Meet the Composers!
Unison selects 5 emerging composers each year whose work is workshopped, premiered and recorded. For the 2026–2027 season, Unison has asked the composers create new works inspired by the theme Metamorphosis. These works will be performed by the Musician’s of the Soft Knee Collective, a highly experienced professional new music ensemble based in Michigan.
MEET THE 2026/27 COMPOSERS
Jens Ibsen, composer/baritone, is a multidisciplinary artist whose vocal talents have led him to performances from Dubai to Shanghai as a principal soloist and the first African-born member of the world-renowned Vienna Boys Choir. His music is equally globe-trotting, with performances from The Polish Hearth in London to the San Francisco Symphony.
Ibsen’s music seeks to liberate the definition of metal music from the confines of the metal band. He natively composes music in this style for traditional classical ensembles while infusing the musical knowledge of his multicultural upbringing including Western classical and avant-garde music, Arab and Turkish music, and African diasporic music. He uses polystylism as a language through which to pursue questions of queerness, ancestry, and structural power.
Euna Joh (b. 1995) is a Korean-American composer whose music explores the relationships between sound, time, perception, and connection. Deeply committed to creating music that is relevant, meaningful, and unapologetically true to herself, Joh views composition as an ongoing dialogue—with herself, with performers, and with the diverse communities her music encounters. She values the richness of multiple perspectives, recognizing that meaningful exchange expands her creative process and allows her music to resonate across a wide range of individual experiences.
Patrick Holcomb (b. 1996) is a composer based in Texas. Holcomb’s recent compositional
honors include the 2026 Remus Georgescu International Composition Competition, the 2022
ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize, a 2021 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, a 2021
American Prize in Composition, and a 2020 BMI Student Composer Award. His solo piano
pieces Rapture After Schoenberg and Kandinsky and Carousel After Milhaud and Archipenko
were composed on the occasion of Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930,
which showed from November 8, 2024 through March 9, 2025 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York. In addition to concert music, Holcomb also composes for visual media.
His score for the 1925 silent documentary Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life accompanied the film
during its showings at the Museum of Modern Art in October and November 2023 as a part of
the series Iranian Cinema Before the Revolution, 1925–1979. Holcomb earned his PhD in
Composition from the University of Rochester Eastman School of Music, which he attended as a
Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull University Fellow, in 2025. A passionate educator, he currently
serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at Stephen F. Austin State University.
Holcomb has been a member of Mensa since age nineteen.
Marcus Rock is a British composer and writer with an affinity for sensuous and physically charged sound. His materials often acquire agency through conflict and attraction. Opposition and coalescence propel an idea into consequence. Each work takes a new form as the sound identities within it converge, resist and transform one another. Beneath these exchanges lies a question we carry: what remains hidden within us, what breaks through into expression, and how our experiences shape both.
Geli Li is a Chinese-American composer, educator, scholar and pianist. Her research and creative practice center on composition as an evolving field of artistic inquiry: the meticulous shaping of sonic materials, the critical and imaginative reinterpretation of musical ideas across cultures, and the expansion of compositional parameters through technology.
Grounded in more than two decades of engagement with Western art music and compositional craft, she has cultivated a portfolio that spans both acoustic and electronic media, bridging Eastern and Western musical traditions through the idiom of contemporary music. Her music has been performed by more than fifty ensembles and orchestras worldwide and has received over fifty international honors and distinctions.
MEET THE 2025/26 COMPOSERS
Sergio Salazar Matthew Tirona Moshe Guerrero Britney Benton Joseph Jones
Sergio Salazar is an emerging latin american composer and sound designer. His compositions have premiered in Mexico, including: The Cinco Cinco Cinco Contemporary Music Concerts at the Center of the Arts in Monterrey (2022), and in Mexico City at the Casa de la Paz Theater. He studied musical composition at the National University of La Plata and continued to explore experimental music through artistic residencies. His work lives at the intersection of sound, image, and the unseen structures that bind them, drawing inspiration from the aleatory patterns of nature, like the fractal sprawl of branches, the rhythmic pulse of water, or the spectral play of light through leaves. In photography, He chases these dynamics, framing compositions that mirror the chaos and order of natural forms, where geometry and entropy collide.
Matthew Tirona (ASCAP) is a Boston-based composer with a prolific and acclaimed output.Collaborators include the New England Conservatory Philharmonia and Wind Ensemble, the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (as winner of the MGMC 2024 Call For Scores), Vox Novus, and Trio Tyche, among frequent art-song collaborations with his operatic peers. In 2024, Matthew was named winner of the NEC Honors Ensemble Composition Competition for his piano trio. The same work was awarded first prize in the 2025 Belvedere Chamber Music Festival Composition Contest. Matthew is enrolled at New England Conservatory studying with Michael Gandolfi.
Moshe is a Colombian composer and was selected as one of the UCMC Composer Commissioning Winners for 2025. We are thrilled to feature his powerful new work, Transcontinental, in our upcoming performances and can’t wait for audiences to experience his inspiring artistry!
Brittney holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition with a Minor in Music Technology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Masters in Music Composition from the Yale School of Music. She is very interested in working outside of the concert hall, especially in the realm of video game music.
Brittney’s music has been performed by the Bellevue Chamber Chorus, ZOFO, the Beo String Quartet, the Lowell Chamber Orchestra, the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra, SOLI Chamber Ensemble and more.
She was named one of the winners of Chicago a Capella’s “Her Voice Competition” in 2022. In 2024 she was named one of the winners of the SOLI Chamber Ensemble’s “30x30x30” competition and was a recipient of Kind of Kings “Bouman Fellowship”.
Recent composition festivals include the 2020 Charlotte New Music Festival and Connecticut Summerfest 2021. She also attended the inaugural Akropolis Chamber Music Institute (ACMI) in 2022. In 2024, she attended the Alba Music Composition Festival in Alba, Italy.
Joseph Jones is a New York City–based composer and conductor whose catalog of more than 200 works spans symphonies, operas, chamber music, and solo repertoire. He studied composition and conducting at the Peabody Conservatory and is Artistic Director of Orchestra Amadeus, which he founded in 2015 following early humanitarian projects including Beethoven for Boston and Symphony for Haiti. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and internationally. Guided by a philosophy he calls Earnest Aestheticism—the belief that beauty is not ornament but necessity—Jones creates music of sincerity, courage, and communion that seeks to dignify human experience.