Board of directors, advisory board listing



Aaron Krister Johnson is the founder and creative/artistic director of UnTwelve. He is also Chicago-based multi-keyboardist, teacher and composer. Ever eclectic and multi-faceted as a virtuoso keyboard artist, his experience ranges from the Western classical keyboard tradition, to folk music and to modern electro-acoustic free improvisation. The Chicago Sun-Times called his composition 'evocative', and his keyboard improvisations have been hailed by Keyboard Magazine as "challenging and creative". His work has been hailed by Chicagocritic.com, the Chicago Tribune, the Windy City Times, and the online music journal Tokafi.com

He has collaborated with the Fine Arts Chamber Players, The Artistic Home, Lyric Opera, Lira Ensemble, Chicago Children's Choir, Kiltartan Road Ensemble, Lakeside Shakespeare, and the International Music Foundation, among others. Other appearances include Chicago Irish Fest, Milwaukee Irish Fest, and the Old Town School of Folk music. Since 1998, he has been the pianist, organist, and choir director at Temple Sholom of Chicago, the largest Reform Jewish congregation in Chicago, and home of a historic 4-manual Wurlitzer organ.

In 2003 he started writing music and designing sound for theatrical productions. His score for The Artistic Home's production of 'Peer Gynt' was nominated for a 2005 Joseph Jefferson award for outstanding original incidental music for a play. Other credits with AH include 'Petrified Forest', 'Clash by Night', 'Madwoman of Chaillot' and 'Natural Affection', and Lakeside Shakespeare of Michigan's productions of 'Twelfth Night' and 'Julius Ceasar'.

His education includes the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory division, SUNY Purchase (BFA Magna Cum Laude) and Northwestern University (MFA Magna Cum Laude) for his graduate studies.

More info and a sampling of works is available at his webpage.


Christopher Bailey is a composer (and, occasionally, performer) of acoustic and electro-acoustic music. His interest in microtonality bloomed in the late '90s. Nowadays, he sees microtonality as a basic fact of contemporary composition in a wide variety of styles and aesthetics, similar to the fact that it is more vivid to see the world in color than in black-and-white. In 2007 Chris aided Aaron Krister Johnson in co-founding MidwestMicrofest, which has since become UnTwelve, and put up their first concert.

Born outside of Philadelphia, PA, Christopher Bailey's first ambition was to take over the world with an army of robots of his own devising. He quickly discovered that this would take too much work, though, and so he turned to music composition in his late 'teens, studying first at the Eastman School of Music, and later at Columbia University.

Recent performances of his music occurred in Taiwan, Germany, Montreal, New York, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Minneapolis, and in Seoul, Korea, where he was a 2nd-Prize recipient in the International Composers Competition. Other awards include prizes from BMI and ASCAP, and the Bearns Prize. For more information, mp3's, software, and fun, informative and interactive paraphernalia, see his webpage..


Richard E. Lange currently Co-Directs Friends Of The Arts, a Chicago based fine arts support organization that helps emerging artists establish themselves in the Chicago art scene. He has a B.A. degree in Music and German as well as a M.Ed. in Educational Administration. He studied organ as well as liturgical musicology in Heidelberg, Germany, and wrote church hymns in high school for a local parish. He has a M.Ed. in educational administration and a M.S. in elementary education. Richard is also an adjunct instructor at National-Louis University where he teaches graduate courses on teacher education and supervises student teachers at the high school level. Having organized dozens of group art shows in the Chicago area, he brings a rich background of fine arts administration knowledge to our board of directors.

" I attended my first microtonal music concert at the invitation of Aaron in the fall of 2007. I was totally mesmerised and wanted to learn more about how these rich sounds of musical notes are composed. I was offered a position on the board and have been exited ever since to play a role with helping to move the goals and objectives of the organization forward. It was honored to have a part with organizing our August 2008 concert at a brand new venue in Evanston. I look forward to future enriching experiences and remaining an active board member."

