Violist/Composer Melia Watras brings together an all-star lineup of composers and performers for world premiere performances and new music. The concert features premieres of works by Mary Kouyoumdjian, Ha-Yang Kim, (UW Percussion Studies chair) Bonnie Whiting, and Watras, and a performance of School of Music Director Joël-François Durand’s Cinq duos. Watras is joined onstage by UW faculty Pala Garcia (violin), Rachel Lee Priday (violin), John Popham (cello), Whiting, and Pacific Northwest Ballet concertmaster Michael Jinsoo Lim.
Biographies
Melia Watras has been hailed by Gramophone as “an artist of commanding and poetic personality” and by The Strad as “staggeringly virtuosic.” As a violist/composer/collaborative artist, she has sustained a distinguished career as a creator and facilitator of new music and art.
In the 2025-26 season, highlights include performances of world premieres: works written for Watras by composers Mary Kouyoumdjian and Ha-Yang Kim, as well as her new solo viola piece to be performed by Anthony Devroye in Paris. A new album of her compositions is slated to be recorded for Planet M Records.
Watras’s much-lauded work as a recording artist spans nearly three decades. Her latest album, of her composition The almond tree duos, was recognized by Bandcamp Daily as being among the best contemporary Classical music of the month. Berlin-based music magazine 15 Questions called the duos “pure, poignant, powerful in their immediacy.” The WholeNote notes that her recording Play/Write “unfolds an exquisite world in which beauty and dreams flirt with sorrow.” String Masks, a collection of her own compositions including the titular work which utilizes Harry Partch instruments, was praised for “not only the virtuoso’s sensitive playing, but also her innovative and daring spirit,” by the Journal of the American Viola Society. Textura hailed her compositional debut album, Firefly Songs, for “distilling rich life experiences into strikingly original musical form.” Schumann Resonances was described by the American Record Guide as “a rare balance of emotional strength and technical delicacy,” with The Strad writing of 26 “a beautiful celebration of 21st century viola music.” Ispirare made numerous Best of 2015 lists, including the Chicago Reader’s (“Watras knocked the wind out of me with the dramatically dark beauty of this recording”). A Seattle Times Critics’ Pick for Short Stories, the newspaper marveled at her “velocity that seems beyond the reach of human fingers.” Strings praised her “stunning virtuosic talent” in her debut solo CD, Viola Solo, and declared her second release, Prestidigitation, “astounding and both challenging and addictive to listen to.”
Watras’s compositions have been performed in the US cities of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Bloomington (IN), and countries including Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, and Wales. She has been commissioned by the American Viola Society, the Avalon String Quartet, violinists Tekla Cunningham, Mark Fewer, Rachel Lee Priday and Michael Jinsoo Lim, violists Anthony Devroye and Rose Wollman, cellist Sæunn Thorsteinsdóttir, pianist Cristina Valdés, accordionist Jeanne Velonis, with works performed by violist Atar Arad, singer Galia Arad, pianist Winston Choi, Harry Partch Instrumentarium Director Charles Corey, violinists Manuel Guillén and Yura Lee, vocalist Carrie Henneman Shaw, percussionist Bonnie Whiting and the ensemble Frequency. Her music has been heard on National Public Radio’s Performance Today and can be found on the albums The almond tree duos; Kinetic; Partita Party; Play/Write; String Masks; 3 Songs for Bellows, Buttons and Keys; Firefly Songs; Schumann Resonances and 26. Watras’s adaptation of John Corigliano’s Fancy on a Bach Air for viola, which she recorded for her Viola Solo album, is published by G. Schirmer, Inc.
For twenty years, Watras concertized worldwide and recorded extensively as violist of the renowned Corigliano Quartet, which she co-founded. The quartet appears on 13 albums, including their recording on the Naxos label, which was honored as one of the Ten Best Classical Recordings of the Year by The New Yorker.
Melia Watras studied with Distinguished Professor Atar Arad at Indiana University, earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees and the prestigious Performer’s Certificate. While at Indiana, Watras began her teaching career as Arad’s Associate Instructor, later becoming a member of the faculty as a Visiting Lecturer. She went on to study chamber music at the Juilliard School while serving as a teaching assistant to the Juilliard String Quartet.
