The Blueprint Bridge Fellowship, in partnership with The Juilliard School, is an annual National Sawdust mentorship and commissioning initiative that connects Juilliard alumni and current student composers with career and project mentorship, culminating in a concert of their commissioned projects.

The 2022 winning composers – alumni composers Eugene Astapov, and Lingbo Ma, and current student composers Nicole Balsirow, Aidan Gold, and SiHyun Uhm – were commissioned to explore collaboration, extra-musical themes, entrepreneurial project creation, and generally out-of-the-box thinking with real-world applications to a dream work that the National Sawdust Ensemble will workshop and perform at National Sawdust.

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Aidan Gold Bio

Aidan Gold is a composer, conductor, and percussionist from Seattle, Washington. His music is widely varied, but focuses on musical characterization, narrative and storytelling, and performer agency / interaction. He is fascinated with the idea of music as a social act – a game or ritual that we perform to allow us to communicate and connect with one another, defining, challenging, and expanding our individual and 

collective identities. Aidan is currently pursuing a DMA in Composition at the Juilliard School, and studies with Andrew Norman. Aidan has a Master of Music from the Thornton School, and a Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Washington. His past teachers include Nina Young, Frank Ticheli, and Huck Hodge. Aidan’s music has been performed by the Seattle Symphony, the Student Symphony Orchestra of USC, the State Symphony Orchestra of Turkmenistan, the UW Percussion/Modern Ensembles, the Talea Ensemble, the Aizuri Quartet, and others. Aidan plays percussion and has played extensively with various Seattle community orchestras and ensembles. He also enjoys conducting and was Assistant Music Director for the Student Symphony Orchestra of USC during their 2020-2021 season.

Lingbo Ma Bio

Lingbo Ma is a Chinese-born, US-based composer and pianist whose work has been performed in the US, China and Europe. Her recent projects include a music film What's next? (composed, directed and filmed by the composer himself and played by the Attacca Quartet); song cycle Cantos of a Narcissistic Roommate (text by Hannah McDermott); opera in one act MARThA (libretto by John de los Santos) to be premiered by Lowbrow Opera Collective in Seattle in March 2022, and a saxophone concerto to be premiered by the Boston University Concert Band in April 2022. Prior to I have missed you forever, she already worked for DNO in September 2020, when her vocal piece Two Gu Cheng Songs was featured in FAUST [working title]. Lingbo earned her Master of Music at the Juilliard School, and is now pursuing a doctorate at the New England Conservatory. Her mentors for composition are Robert Beaser, Kati Agócs, Michael Gandolf.

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SiHyun Uhm Bio

SiHyun Uhm is a composer, pianist, multimedia producer currently based in Rochester, NY. She is a Composer Fellow with Nashville Symphony Composer Lab, Riverside Symphony, Universal Artists Festival, Daegu MBC Orchestra, Intimacy of Creativity, Red Note Workshop, has received prizes from Pyeong Chang Olympic Celebration, Howard Hanson Orchestral Prize, Louis Lane Prize, Leopold Auer, Future Symphony, NY Composers’ Circle, Next Notes, National YoungArts, Golden Key Festival, Avalon, MTNA, and CBS National Youth Competition.

Her distinctive and interactive musical style is recognizable to audiences, and since the release of her first album in 2017, the listenership of her music has continued to grow. She always strives to write music that connects audiences with herself as a way of communication. Notable performances and recitals have taken place in Graz Hall in Vienna, YEORO, Hong Kong City Hall, Walnut Hill School, the New England Conservatory, Houston Museum District, Hatch Hall, Perigee Hall, Seoul Art Center, and more. She has attended Bowdoin, Brevard, Golden Key, Curtis, and NEC Contemporary Festivals.

She will be attending The Juilliard School this fall to study with Prof. Beaser and she recently graduated from the Eastman School of Music in NY, studying with Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, David Liptak, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and Vincent Lenti. She graduated from Walnut Hill School for the Arts in MA, where she studied composition with Whitman Brown and piano with Mana Tokuno from New England Conservatory. SiHyun was born in Seoul, Korea, where she went to Yewon School.

Nicole Balsirow Bio

Nicole Balsirow is a Kalmyk-American composer based in New York City. She is currently an undergraduate enrolled at Columbia University (class of 2024) and the Juilliard School studying music composition with Robert Beaser. Her works have received honorable mentions from Luna Lab and the Next Notes High School Music Creator Awards. In her compositions, Nicole likes to explore and experiment with a myriad of sounds drawn from her culture, video games, composers she is inspired by, literature, and fun things she has heard on her daily walks to campus. When not composing, Nicole usually spends her time chatting and gaming with her friends and sister or studying her second major interest, computer science. 

Dr. Eugene Astapov Bio

The RBC Associate Composer/Conductor to Esprit Orchestra, Dr. Eugene Astapov is a Ukrainian-born Canadian musician whose music combines the “richness of harmony” (New York Times) with a “haunting and soothing” narrative atmosphere (Calgary Herald). A graduate of The Juilliard School who studied with Christopher Rouse and Robert Beaser, Astapov has shared his music with audiences of different nationalities and backgrounds around the globe. The stages of New York’s Lincoln Center, the Salle Cortot in Paris, the National Arts Center in Ottawa, Sejong Hall in Seoul, the Banff Center (where he was 2014 Composer in Residence), the Grafenegg Festival in Austria, the Ravinia Music Festival, the Intimacy of Creativity Festival in Hong Kong and the Curtis Institute where he was the featured composer - are a few venues among many others at which his work has been performed. In 2022 Dr. Astapov's music is scheduled to be heard around the world, including a world premiere with the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Sofia, as well a brand new commissioned work for the percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.

As a prolific creator of music for large orchestral forces, Astapov’s music has been performed by major orchestras and ensembles across Canada and internationally including the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich, Moravian Philharmonic, Victoria Symphony Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, the Juilliard Orchestra, Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra, the Eastman Philharmonia and L’Orchestre de la Francophonie Canadienne, which enabled him to introduce his music to conductors including Peter Oundjian, Bramwell Tovey, Alex Pauk, Tania Miller, Paul Haas, Jeff Milarsky and Jean-Philippe Tremblay, to name a few. Currently Mr. Astapov is serving a term as the RBC Associate Composer/Conductor to Toronto's Esprit Orchestra - the only full time orchestra in Canada solely dedicated to the performance of music by contemporary composers.

In addition to his orchestral works, Astapov is an active composer of solo and chamber music, and is currently working on Contemplations, a project that creates sets of pieces for various solo instruments. His solo music has been recorded at the TelDec studios in Hamburg, Germany and released on that label. Eugene Astapov holds a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree from the University of Toronto and his artistic activity is supported in part by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the SOCAN Foundation and the University of Toronto.