Paul Walker is Associate Professor of Music and Director of Early Music activities, including the Baroque Orchestra, at the University of Virginia. He also founded and directs the local ensemble Zephyrus, which specializes in early vocal music. His scholarly work has focused on J. S. Bach and seventeenth–century German music, with special interest in counterpoint and fugue. His first book, Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach, was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2000, and he is currently at work on a follow–up book that is a history of the pre–Bach fugue. He is also the author of the articles in the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary on fugue and related topics. Dr. Walker serves on the editorial board of the Buxtehude Complete Works, edited by Broude Brothers, and is the editor of Volume 11 of that set, which is scheduled to appear in 2007. As a performer, his primary training is as an organist and harpsichordist, but he has always loved singing and is delighted to have finally found the right repertoire for a voice type that always seemed a bit peculiar when he was growing up.

Brent Wissick is Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches cello, viola da gamba and early music ensembles. A member of Ensemble Chanterelle and the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, he is a frequent guest with American Bach Soloists, Folger Consort, Concert Royal, Musica Angelica, Smithsonian Chamber Players, Boston Early Music Festival Opera Orchestra, and Dallas Bach Society, as well as Collegio di Musica Sacra in Poland. He was an NEH Fellow at Harvard, taught at the Aston Magna Academy at Yale and served as chair of Higher Education for Early Music America. A former student of John Hsu at Cornell University, he has performed and taught at many of the important schools, workshops and festivals in North America, Australia, Europe and Asia. His recording of Sonatas and Cantatas by Bononcini was released by Centaur; his online video article about them will be published by the Journal of Seventeenth–Century Music. He has also recorded for Albany and Koch International. He is currently Past President of the Viola Gamba Society of America, having served as President from 2000 through 2004 and as a board member since 1986.

C. Ann Loud is on the faculty at the Washington Conservatory of Music and Episcopal High School, teaching violin and viola. Prior to moving to the Washington area, she was Artist-in-Residence at Chowan College, where she was founder/director of the Meherrin Chamber and Youth Orchestras, and taught strings, music history, and music appreciation. She is principal violist with the Washington Bach Consort, and performs with the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, Portland Baroque Orchestra, The Violins of Lafayette, Opera Lafayette, Chatham Baroque, Baroque Arts Project, Atlanta Baroque, and at Wolf Trap, Bloomington Early Music Festival, and Magnolia Baroque Music Festival.

Jennifer Myer studied Baroque violin and viola with Enrico Gatti in Milan, Italy, where she performed with Teatro del’Opera di Roma, Orchestra da Camera di Angelicum, and Orchestra di Bergamo, among others. She toured extensively with Orchestra Internazionale d’Italia and Orchestra da Camera di Mantova. She has been teaching a full studio of violin and viola students since returning to the United States, as well as performing with modern and original instrument groups in Philadelphia, Washington, D. C., Maryland and throughout Virginia. She is the fiddle player for the Red Hill Ramblers and the contradance band Catharsis, for which she has lately begun composing waltzes and reels. Her Charlottesville group, Encore String Quartet, recorded on Dave Matthews’ latest CD.

Lee Bigood is a Ph.D. student in musicology at the University of Virginia. At school and play he trades in issues of race, authenticity, transcendence, and performance, mostly dealing with string–based eating are all that arise in the course of a normal day to keep him from problematizing and/or taking part in these kinds of music making all of the time.

Shana Goldin–Perschbacher, a Connecticut native and Ph.D. candidate in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia, is working on a dissertation entitled “Vocality, Listening, and Intimacy: Gender Transgression in Popular Music, 1990–2005.” She has played the viola for almost twenty years, earning an undergraduate performance degree from the University of Michigan.

Elizabeth Lindau is a second–year Ph.D. student in the University of Virginia’s Critical and Comparative Studies in Music program. She is a 2002 graduate of the University of Illinois at Champaign–Urbana, where she received Bachelor’s degrees in Piano Performance and Piano Pedagogy.