Watras is currently Professor of Viola at the University of Washington, where she holds the Ruth Sutton Waters Endowed Professorship. In 2024, the American Viola Society presented Watras with the Maurice W. Riley Award, for her distinguished contributions to the viola as a performer, composer, teacher and leader. She has penned articles for the Journal of the American Viola Society, The Strad (online), Strings and the Juilliard Journal.
Bonnie Whiting (she/her) performs, commissions, and composes new experimental music for percussion. She seeks out projects involving the speaking percussionist, non-traditional notation, improvisation, and interdisciplinary performance. Her debut album, featuring an original solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage's 45' for a speaker and 27'10.554” for a percussionist, was released by Mode Records in April 2017. Her sophomore album Perishable Structures, launched by New Focus Recordings in 2020, places the speaking percussionist in the context of storytelling and features her own music as well as works by Vinko Globokar, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Logan-Greene, and Susan Parenti.
Her recent season highlights include onstage work in the multimedia chamber opera The Ritual of Breath Is the Rite to Resist, featuring productions at Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City, at The Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College, and at Stanford Live; a reprise of composer Wang Lu’s Stages for solo speaking/singing percussionist at New York’s Performance Spaces for the 21st Century (PS21); and four performances of a new concerto written for her by Jonathan Bingham with the National Symphony Orchestra for the family pops series at the Kennedy Center alongside renowned children’s book author Mo Willems. Whiting also creates original, improvised music with clarinetist James Falzone and pianist Lisa Cay Miller; their first album was released on Allos Documents in 2024, and the trio performs this season in Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland.
In 2022 she premiered Through the Eyes(s): an extractable cycle of nine pieces for speaking/singing percussionist collaboratively developed with composer Eliza Brown and ten artists and writers incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison. The project was featured on NPR’s nationally-syndicated Slingshot, and locally via Seattle’s ClassicalKING radio station. Whiting has an ongoing relationship as a soloist with the National Orchestra of Turkmenistan via the U.S. Embassy Cultural Affairs Office, playing concerti in Ashgabat in 2017 and 2018. She performs frequently with percussionist Jennifer Torrence, giving concerts of new experimental work for speaking percussionists throughout Norway and the US. Her collaboration with multimedia artist Afroditi Psarra generated the album <null_abc>, released on the Zero Moon label in 2018, and their project with designer Audrey Desjardins on transcoding data from IoT devices as performance received a 2019/20 Mellon Creative Fellowship. The project was explored in a workshop at the 2020 Transmediale Festival in Berlin, and currently lives as an interactive net art installation. She spent four years performing music for voice and percussion with the Harry Partch Ensemble on the composer’s original instrumentarium while the instruments were in residence at the UW. Whiting has presented solo and small ensemble shows at The Stone in New York, the Brackish Series in Brooklyn, The Lilypad in Boston, The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, at Hallwalls in Buffalo, the Tiny Park Gallery in Austin, The Wulf in LA, the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati, The Grove Haus in Indianapolis, on the Wayward Music Series in Seattle, on tour throughout New Zealand, and at colleges and universities around the country.
Whiting is the Co-Artistic Director and core percussionist of the Seattle Modern Orchestra, the Pacific Northwest’s only large ensemble solely dedicated to music of the 20th and 21st Centuries, and she plays vibraphone with the Torch Quartet. As a chamber musician, she has collaborated with many of today's leading new music groups, including red fish blue fish percussion group, (George Crumb's Winds of Destiny directed by Peter Sellars and featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw for the Ojai Festival), eighth blackbird (the “Tune-in” festival at the Park Avenue Armory), the International Contemporary Ensemble (on-stage featured percussionist/mover in Andriessen's epic Die Materie at the Park Avenue Armory, and the American premiere of James Dillon's Nine Rivers at Miller Theatre), Talea Ensemble (Time of Music Festival in Finland), Bang on a Can (Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians for the LA Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series) and Ensemble Dal Niente (the Fromm Concerts at Harvard.) She attended Oberlin Conservatory (BM), the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (MM), and the University of California San Diego (DMA). She is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Washington, where she has been Chair of Percussion Studies since 2016.
