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Atlas Music Academy

William Harvey

Violon ( Violin )

Concertmaster of Mexico’s premier orchestra, the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, and violin faculty at the Universidad Panamericana, violinist, conductor, and composer William Harvey has appeared as violin soloist at Carnegie Hall with the New York Youth Symphony and has performed concerti with orchestras in Argentina, El Salvador, the Philippines, Mexico, and USA. His recording of the violin concerto by Hector Infanzón received two nominations to the Latin Grammys in 2021.

For 4 years, he served as the Violin and Viola Teacher at Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM). At the request of ANIM founder, Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, he founded the Afghan Youth Orchestra, which he conducted 8 times for President Hamid Karzai and led on a historic tour of the USA that he also coordinated and for which he raised the funding. On that tour, he conducted AYO in his own arrangements at sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. The tour was featured extensively in major media including the New York Times, CNN, ABC, and NBC.

In March 2012, Harvey conducted AYO on the season finale of Afghan Star, which was the most-watched TV event in Afghan history, with 15 million viewers; he did so again for the season finale in March 2013. He subsequently conducted AYO at the Royal Opera House in Muscat, Oman, in February 2014. In 2011, he was a guest judge and performer on Afghan Star. He also edited and arranged the Anthologies of Afghan Songs for Violin, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass, intended to supplement the pedagogy of all of those string instruments. As an experiment in audience perception, he recorded all four solo violin pieces by Elliott Carter for live audiences in Afghanistan in a project called “Playing Carter in Afghanistan.”

He has previously served as concertmaster of the Orquesta Sinfónica Sinaloa Las Artes (Mexico), Orquesta Sinfónica de la Universidad Nacional de San Juan (Argentina) and the Spokane Symphony (USA), faculty at Indiana University’s Summer String Academy, a Fellow at Carnegie Hall’s Academy, and a guest artist at the Myanmar Music Festival (where he performed for Aung San Suu Kyi), Mehli Mehta Music Foundation (to which he was invited by Zubin Mehta), and Iguazu en Concierto (where he conducted an orchestra of hundreds of children from around the world in front of Iguazu Falls). He has performed at festivals throughout Mexico, such as the Festival del Centro Histórico, where he performed most of the unaccompanied works by Bach for those pieces’ 300th anniversary in 2020. William plays on a violin made by Joseph Curtin in 2001 and a violin made by Nadia Sánchez in 2021.

As a conductor, he has led professional orchestras throughout Mexico and youth orchestras in Argentina, Qatar, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and the USA. Mr. Harvey’s compositions have received over a hundred performances. He has performed his own violin concerto inspired by the life of Gandhi with 5 orchestras in the USA and Mexico. Renowned soprano Susanna Phillips commissioned his song cycle based on poetry by Afghan women. His Cuerpo Garrido for solo piano won Columbia University’s Bearns Prize. Mr. Harvey earned his M.M. from The Juilliard School, where he studied violin with Ronald Copes and composition with Samuel Adler, and B.M. from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he studied violin with Mimi Zweig and composition with Sven-David Sandström.

In 2005, Mr. Harvey founded Cultures in Harmony (CiH). In 2010, CiH was named a Best Practice in International Cultural Engagement (along with the Kennedy Center & Library of Congress) by the US Center for Citizen Diplomacy. CiH workshops in Pakistan, Qatar, Egypt, the Philippines, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, and Mexico have benefited thousands of young musicians. Mr. Harvey has lectured about CiH at the British Parliament; at the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin, Germany; at the Escuela Superior de Música in Mexico; at Boston University, Georgetown University, and Oberlin Conservatory in the USA; and at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan. In 2017, he gave the keynote speech at the ASTA convention in Pittsburgh.

Hanan Aseelah Davis

Chant / Chorale (Vocal teacher and Chorus)

Hanan Aseelah Davis is an Atlanta-based performing artist and educator. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music and Psychology from Spelman College and a Master of Music in Vocal Performance from Ohio State University. Throughout her career, she has been a featured soloist, performing such works as Vivaldi’s “Gloria”, Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater”, Mozart’s “Requiem”, and Handel’s “Messiah”. She has participated in several young artist programs.

