Edwin Huizinga is a violinist, composer, improviser, educator, and artistic director whose work is rooted in connection. Moving freely between Baroque, folk, contemporary music, improvisation, and indie rock, he is drawn to the spaces where musical traditions meet—and to the human connections that make those encounters meaningful. Edwin has performed around the world with artists including Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Mike Marshall, and Stevie Wonder. He is a founding member of the internationally-acclaimed Baroque ensemble ACRONYM and a founding member of Fire & Grace, his long-running collaboration with guitarist William Coulter, exploring the connections between Baroque music and folk traditions from around the world. He also performs with Tafelmusik and has toured around the world with Juno-nominated indie-rock band The Wooden Sky. Increasingly, Edwin’s work is about creating places for people to come together through music. He is Artistic Director of the SweetWater Music Festival in Ontario and Director of the Baroque & Classical Academy at the Carmel Bach Festival, where he is also part of the Festival’s Artistic Leadership Team. At Oberlin Conservatory, he serves as Assistant Professor of Baroque Violin, sharing his passion for historical performance with a new generation of musicians. As a composer and improviser, Edwin creates work that reflects his belief that musical boundaries are meant to be crossed. He has composed for institutions including the National Arts Centre and Opera Atelier and was commissioned to create a work for Canada’s 150th anniversary. He is also a founding member of Classical Revolution, an international movement bringing classical musicians and audiences together in unconventional spaces. For Edwin, music is ultimately a way of connecting—with another person, another tradition, another generation, or something within ourselves. There are no borders in music, only possibilities for connection.

 

William Coulter is an internationally acclaimed, Grammy award winning master of the steel-string guitar. His most recent recording, The Rolling Waves, was released in December 2022 on the Gourd Music label. This solo project is a collection of original arrangements of folk and original music from the Celtic lands and beyond. His duo with Edwin Huizinga, Fire & Grace, released their third CD, Alma, in 2021 and the duo has been taking their music on the road again with performances around the US. Coulter has been Music Director for Tomaseen Foley’s A Celtic Christmas since 1998, and has performed with the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival, Apollo’s Fire and many other ensembles. In March of 2016 he debuted Celtic Journey, a full length pops concert with the Omaha Symphony featuring Irish singers, dancers, musicians and story-teller. Collaborations have been a mainstay of his career including tours and recordings with Gourd Music artists Neal Hellman and Barry and Shelley Phillips; classical guitar virtuoso Benjamin Verdery, and Irish flute wizard Brian Finnegan. Tours have taken him around the states and to Ireland, Europe, Taiwan, New Zealand, Chile, and most recently Australia. Coulter teaches classical guitar at UC Santa Cruz and at many summer camps and festivals. Coulter earned degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the university of hard knocks.

 

Fanny Ara is an internationally sought-after and award-winning choreographer, performer and instructor. Her most dedicated worldwide fans especially credit her as one of the driving forces of flamenco today; an artist excelling in the full spectrum of flamenco, from the most traditional to the avant-garde. Fanny has been an invited artist in national and international festivals and has toured extensively in Canada, Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa, and throughout Europe. She has been distinguished since 2006 with nominations from the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards in the categories of Most Outstanding Individual Dancer, Most Outstanding Music, Ensemble, and Individual Performance for her project, Juncal Street, and Best Ensemble for her work with the San Francisco Opera in La Traviata. New York’s Vilcek Foundation also awarded Fanny a prestigious finalist prize for “Creative Promise in Dance” in 2012.”

 

Ian Scarfe enjoys a wide ranging career as a concert pianist, an organizer of large-scale musical happenings, and as an advocate for the arts. The majority of his work comes in the form of over 150 concerts each year, as a soloist, ensemble artist, and director. His career as a performer is bolstered by his thoughtful, humorous, and charismatic stage presence. Ian enjoys sharing the history of the music being performed, giving specific listening guides about it, and generally acting as both a performer and a musical tour-guide. He is the pre-concert lecturer for Chamber Music Monterey Bay and a guest speaker with other organizations. He produces a patron-supported YouTube series called “In the Practice Room with Ian”, and broadcasts monthly live-streamed concerts from his living room. He is the founder and director of the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival, founded in 2011, which has presented hundreds of free concerts and school programs across rural Northern California. He is also the director of Chamber Music at the Century Club, a series bringing music to one of San Francisco's oldest concert venues. He is on faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and teaches occasional private lessons to dedicated advanced students. He coaches chamber music students through the Crowden School in Berkeley and Chamber Musicians of Northern California, an organization that creates workshops for adult amateurs. Born in Bryan, Texas, and raised on a farm, Ian moved to Oregon to study at Willamette University in Salem. Since 2006, he has lived in San Francisco, where he earned graduate and postgraduate diplomas from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He lives near the Pacific Ocean in the beautiful Presidio of San Francisco.