John Popham joins the School of Music faculty in Fall 2025 as Assistant Professor of Strings.
Popham, “a very fine artist” (Fanfare), is a critically acclaimed cellist and educator previously based in Brooklyn, NY. A versatile and dynamic performer, he has collaborated with a wide-range of composers, musicians, and performing artists both within the United States and abroad. His “brilliant” and “virtuosic” (Kronen Zeitung) playing can be heard on numerous solo and chamber music releases on Tzadik, Carrier, New Focus Recordings, Albany, and Arte Nova record labels. Critics have noted his “velvet tone,” “remarkable technique” (Fanfare), and “warm but variegated,” and “highly polished” artistry (The New York Times).
John is a founding member of Longleash, an “expert young trio” praised for its “subtle and meticulous musicianship” (Strad magazine). The trio has performed at venues including the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy, NY), San Francisco’s Center for New Music, National Sawdust, (le) poisson rouge, Florentinersaal (Palais Meran), Aula Maxima (UCC Cork) as well as concert series with the Metropolitan Museum, the Kaufman Center (Ecstatic Music Festival), the Green Music Center (Sonoma), Scandinavia House (New York City), Open Music (Austria), and FUAIM (Ireland). Their debut album Passage earned wide critical acclaim, praising the trio’s performance as “fearlessly accomplished, the most outré effects realised with confident ease” (The Arts Desk) and “vividly maximizing the musicality and accessibility of uncompromisingly experimental pieces” (Textura). In 2017, they were named Best New Recording Artist by Sequenza21, and were included in The New Yorker’s list of “Notable Recordings and Performances.”
In addition to his work with Longleash, John is a current member of Either/Or Ensemble, and has performed with Klangforum Wien, Talea Ensemble, the Wet Ink Ensemble, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, and ECCE. Recent festival appearances include Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), reMusik (St. Petersburg), Beijing Modern Music Festival (China), Brücken (Austria), Internationales Musikfest Hamburg (Germany), Open Music (Austria), Wiener Festwochen (Austria), Bay Chamber (Maine), and the Contemporary Classical Music Festival (Peru).
He has appeared as soloist with the Louisville Orchestra, the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, the Red Light Ensemble, and the Kunstuniversität Graz Chorus, and has worked with celebrated composers including Pierluigi Billone, Pierre Boulez, Beat Furrer, Georg Friedrich Haas, Klaus Lang, Fred Lerdahl. Tristan Murail, Steve Reich, Rebecca Saunders, Nils Vigeland, and Walter Zimmermann. A champion of young composers, he has collaborated with many of his generation’s most compelling voices including Anthony Cheung, Christopher Cerrone, Suzanne Farrin, Francesco Fillidei, Reiko Füting, Erin Gee, Ted Hearne, Mauro Hertig, Clara Iannotta, Zesses Seglias, Caroline Shaw, Cleek Schrey, Kate Soper, Johan Svensson, Christopher Trapani, Anthony Vine, Yukiko Watanabe, and Scott Wollschleger.
As an educator and arts advocate, John is committed to a holistic and socially engaged approach to musical instruction. In 2016, he joined the cello faculty of the Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, a program dedicated to nurturing the talents of students from backgrounds typically underrepresented in classical music. From 2018-21, John also served as the Juilliard School’s Artistic Administrator for Community Engagement, where he mentored Juilliard teaching fellows; produced interactive, multidisciplinary educational programs; and curated the school’s Young People’s Concert series. John co-directs The Loretto Project, an annual creative residency held at the Loretto Motherhouse in Nerinx, Kentucky.