Jacob A. Barton started composing at age 5, which, along with his parents' unwavering support, made it possible to release a 10-year retrospective album at age 15. He has studied composition with Kurt Grossman, BJ Leidermann, Timothy Bandy, Andrey Kasparov, Karim Al-Zand, Kurt Stallmann, Edward Applebaum, and Arthur Gottschalk. He has a Bachelor of Music degree from Rice University. He received a BMI Student Composer Award in 2006 for composing Xenharmonic Variations on a Theme by Mozart for microtonal player piano.

Jacob tends to write music for his friends and/or himself to play. He plays piano reluctantly, and many wind instruments wishing they could do microtones more easily. He avidly collects odd musical instruments and hoards raw materials for making new ones. One such instrument is the "udderbot", a slide bottle discovered in 2005.

He has performed in New York, Houston, and Ann Arbor in An Exciting Event, an ensemble which takes microtonality as seriously as it takes puppetry and round-singing. He has participated in the Garden Performance Project, a series of workshops and concerts which elicit and present new local musics among neighbors, and the School for Designing a Society, a project for making formulation, especially formulation of desires, relevant to now (and vice versa).

Jacob's interest in microtonality is driven by its persistent (and juicy) problems: What is it, exactly? Who notices and who doesn't and why? What can I make out of it? How can the difficult bits become easy? And then what happens? To pursue these questions socially, Jacob has started such projects as Thirty-one Tone Singing Camps, the Seventeen Tone Piano Project, the Xenharmonic Wiki, and Make Microtonal Music Day.


Andrew Heathwaite "is" a composer, (dis-)organizer, activist, situationist, philosopher, and polyhuman. He crafts in music, language, and situations, with stated intent to generate new alternatives. He began teaching himself microtonality/xenharmonics in 2003, when he discovered that none of his fancy music professors had any idea about it. He is interested in the politics of new composition systems demanding new languages, and the social consequences of transforming language constraints. He has composed using various equal divisions of the octave, equal divisions of a nonoctave, rational tunings, irrational tunings, and other experimental scales. He is interested in composing composing.

Andrew currently collaborates with School for Designing a Society in Urbana, IL and, with Jacob Barton, has started designing a community music space that functions as a musical instrument library, recording studio, workshop, "composer's living room," and general haven for those interested in oddmusic. He performs with a plebeian nameless 17-tone band, singing and playing cümbüş, a fretless Turkish instrument with twelve strings.


Randall West is a composer and sound artist whose catalog includes music for the concert hall as well as electroacoustic, vocal, and experimental music. His music tends to explore novel ways in which performers or sounds interact, while directly engaging its audience with colorful timbres, striking melodies, and a vivid theatricality. His musical inspiration spans from 20th century modernism to the baroque, Indian classical, Japanese folk, electronic, avant-garde, and popular music.

Randall received his Masters in composition at the Chicago College of the Performing Arts, where his instructors included Stacy Garrop, Daron Hagen, and Kyong Mee Choi. He has been awarded fellowships by the Seasons Music Festival and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was the recipient of the CCPA Wind Ensemble Competition for Wayna Picchu. His works have been read or performed by Palomar, the Yakima Symphony, the University of Illinois New Music Ensemble, and Chicago Opera Vanguard, among others. Recent projects include collaborations with award-winning poets Jill McDonough and Matthew Hittinger, with vocal ensembles VOX 3 and S O N G. His electroacoustic work has been presented at the 2010 International Computer Music Conference in New York and at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Randall also works as a computer programmer, and is a pianist and performer of traditional Japanese music on shamisen and taiko.


Chris Vaisvil grew up as a south side Bridgeport Chicagoan. He was educated at South Suburban College and Governor's State University and holds degrees in Music and Chemistry.

