Horn player Nicolee Kuester is based in NYC and divides her time between experimental music and the Older Stuff, recently performing with the International Contemporary Ensemble, The Knights, Talea, and Wet Ink Ensemble in NYC; Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris; Alarm Will Sound in St Louis; and Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra in Los Angeles. She is co-founder with Leah Asher of MEANINGLESS WORK, a performance series that happily meanders between sounds, performance art, text, and movement theater.

Nicolee holds undergraduate degrees in horn performance and creative writing from Oberlin College & Conservatory and graduate degrees in contemporary music performance from UC San Diego. In addition to mucking about with experimental sounds and chamber music, she continues to do teaching artist work with high school students in Ridgewood, Queens as an alumna of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect fellowship. She also freaks out teens most summers as the brass faculty at North Carolina’s Governor’s School West, where among other things students encounter microtonal improv and learn how to stare into each other’s eyes without getting really squirmy.

Erin Paul is a New York based French hornist, known for a versatile performance career, as a co-founder of the nonprofit ensemble Calliope Brass, and host of the podcast Doublers. Her diverse performance career includes Broadway, Carnegie Hall, the Las Vegas Strip, and appearances with major artists including Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban. Additionally, she is the horn player and director of operations for Calliope Brass. Calliope’s recent educational workshop, “What’s Your Story?”, was developed in collaboration with creatives from Hamilton and Sesame Street; following successful live tours in 2018 and 2019, the quintet adapted the workshop for remote classrooms, dubbed “What’s Your Story? Online!”.