Eva Stone-Barney

Mezzo-soprano, On Destruction and Death in Ancient Times 

Eva Stone-Barney is a Canadian mezzo-soprano pursuing her Masters in Vocal Studies at Guildhall, where she studies with Samantha Malk. She holds degrees in vocal performance and musicology from McGill University and the University of Toronto. This summer, she will appear as a young artist in various performances at the Festival Lyrique-en-mer in Belle-Île, France. Recent highlights include Marcellina in Le Nozze di Figaro (Goodenough College), Nancy in scenes from Britten’s Albert Herring, Ramiro in scenes from Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (Guildhall), chorus in Strauss’ Die Fledermaus (Guildhall), and New Ofglen in Poul Rouders’ The Handmaid’s Tale (Banff Centre).

Lydia Kenny

Saxophone, Resistances

Lydia is a versatile saxophonist, composer and interdisciplinarian.

She has performed as a soloist across the UK and Europe and collaborated with many composers, including Gregory Rose, Toby Young, Alex Groves, Jenni Watson, Malcolm Singer and Etienne Rolin, and also plays with Notes Inegales, led by Peter Wiegold, and The Bauhaus Band, led by John Harle.

Lydia's compositions incorporate elements of chamber music, physical movement and video, and have been performed across London and the UK, including BEAT with verbatim lyrics curated by Olivia Bell (2025), FABLES (vol.1) co-written with Toby Young (2024), Gleamings (2024), That's the New Barbican (2023) and After the Birds (2022).

Her academic interdisciplinary writings at UCL (BASc 1st) and Guildhall School of Music and Drama (MMus 1st; MPerf, Dist 2025, Concert Recital Diploma) explore the intersections of music, culture, and social issues, alongside collaborative projects on cross-disciplinary composer-performer relationships.

Lydia is actively involved in outreach initiatives with organisations such as Create Arts, Live Music Now, Ark Music, and Woven Gold, and also enjoys calisthenics and running.​ 

Lara Ali

Alto flute, OVERLOAD

Lara Aisha Ali is a Nigerian-German classical flautist. She is based in London, studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and performing with Guildhall Orchestras in the Barbican Centre. Her studies at GSMD thus far have led to her being awarded the Guildhall Flute Prize 2024 and becoming a Liverpool International Flute Competition semi-finalist in the same year. Lara has been performing across London playing various genres, developing a holistic, creative musical identity and networking with up and coming artists. She is driven by community and collaboration, which fuels her passion for chamber music as well as leading workshops. Lara’s musical voice is formed by improvisation and contemporary music, and her anthropological perspectives on music are forming a path toward further studies in ethnomusicology.

Jacob Cavendish

Conductor, On Destruction and Death in Ancient Times

Jacob Cavendish is a London-based conductor specialising in contemporary music. He regularly conducts premieres of new works by living composers, collaborating closely with composers and soloists to realise their artistic intentions. The majority of his work to date has focused on post-2000 repertoire, with particular emphasis on composer-led projects.

He is drawn to the colours and sound-worlds explored by modern composers and values rehearsal as the space in which those textures are shaped and refined. His approach prioritises precision, rhythmic clarity, and detailed ensemble coordination, ensuring that complex contemporary music emerge feeling like a cohesive performances rather than collections of individual parts. In chamber and small-ensemble contexts (where contemporary works often require a conductor despite chamber-scale forces) he supports the ensemble’s natural instincts, enabling players to breathe and respond together with clarity and flexibility.

Jacob has conducted a number of student composer showcases at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, including one in October 2025 in which he premiered his own Flute Concerto. The work received its second performance in January 2026 at Milton Court Concert Hall as part of Guildhall’s Composition Open Day. In February 2026, he conducted the premiere of thresholds to imaginary gates, a new work by Thomas Shorthouse for fifteen flutes at the Royal College of Music alongside Steve Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint. Throughout 2026, he also conducted several concerts featuring new works by living composers.

Jon Paul Mayse

Conductor, Singha, Confluences, OVERLOAD

Jon Paul Mayse is a composer, curator, and researcher. His work is shaped by a deep interest in the granularity of our listening, a multidisciplinary bent, and devised/collaborative curatorial practices.

His music is spacious, colorful, and often quiet, almost to the point of silence, and explores memory, gesture, perception, and the expressive potentials of virtuosity. He has worked with many artists including Mark Padmore and the Britten Sinfonia, JACK Quartet, The Hermes Experiment, CHROMA Ensemble, Tabea Debus, Charlotte Barbour-Condini, and Ensemble Garage. He won the 2020 Luigi Nono Composition Prize. 

