"Robert Dick (born January 4, 1950) is a flutist, composer, teacher and author. His musical style is a mix of classical, world music, electronic and jazz, and he is the inventor of the "glissando headjoint" a custom flute head joint that allows the player to achieve electric guitar-like whammy bar effects with their instrument. In 2014, the National Flute Association awarded Dick its Lifetime Achievement Award. The New York Times said his Òtechnical resources and imagination seem limitless" while JazzTimes called him Òrevolutionary.Ó

Robert Dick was born and raised in New York City. He began playing the flute in the fourth grade, after hearing the piccolo on the radio in the Top 40 hit ÒRockinÕ Robin. His primary teachers were Henry Zlotnik, James Pappoutsakis, Julius Baker and Thomas Nyfenger.

As a teenager, Dick wanted to become an orchestral flutist, and played first flute in the Senior Orchestra at the High School of Music and Art and also the New York All-City High School Orchestra. ÒStudies with him (Julius Baker) were geared toward becoming an orchestral player, and that was my dream at the time. But as I grew out of that dream, I realized that my training really hadnÕt provided a look at music from the inside, which is what I neededÑparticularly the idea that music is generated from hearing within and recognizing what you are hearing.Ó He became a soloist and composer.

At Yale College, Dick earned a BA degree, and met Robert Morris, a composer and theorist, who mentored him as he wrote his first compositions. While at Yale, Dick wrote his first book: THE OTHER FLUTE: A Performance Manual of Contemporary Techniques, and then earned his master's degree in composition, studying with Morris as well as electronic music with Bulant Arel and Jacob Druckman.

While attending YaleÕs graduate school, Dick composed ÒAfterlight,Ó a flute piece that used multiphonics as its basis. ÒAfterlightÓ received a BMI Oliver Daniel Prize.

After leaving school in Spring 1973, Dick lived in New Haven, Connecticut until September 1977, when he moved to Buffalo, New York to join the contemporary music group, the Creative Associates. Dick was a member of the group until June 1980. While in New Haven, he wrote his second book Tone Development through Extended Technique and began to develop himself as an improviser and composer.

Dick spent six months in Paris from July - December 1978 working at I.R.C.A.M. (Institute of Research and Coordination, Acoustics and Music) developing his idea for a new flute mechanism. The first prototype was made by Albert Cooper in London in 1984. This design remains unfinished.

From Fall 1980 until Spring 1992, Dick lived in New York City, developing his compositions, improvisations and wrote Circular Breathing for the Flutist. In this period, he self-published The Revised Edition of THE OTHER FLUTE: A Performance Manual of Contemporary Technique and his later books, compositions and instructional recordings through his Multiple Breath Music Company. In 1986, he left the role of concert soloist in contemporary music to perform his own music and the music of composer-performer collaborators exclusively. Dick performed a recital of his own works as part of the New York PhilharmonicÕs Horizons 84 Festival at Avery Fisher Hall in 1984.

In May 1992, he moved to Switzerland for ten years, continuing his career as a composer-performer. He returned to the US in 2002, as Visiting Assistant Professor of Flute at the University of Iowa. In July 2003, he returned to New York City. Since July 2013, Dick has been dividing his time between New York City and Kassel, Germany, where his children Sebastian (born 2006) and Leonie (born 2008) live with their mother, composer-pianist Ursel Schlicht.[citation needed]

Dick's recitals today primarily consist of his compositions and improvisations, occasionally incorporating the influences of Paul Hindemith, Georg Philipp Telemann and Jimi Hendrix into his repertoire.

As an instructor, Dick created a method and practice of teaching for flutists that he documented in his books: Tone Development through Extended Techniques, and Circular Breathing for the Flutist and the two volumes of FLYING LESSONS: Six Contemporary Concert Etudes. He teaches masters classes at hundreds of international universities.

Dick is the inventor of the Glissando Headjoint¨, a telescoping flute mouthpiece which allows the flutist to slide and extend notes.

As a composer, Dick's work has been recognized by a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, a Guggenheim Fellowship and two NEA Composers Fellowships, among many grants and commissions. Dick has composed a new work for the National Flute Association Young Artist Competition. He has recorded over 20 albums and appeared as a guest on many other recordings."

"Nicola L. Hein (Born 1988 in Düsseldorf) is a guitarist, composer and soundartist. As a guitarist he is mainly concerned about the search for new sounds on his instrument. He plays electric and acoustic guitar with or without preperations and tries to find new ways of playing the guitar within the context of Free Improvised Music and Jazz. He plays the guitar with his hands and plectrum but also with a lot of different objects: screws, rulers, iron wool, violin bow, abrasive paper, magnets and many other objects which are part of his musical vocabulary. The result is his very own world of sounds, which is using the rich potential of the guitar as a creator of sounds. The manual creation is a very important character of this sound world, which never gets distorted by the use of electronic effects. As a composer he finds different ways of integrating philosophical ideas into music and to play music as a form of philosophy. In order to actualize itself the compositional work is always aimed at the improvising musician as a dialectic partner of the composition. From the interplay of these partners an ästhetic emerges that is based on the spontanity of the performance and the setting of aesthetic action spaces alike. As a soundartist he is developing different ways to project the musical ontology of Improvised Music onto different aesthetic rooms. This is done by creating instruments, installations and other ways of using the guitar, which use the musical ontology of Improvised Music as the center of the sonic practise but generate a lot of different sense structures that differ from the usual practise of Improvised Music (for example by creating a scenic sense layer etc.). He also creates sound installations which involve the recipient as a part of the work. The works encourage the recipient to make a special aesthetic experience with different sounds. The aesthetic of these sounds is inspired by the aesthetics of Free Improvised Music.

He studied Jazzguitar, Soundart/Composition, Philosophy and German philology at the Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Bonn and the Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Projects with the support of: Initiative Musik, Staatsministerium für Kultur und Medien, Kunststiftung NRW, Deutscher Musikrat, Akademie der Künste der Welt, Kultursekretariat NRW, Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, Landesmusikrat NRW, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Staatstheater Mainz, Staatstheater Hannover, ON Neue Musik Cologne, RheinEnergieStiftung Kultur, Kulturamt der Stadt Köln, Kulturamt der Stadt Düsseldorf, Kulturamt der Stadt Essen, Kulturbehörde Hamburg, Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Köln Musik, Acht Brücken, RWE Stiftung für Energie & Gesellschaft, Second Floor e.V., Jazz Offensive Essen, ZKM Karlsruhe etc. He has worked with: Evan Parker, Phil Minton, John Russell, Paul Lytton, Frank Gratkwoski, Michael Vorfeld, Rudi Mahall, Tobias Delius, Liz Allbee, Christian Lillinger, Ute Wassermann, John Butcher, Axel Dörner, Thomas Lehn, Wilbert de Joode, Tristan Honsinger, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Michael Thieke, Sofia Jernberg, Audrey Chen, Peter Jacquemyn, Carl Ludwig Hübsch, Robert Landfermann, Jon Rose, Sebastian Gramss, Tomomi Adachi, Alfred Zimmerlin, DJ Illvibe etc."