line upon line presents 2026 Austin Winter Music Festival

Hosted by line upon line January 4th, 6th, 8th and 9th

Thanks to: Rea Charitable Trust, Texas Commission on the Arts and You All!

January 6th

Louis Goldford is a composer whose works explore emergence, psychoanalytic formal models, and abstract resonances through data sonification and experimental orchestration. He has received prestigious awards including a Fromm Commission from Harvard, a Salvatore Martirano Award, and the ACTOR Project Research-Creation Grant. In 2019, Louis completed his Cursus at IRCAM, supported by the Fulbright Commission in France. Louis has been a Laureate of Fondation Royaumont’s Voix Nouvelles and composer-in-residence at Paris’s Cité internationale des arts. His music has been performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Wet Ink, Talea, and Ensemble Linea, among others, at venues such as IRCAM’s ManiFESTE and June in Buffalo. Louis holds a D.M.A. from Columbia University, where he studied with Georg Friedrich Haas, George Lewis, Fred Lerdahl, and Zosha Di Castri.

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James Parker (b. 1992) is a composer, sound artist, and bandoneonist based in Ithaca, New York. He works across various media, including performance, installation, composition, and improvisation. His work addresses questions of aesthetic slowness and varying modes of attention by engaging in gradual, loosely structured transformational processes. Most recently, his work has been inspired by repetitive natural processes, medieval applications of rational intonation, and a thorough inquiry into techniques and practices of field recording.

He has been a fellow at Can Serrat, twice at The Atlantic Center for the Arts, and OneBeat. His works have been performed by Loadbang, AndPlay, TAK Ensemble, Dither, Invoke, and Unassisted Fold, and has been commissioned by Austin Soundwaves, Collide Arts, Tetractys New Music, and Austin Unconducted. James is currently a doctoral candidate in Composition at Cornell University.

In soil horizons, long tones from the bandoneon are recorded and looped, gradually layering into a dense, sustained sound mass. Nuances in pitch and timbre animate the texture as it grows, saturates, and eventually dissolves. The piece focuses on repetition, resonance, and the slow transformation of sound over time.

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Bob Hoffnar is a composer/pedalsteel player living in Austin, TX. Hoffnar graduated from Purchase Conservatory of Music, Purchase, NY in 1998 with a BFA in Composition. Further private studies included time with such musical luminaries as Lamonte Young, Pandit Pran Nath, and Ernest Tubb’s steel player Buddy Charelton. As a performing musician he has recorded, performed and toured with artists as diverse as Nora Jones, Iggy and the Stooges, Butch Morris, Catherine Lamb and Patsy Montana. The bulk of his creative output over the last 8 years is based on the exploration of ratio based harmonic systems and their relationship to physical space with his Prismatic Listening installations.

Christopher Trapani earned a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard, then spent most of his twenties in London, Istanbul, and Paris, where he studied with Philippe Leroux and worked at IRCAM. At thirty he moved to New York City, earning a doctorate at Columbia in 2017. He is currently Assistant Professor of Electronic Music and Digital Media at Louisiana State University. Recent commissions have come from Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern, and Radio France. His works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Wiener Konzerthaus, Ravenna Festival, and Wigmore Hall.

Christopher is a Guggenheim Fellow (2019), winner of the Rome Prize (2016) and the Gaudeamus Prize (2007). Waterlines, his debut portrait CD, was released on New Focus Recordings in 2018, followed by Horizontal Drift in 2022 and Noise Uprising in 2024. Christopher splits his time between his hometown of New Orleans and his European base in Palermo, Sicily.

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Trevor Van de Velde (he/him) is an experimental composer, sound artist, instrument builder, and creative programmer based in NYC. His practice is oriented toward exploring the relationship between technology, play, and hybridity through electroacoustic composition, custom-built electronics, and mixed-media. He is the recipient of the Nicola De Lorenzo Prize, Eisner Prize, Hopkins Center for the Arts Art+Technology grant, and the Rhizome Micro Grant. He has presented work internationally at festivals, institutions, and galleries such as MICF, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, DNMA, Fridman Gallery, Water Street Art Projects. In addition, he has collaborated with a variety of performers and ensembles such as JACK Quartet, Chromic Duo, Bergamot Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, Thin Edge Collective, Aksiom Ensemble, Tak Ensemble, and Jennifer Mong. He was previously an Art+Code Fellow at NEW INC. He is currently a doctoral candidate at NYU.

COCKPIT is a performance project exploring themes of technological embodiment, boyhood, and video games through musical performance. It’s inspired by the complicated history of Yamaha Pianos as being one of the top providers of both pianos and agricultural drones. It is also inspired by a drawing I made when I was 6 where I was driving a piano on a racetrack.