Chris became interested in microtonal music when his music theory teacher mentioned in passing that at one time F sharp and G flat were not the same note and later that the composer Charles Ives was guided into quartertone music by his father who built contraptions for exploring "notes in the cracks between the keys of the piano". Unfortunately, exploring non-tweleve music in a tweleve equal world was not an easy task. Until personal computers arrived. Chris' first microtonal pieces were performed on computer using a program called a "tracker" that was bent to do something it wasn't made to do - make microtonal music - by the brute force method of loading and tuning by ear samples of classical guitar in 22 note per octave tuning. This satisfying microtonal experience led to further computerized microtonal solutions. Presently Chris composes in a variety of tunings using computers to re-tune normal instruments or samples and also builds his own instruments to further explore microtonality. Chris' compositions have been performed in Chicago, New York and other cities across the world with the Vox Novus 60x60 Untweleve mix, the 60x60 International mix and the Vox Novus Composer's Voice series. Chris has performed in Urbana IL, Kokomo IN, and the greater Chicago area and maintains an active internet presence. See www.chrisvaisvil.com for music and more information.

Chris' interest in microtonality is one of discovering new emotional expression and intellectual exploration of a the many possibilities that microtonal tunings provide. Chris' perspective is that tuning should be simply another choice a composer can make just like the other more convential choices a composer makes such as which instruments and tempo to compose in. To make this happen the ability to tune to something other than the western hegemony of 12 equal has to be made easy to do, easy to understand and most importantly be used to make sound that inspires others to explore the vast possibilities of microtonality.


Stuart Rosenberg’s ability to draw on a wide world of music in order to make the ultimate human connection has endeared to him to a substantial and appreciative audience. As a composer, producer, broadcaster and ultimately, as a performer, Rosenberg’s musical fluency in a broad range of styles has paved the way for a life of musical adventures.

From 1986 through 1993 Rosenberg produced and hosted several award winning programs for National Public Radio and WBEZ, their local affiliate.

As a composer his work can be heard underscoring cutting-edge fare like NPR’s “This American Life”and “SoundPrint”, Kurtis Productions teledocumentaries, the BBC World Service & BBC Radio 4, The History Channel, PBS, and more. He has also composed original music for theatre including dramatic works for Northlight Theatre, Live Bait Theatre and Steppenwolf Theatre. He has also performed onstage at the Goodman, Court Theatre, The Free Street Theater of Chicago, Wisdom Bridge, and the Body Politic Theater.

He has produced dozens of records and CD’s in myriad genres. Production credits include Catherine Russel, Alberto Mizrahi, Jefferey Klepper, Andrew Calhoun, Anne Hills, Jamie O’Reilly, the Chicago Bluegrass Band, Paul Kahn, Sones de Mexico, Doug Stuart, Kol Sasson, Kol Zimrah, Shakshuka, and many more.

As a studio and session musician he’s played on numerous recording sessions for other musicians and hundreds of television and radio commercials, and has performed at concerts and festivals around the world including the Festival D’ete in Quebec, the Montreal Jazz Festival, EarthFair in Osaka, Japan, the Winnipeg Folk Festival, and all over the US, including Garrison Keillor on “A Prairie Home Companion”, as well as appearances with Stud Terkel at the Ravinia Festival, with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and as an guest instrumentalist with the Grant Park Orchestra. As the leader of his own ensemble, he’s known for providing an energetic and soulful accompaniment for celebrations of every kind, blending sophistication, exuberance, a broad range of repertoire.

Stuart has always seen music as a path to the heart of the spirit. From his earliest exposure to synangogue chant as a child in Rogers Park, the blend of tribal affiliation and musical expression has been at the core of his musical life. As a founding member of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble he was at the forefront of the revival of traditional Jewish music that started in the latter part of the 20th century. His music has been an integral component of the re-introduction of instrumental music in worship, providing spirited and spiritual support through music for congregations such as Anshe Emet, Temple Sholom, Bnai Tikvah, Beth Emet, Har Zion and others.


Aaron Andrew Hunt is a composer, inventor, and educator who has developed significant theories, instrument designs, and notations for alternative tunings. From 2002 to 2007, Hunt was instructor of music at Eastern Illinois University, where he taught ear training, music theory, music analysis, electronic music, counterpoint, and composition. He has also served as guest lecturer in microtonality at Universities in the U.S., Europe, and the UK. In 2006, Hunt founded H-Pi Instruments, which he now runs full time, continuing research and development in the area of microtonality, building instruments, writing software, composing music, and working with musicians in the spirit of the company motto - for the future of music. Hunt serves on the board of directors for untwelve.org in an advisory capacity.