Creative Team
Photo by Andrew McAllister
Fry Street Quartet / Utah State University
The Fry Street Quartet, comprised of violinists Robert Waters and Rebecca McFaul, violist Bradley Ottesen, and cellist Anne Francis Bayless, has performed for audiences around the world – from Carnegie Hall to the Utah State University Performance Hall, Jerusalem to Sarajevo, Austria to Brazil. The dramatic landscape of northern Utah is now the quartet’s environment, and they prioritize creating a sense of place through their artistic endeavors and activities. The Crossroads Project is a clear expression of this mission.
Robert Davies / Physicist & educator
A physicist and educator at Utah State University, Rob’s work focuses on global environmental change, sustainable human systems, and critical science communication ― which is to say, scientific storytelling for critically important stories. His unique position is jointly sponsored by USU's College of Science, the Caine College of the Arts, and the USU Ecology Center. Rob has served as an officer and meteorologist in the U.S. Air Force, worked for NASA on the International Space Station project, and taught on the faculty of three universities. His scientific work has included research into interactions of spacecraft with the space environment, the fundamental nature of light and information, and Earth's changing climate.
laura Kaminsky / Composer: rising tide
Laura Kaminsky is a composer with "an ear for the new and interesting" whose works are "colorful and harmonically sharp-edged" (The New York Times) and whose "musical language is compounded of hymns, blues, and gestures not unlike Shostakovich's" (inTune). Social and political themes are common in her work, as is an abiding respect for and connection to the natural world. The visual is made manifest in sound, with color and image often serving as the underlying inspiration.
libby Larsen / Composer: Emergence
Libby Larsen is one of America’s most performed living composers. She has created a catalogue of over 500 works spanning virtually every genre from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral works and over 15 operas. Grammy award-winning and widely recorded, she is constantly sought after for commissions and premieres by major artists, ensembles, and orchestras around the world, and has established a permanent place for her works in the concert repertory. Larsen believes, "Music exists in an infinity of sound. I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer’s task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music."
Photo by Adi Talwar
Rebecca Allan / Visual Artist
Rebecca Allan is a New York-based painter whose work centers on landscape and themes of music. Rivers, tributaries, and coastal regions of the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and northern England are the artist's primary sites of investigation and inspiration. Exhibited nationally and abroad for more than 25 years, Allan's work attempts to express, in abstract and painterly terms, the fragility of our ecosystems, and the unpredictability of nature’s cycles.
Garth Lenz / Photographer
Garth Lenz is an internationally renowned environmental photographer who examines contrasts between the industrialized and natural landscape. The range of his photographic subjects has included the impacts of industrial logging on forests, and the world of modern fossil fuel production and its associated impacts on the landscape. Recent projects have addressed mountaintop removal coal mining, shale gas production, and the Alberta Tar Sands. His work has appeared in leading editorial publications including, Time, GEO, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times.
Jeff Counts / Production Manager
Jeff Counts is General Manager of the Grand Tetons Music Festival, and past General Manager of the Utah Symphony. He has worked in performing arts planning and logistics for over 15 years and previously spent 6 years as an elementary school educator in his home state of Florida. Jeff speaks and writes about music frequently and provides concert annotation and program articles for orchestras and opera companies around the country. When not focused on music, Jeff enjoys a second life as a pop culture commentator and film critic and appears weekly on the regional television program "Big Movie Mouth-Off.”