John began his musical instruction in his hometown of Louisville, studying with cellist Wayne Krigger at the University of Louisville’s Preparatory Division. He received his BM and MM from the Manhattan School of Music where he was a student of David Geber and David Soyer and was awarded the Manhattan School of Music Full Scholarship. In 2013, he received a Fulbright Research Grant to study the performance practice of Austrian contemporary music ensemble Klangforum Wien. He received his DMA from the CUNY Graduate Center where he was awarded a dissertation distinction for “Sonorous Movement: Cellistic Corporealities in Works by Helmut Lachenmann, Simon Steen-Andersen, and Johan Svensson.”
Pala Garcia is a critically acclaimed violinist recently named a 2024 National Arts Club Fellow. She was also featured as a leading innovative artist in the Washington Post’s “23 for ’23: Performers and Composers to Watch.” Garcia previously served on the faculty of The Juilliard School’s Preparatory Division, on the violin and chamber music faculty of Hunter College, and as a teaching artist with Carnegie Hall’s social impact programs.
Alongside spouse John Popham, Garcia is a member, co-founder, and co-director of the chamber trio Longleash, which specializes in commissioning, performing and curating contemporary music. Their trio has performed internationally at venues such as the TIME:SPANS Festival, Kennedy Center, Kaufman Center, Noguchi Museum, National Sawdust, EMPAC, Princeton University, and others. The trio’s discography can be heard on New Focus Recordings, Innova, and New Amsterdam Records. Garcia has also appeared as a regular guest with world-class ensembles including the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and on stages such as Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Guggenheim Museum, Met Museum, Skirball Center, Caramoor, and others.
Garcia received undergraduate and graduate degrees from The Juilliard School. She was also a Senior Teaching Fellow at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and an Academy Fellow with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim has been praised for playing with “delicious abandon” by Gramophone, described as “bewitching” and “masterful” by the Seattle Times and hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “conspicuously accomplished champion of contemporary music.” He enjoys a dynamic career as a soloist, concertmaster, chamber musician and recording artist. Highlights of the 2024-25 season include the release of his new solo album Kinetic, featuring world premieres of newly-commissioned works by Leilehua Lanzilotti, Paola Prestini and Melia Watras, and pieces by John Corigliano and Astor Piazzolla; and numerous concerto performances (Stravinsky, Vivaldi, Oliver Davis) with the internationally-acclaimed Pacific Northwest Ballet, for whom he serves as concertmaster and solo violinist.
Lim’s solo violin appearances with Pacific Northwest Ballet include performances in Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Washington DC and Seattle, of works such as Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto and Duo Concertant, Prokofiev’s first Violin Concerto, Max Richter’s Vivaldi Four Seasons Recomposed, Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel and Richard Einhorn’s rock and roll-inspired piece for electric violin, Maxwell’s Demon. His solos have been heard at the Paris festival Les étés de la danse and the Vail International Dance Festival.
Lim’s discography can be found on Naxos, Planet M, Sono Luminus, DreamWorks, Albany, Bridge, CRI, Bayer Records, RIAX and New Focus. He has recorded numerous world premieres, including Andrew Waggoner’s Violin Concerto, solo violin works by Melia Watras and chamber music by John Corigliano.
For twenty years, Lim toured and recorded with the Corigliano Quartet, a group he co-founded. With the quartet, he won the Grand Prize at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition and the ASCAP/CMA Award for Adventurous Programming, and performed in the nation’s leading music centers, including Carnegie Hall, Weill Recital Hall, and the Kennedy Center. The quartet’s Naxos label CD was honored as one of The New Yorker’s Ten Best Classical Recordings of the Year.
Offstage endeavors include his role as director and co-founder of Planet M Records, serving as producer for three critically acclaimed albums by violist/composer Melia Watras, his work as lyricist for a number of compositions by Watras, and an appearance alongside Jinkx Monsoon in a promotional video for the city of Seattle. Lim is the inspiration for a character in Erica Miner’s operatic mystery novel, Death by Opera.
Lim was among the final pupils of legendary violinist and pedagogue Josef Gingold at Indiana University. He later studied chamber music at the Juilliard School, where he also taught as an assistant to the Juilliard String Quartet. He has served on the faculty of Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, taught at Indiana University as a guest professor, and has given violin and chamber music classes throughout the US and in France, Korea and Mexico. He currently serves on the faculty of Cornish College of the Arts.