse
Senior Producer, Minnesota Orchestra
Brian Newhouse has combined his experience as a professional musician and writer for public radio for 20 years. He has written for The Writer's Almanac and the internationally broadcast European Journal, a daily half-hour newsmagazine for Deutsche Welle Radio. Newhouse is host, writer and producer of the national broadcasts of the Minnesota Orchestra, heard on more than 150 stations. He won a Peabody Award for writing The Mississippi: A River of Song, and received the 2002 Golden Reel Award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters for his work with the Minnesota Orchestra. Simon & Schuster published his memoir A Crossing in 1998.
John Pearson
Manager, New Media
John Pearson heads up the production of MPR's regional Web services and American Public Media's St. Paul-produced national program Web sites. He has led the development of Minnesota Public Radio's online services since their launch in 1995, which includes the development of program Web sites, the creation of online communities, and the production of interactive events that blend streaming audio, images, and audience interaction in real time.
Julia Schrenkler
Online Interactive Producer
Julia Schrenkler manages discussion boards for MPR's regional service and for American Public Media's A Prairie Home Companion, Sound Money, The Splendid Table, and Saint Paul Sunday. She also works to develop new ways to engage online audiences through contests, story submissions, and chats. Before joining MPR, Julia produced topical discussion boards for iVillage.
Tom Voegeli
Producer
Tom Voegeli, one of the leading audio producers in the United States, has won two Grammy Awards, three Peabodys, and a Prix Italia for Best Radio Drama. He produced the Peabody-winning American Mavericks, a 13-part radio series hosted by Suzanne Vega that chronicled the lives, ideas and music of some of the 20th century American composers who broke European music traditions. He also produced two weekly radio series From the Top, a showcase for America's best teenage classical musicians, and Schickele Mix, featuring composer Peter Schickele (the "discoverer" of P. D. Q. Bach), which uses music and humor to demonstrate musical ideas that transcend cultural boundaries. Voegeli is currently working on a radio series with conductor Michael Tilson Thomas who will share his ideas about music and art, and his reminiscences of the legendary artists he’s known throughout his career.
Preston Wright
Web Producer
Preston Wright is arts and music Web producer for Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media, where he created the Web site for the Peabody-winning series American Mavericks. Wright is a champion and creator of experimental art and music. He won an American Composers Forum/McKnight Composer Fellowship and a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship for his music compositions. His electroacoustic works have been heard at the Kennedy Center and are featured on two CDs from the Sonic Circuits International Festival (innova). Wright also creates immersive, 3D virtual environments, binaural sound art, and 3D visual art that explore the artistic possibilities of the latest technologies.
Keynote Presenters
Tod Machover
Tod Machover has been widely recognized as one of the most important and innovative composers of his generation. The Los Angeles Times names him “America’s Most Wired Composer,” and The New York Times recently called him “brilliantly gifted.” As a designer of new technology and the inventor of Hyperinstruments which augment musical expression using smart computers, Machover has helped to re-invent music. He has designed and built Hyperinstruments for the most diverse musical performers and situations, such as Yo-Yo-Ma, Prince, Disney’s Epcot Center, and the BBC Symphony.
Machover is Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, and is Director of the Hyperinstruments and Opera of the Future groups there. He was the Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM Institute in Paris and was educated at Juilliard where he studied composition with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions.
Machover has received numerous awards and prizes for his work, including a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres from the French government and, most recently, the first Ray Kurzweil Prize for music and technology. He has composed five operas, including the science fiction VALIS (based on Philip K. Dick’s novel), Resurrection (based on Tolstoy’s last novel), and the audience-interactive Brain Opera, now permanently installed at Vienna’s House of Music. One recent project, Toy Symphony, uses specially designed hi-tech Music Toys to introduce children to musical creativity in radically new ways, enabling them to collaborate with world-class orchestras and soloists in high visibility concerts. Touring throughout Europe, the U.S., Latin America, and Japan, Toy Symphony has been called “a vast, celebratory ode to the joy of music and its power to bring young and old together, diversity into unity (Boston
Globe).” Several Music Toys have already been licensed to major toy companies – such as Fisher-Price’s “Symphony Painter” – and Machover has just launched his own company, Harmony Line, Inc., to further develop and disseminate creative tools such as Hyperscore, which allows anyone to compose original music.
Machover’s latest CD’s are “Hyperstring Trilogy” (Oxingale/Artemis) and “Messiah Remix” (just released on Bang-on-the-Can’s Cantaloupe Records). He is currently working on several new operas, including one with former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, as well as composing new works for cellist Matt Haimovitz, the Ying Quartet, and the Boston Pops.
Terry Teachout
Terry Teachout is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the music critic of Commentary, and a contributor to the Washington Post, for which he writes "Second City," a column about the arts in New York City. He also writes about the arts for the New York Times, National Review, and other publications, as well as on his Web site, www.terryteachout.com. His most recent books are A Terry Teachout Reader, just published by Yale University Press, and All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, out in November from Harcourt.
Teachout is the author of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken (2002) and City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy (1991) and the editor of Beyond the Boom: New Voices on American Life, Culture, and Politics (1990, introduction by Tom Wolfe) and Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959 (1989). In 1992, he rediscovered the manuscript of A Second Mencken Chrestomathy among H.L. Mencken's private papers and edited it for publication. He wrote the foreword to Paul Taylor's Private Domain and contributed to The Oxford Companion to Jazz, and has written liner notes for CDs by Karrin Allyson, Gene Bertoncini, Chanticleer, Jim Ferguson, Diana Krall, Marian McPartland, Mike Metheny, Maria Schneider, Kendra Shank, and Luciana Souza.
Born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1956, Teachout lived in Kansas City from 1975 to 1983, working as a jazz bassist and as a music critic for the Kansas City Star. He was an editor of Harper's Magazine from 1985 to 1987, an editorial writer for the New York Daily News from 1987 to 1993, and the News' classical music and dance critic from 1993 to 2000. The oldest son of Mrs. Evelyn Teachout of Sikeston, Missouri, he lives in New York City.
