"Marguerite Cox, a double bassist from northeast Ohio, is a versatile and in-demand collaborator in numerous musical settings throughout the United States.A recent alumna of Carnegie Hall's Ensemble Connect fellowship, she performs regularly with A Far Cry, Palaver Strings, and Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players, and counts forthcoming appearances with The Knights, AMOC*, East Coast Chamber Orchestra, Ruckus, Teatro Nuovo, and other chamber ensembles exploring music through the ages. As a orchestral musician, she has appeared as a substitute with the Baltimore and Charleston Symphonies, held the principal bass position at Symphony in C from 2022 to 2024, and was a member of the 2023 Cabrillo Festival Orchestra; she was also a member of the inaugural NYO All-Stars Orchestra.

In 2024, Maggie toured and recorded extensively with experimental folk band Big Bend in collaboration with producer and musician Shahzad Izmaily. In 2022, she was in residence at Avaloch Farm with composer Ted Babcock's Dialogues Quintet. Marguerite received her undergraduate degree at Rice University's Shepherd School and her master's at the Curtis Institute, where she was the first bassist to receive that degree. In 2016, inspired by studies within Rice's Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities program, she founded the Ohio-based Artists for Action, through which she organizes community benefit concerts and other funding initiatives for local organizations. Based in New York, she instructs budding musicians of all ages across the city, lately at Brooklyn High School of the Arts through her Ensemble Connect placement."

"Jennifer Wei Gersten is a violinist and writer from Queens, New York. A former tenured tutti violinist with Helsingborg Symfoniorkester (Sweden), she instigates solo and collaborative musical projects in avant-garde and improvised performance, usually in the US and Scandinavia. Jennifer's feature reporting, essays, and music criticism appear or are forthcoming in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, Gramophone, and The Washington Post, among other publications, on subjects that include experimental music designed for a fjord-side pool, "ugly" Nordic architecture, and smashing violins to smithereens.

As a violinist, Jennifer is mainly engaged in the creation of idiosyncratic sounds and situations for her instrument, lately with composer-musicians Jo David Meyer Lysne (NO), Inga Margrete Aas (NO), and Luis Fernando Amaya (MX/NO). Within improvised music, Jennifer principally uses a beater instrument to explore what the violin could do if it only tried. She performs solo and in different constellations in New York City and Oslo, lately with Hvidovrefjell (with Ole-Henrik Moe and Kari Rønnekleiv) and Goal Weight (with Maggie Cox); the latter's debut record, Keep Telling Yourself That (Relative Pitch Records), was released in March 2026. Jennifer additionally works as an independent curator and producer, inventing memorable musical situations that tend to involve vast numbers of string players.

Jennifer is also an avid chamber musician in classical and new music contexts, appearing with TAK Ensemble (US), Ensemble Temporum (NO), and SEM Ensemble (US). She has served as a substitute with orchestras that include the Norwegian Radio Broadcasting Orchestra and Stavanger Symfoniorkester (NO); and as concertmaster of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and co-concertmaster of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. Jennifer has often collaborated with pianist and style icon Laura Davey in their contemporary-focused duo Double Standard.

Jennifer holds a doctorate and master's in violin performance from Stony Brook University, where she was a winner of the 2022 concerto competition, performing Britten's Violin Concerto with the graduate orchestra. She is a recipient of a Fulbright and a two-time recipient of American Scandinavian Foundation grants for reporting on, performing, and commissioning Norwegian contemporary experimental music. For strivings in the musical domain, including a site-specific quasi-improvised speculative durational beauty pageant, Jennifer received an honorable mention for Darmstadt Ferienkurse's 2023 Kranichstein Music Prize.

In 2018, Jennifer won that year's $10,000 Rubin Institute Prize in Music Criticism, granted by a panel of leading American music critics for "exceptional promise" in the field. Jennifer regularly writes liner and program notes as well as promotional materials for a range of international festivals, presenters, and artists. In collaboration with the Norwegian experimental label SOFA, she also hosted and edited SOFA STORIES, a podcast on three of SOFA's pathbreaking musicians. Jennifer has additionally been an on-air essayist for the PBS NewsHour and a senior editor at Guernica, and spent formative summers as an editorial intern at NPR Music and as a newsroom reporting fellow at The Toledo Blade. She is an enthusiastic copy-editor, fact-checker, and editorial consultant for artists in need of someone to help them dot their i's and cross their t's. She can even do this for you if you ask nicely.

Jennifer received her undergraduate degree from Yale University, where she majored in English and concentrated in creative nonfiction and, as a senior, received the Wrexham Prize in Music. She was a finalist in the 2015 Norman Mailer Four-Year College Writing Awards for an essay about her mother, an amateur ballroom dancer, that served as the genesis for her senior thesis project on the Asian American ballroom community of Flushing, NY."