As a curator, his practice bridges concert and research contexts. His concert curation ranges from scenographic and thematic concerts with Stomping Ground (In the Room, Analogue Nostalgias, and Chasing Shadows) and his co-directorship of the Guildhall New Music Society, which produced 14 concerts in 3 years using DIY, punk, and queer frameworks to claim performance spaces for devised works. With NMS, he coordinated the orchestra for LCMF's performance on Luigi Russolo's Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners at the Wigmore Hall. His research-led curation focuses on practice-based inquiry, co-directing the Guildhall Researchworks seminar series for two years and co-curating PGR symposia such as Play, Practice Laboratories, and Marginalia. He is currently curating Small Talk, a series of spoken word/practice-research events with Small Room Arts. As a producer, he has brought music, dance, opera and devised theatre works to the Tête-a-Tête Opera Festival; Resolutions Festival at The Place, London; and Oslo Fringe.

His PhD research, Smelly Music, explores how olfaction shapes listening and incorporates compositional/curatorial practice, scent-making, audience research, semantic analyses, and conceptual metaphor theory. His Masters thesis, Quiet Music, explored intimate, unstructured, and non-teleological listenings. He is a PhD candidate at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and holds degrees from the Royal Academy of Music, London (M.Mus) and Temple University (B.Mus.).

Goi Ywei Chern

Composer, On Destruction and Death in Ancient Times, Singha, OVERLOAD

Guitar, Confluences

Goi Ywei Chern (b. 1996) is a Singaporean composer and guitarist currently based in London. He is undertaking a DMus (Composition Route) in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama under the supervision of Professors Richard Baker, Matt Kaner, and Julian Anderson. 

In 2025, his opera Medusa, composed with a libretto by Jess McNulty, was premiered in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. 

Goi has taken part in numerous performances and competitions, winning the 11th International Antonin Dvorak Composition Competition (Senior Category) in 2023 and the Leong Yoon Pin Composition Competition in 2016. His compositions have been performed in Singapore, London, Leeds, Bangkok, and Ayrshire. 

He previously studied in the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) School of Music, receiving his Diploma in Music Performance in 2016 and NAFA-RCM Undergraduate degree (funded by the OCBC Local Undergraduate Scholarship) in 2019, and the Royal College of Music, where he achieved a Distinction in the Master of Music in Composition degree . He has studied the guitar under Manuel Cabrera II and Hunter Mah and composition under Dr Zechariah Goh, Professor Kenneth Hesketh, and Professor Alison Kay. 

Goi participated in MusicFest Aberystwyth in 2019, and he was selected as one of eight composers to participate in The Cumnock Tryst International Summer-School for Composers 2024 under the guidance of Sir James MacMillan and Oscar Bettison, where his piece Charybdis for contrabass clarinet and string trio was performed on the Dumfries House estate. Also in 2024, his song, Letter from Heaven, composed for the Composers & Poets Forum Showcase: A Leeds Songbook in collaboration with poet Yvonne Ugarte, who wrote the lyrics, was performed in the Leeds Lieder Festival. 

More information at www.goiyweichern.com. 

Efe Yüksel

Composer, Resistances, Confluences

Efe Yüksel (1999) is a composer, electronic musician, and melodica performer from İzmir (Turkey), based in London. He is currently undertaking doctoral studies in the Guildhall School if Music, supervised by Julian Anderson and Aaron Einbond, looking into the structural organisation of inharmonic sonorities and formulating a personal theory of working with noise. His work involves exploring the physical capabilities of instruments and voices via close collaborations and the use of live electronic processing. Alongside composing he is also active as a melodica performer, with a particular focus on the bass melodica, writing and commissioning new works for the instrument.

Pernille Faye

Composer, Penumbra

Pernille is a Norwegian/Irish composer based in London whose work explores a diverse range of musical styles, often inspired by the vivid landscapes of rural Norway and other natural images. She has previously drawn upon the vocal traditions of the Sami as inspiration for her cello solo, Shadows and experimented with the natural music of gibbon song alongside ‘human’ music in her piece Rhapsody for Gibbons, a collaborative project with Monkey World Ape Rescue Centre.

The winner of the GCNA Franco Proposal Contest, her two pieces for solo carillon (Moonglades) were premiered at the GCNA’s annual congress in Massachusetts and subsequently toured by Joey Brink. Pernille’s other notable prizes include the British Double Reed Society Composition Competition Under-19 Prize for which she wrote a cor anglais solo (Embers) for Henry Clay, and an Honourable Mention in the Composers Concordance Annual Composition Competition for her jazz sextet Responsibility. She was a three time Martin Read Foundation Young Composer, receiving commissions for their Festival of Contemporary Music and has since returned for a performance of her piece Roots: Carrot Music. Recent works include her low string trio Penumbra, commissioned for the Budleigh Salterton Music Festival which has since received its Finnish premiere at the Sinetän Musiikkijuhlat, and “Smiling Doesn’t Win You Gold Medals” which was performed at Dumfries House by members of The Cumnock Tryst Ensemble.

Pernille recently graduated from the Royal Academy of Music where she studied under scholarship with Helen Grime and is now pursuing a Master of Composition (Guildhall Artist) at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying with Dr Sylvia Lim as a Guildhall Scholar. She is a former pupil of Morgan Hayes and Dr Pande Shahov and has worked with James MacMillan and Oscar Bettison at the first Cumnock Tryst Summer School.