Hanan is currently pursuing a Master of Music and Music Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her educational interests are centered on culturally responsive pedagogies and highlighting the contributions of marginalized groups in classical vocal repertoire, with an emphasis on composers who are women and composers of African descent.

Melinda Faylor

Piano ( Piano )

Melinda Faylor, a native of New York City, received her BM from the Oberlin Conservatory and her MM in piano performance from the Manhattan School of Music. She has worked extensively with electronics and has performed original electroacoustic music at the Performance Garage (PA), the Firehouse Space (NY), Spectrum (NY), Grounds for Sculpture (NJ), Andrea Clearfield’s Salon (PA), the Home Audio series (NY), the Park Church Co-op (NY), the Brooklyn Public Library and the North Brooklyn Arts Festival. In 2018 Ms Faylor was an artist in residence at the Cannery in South Penobscot, ME for work on her Kulintang, piano and electronics project.

Ms Faylor has travelled throughout Australia and South East Asia: to study Gamelan in Bali, and to perform concerts in Melbourne and Sydney, Australia. She has been a member of Cultures in Harmony, a NY based NPO that encourages cultural dialogue across boundaries through the use of music. She has travelled with CIH to the Philippines to give master classes and concerts at several institutions including the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

As a collaborative artist, Ms Faylor has worked extensively with dance. Her long time interest in John Cage, in particular his aleatoric practices, led her to collaborate often with Loren Groenendaal and Vervet Dance of Philadelphia, PA.

As a chamber musician, Ms Faylor has performed with the Mimesis Ensemble, Ensemble 212, Tenth Intervention, the Curiosity Cabinet, and for composers Joe Diebes, Sugar Vendil and Charles Waters. She has performed the interdisciplinary work of others at the NYC International Fringe Festival, the Great Hall at Cooper Union, National Sawdust, the Stone, the Stone at the New School, Knockdown Center, the Joyce Theater, Dixon Place, Roulette, Issue Project Room, and the Target Margin Theater.

In addition to her work as performer/composer, Ms Faylor has produced and co-produced several concert series, including Semi-Composed: Metamorphosis (2017) with Vervet Dance; Burning Pianos: the Firehouse Space Two Piano Festival (2014); Get Your Gamel-on! with pianist Manon Hutton-DeWys (2011-2012) and a NYC-wide John Cage festival in honor of the composer’s Centennial (2012). She has been featured on the Airborne Event on WFMU, alongside percussionist and collaborator Frederick Trumpy, for their work on reviving the John Cage radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat. Additional radio segments include appearances on DZFE (Manilla, Philippines) and 3MBS (Melbourne, Australia).

Current projects include a solo electroacoustic album, Melia Duo with flutist Melanie Chirignan, her interdisciplinary theater piece MeMeMeMe, and a setting of Christina Newhard’s Sari Sari Storybooks collection (Filipino children’s books) to music. MeMeMeMe is a series of generative performances in four parts, building upon experiments with meme and emoji language through parlor games and emoji tarot card divination. Ms Faylor is a pianist for the Joffrey Ballet School and the Garden Players in Forest Hills, Queens.

Colin Davin

Guitare (Guitar)

Colin Davin has emerged as one of today’s most dynamic young artists, Colin Davin has performed across the world, including at Carnegie Hall, the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, the Fridge Fringe in Dubai, and the Paris Conservatoire.

Nominated for two Latin Grammys in 2021, violinist, composer, and conductor William Harvey is the first American to serve as concertmaster of the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico. From 2010 to 2014, he taught violin and conducted the Afghan Youth Orchestra at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. He conducted that orchestra eight times for President Hamid Karzai and in 2013, on a tour to Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center that received front-page coverage of the New York Times. William has served as concertmaster of orchestras in Africa and North and South America, and appeared as soloist with orchestras in the US, El Salvador, Mexico, Argentina, and the Philippines. He teaches violin at the Universidad Panamericana and has a master’s from Juilliard (where he studied violin with Ronald Copes and composition with Samuel Adler) and a bachelor’s from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (where he studied violin with Mimi Zweig and composition with Don Freund and Sven-David Sandstrom). His compositions have received over 100 performances around the world; recently, four American orchestras (Princeton, Santa Cruz, Peoria, and Flint) have programmed his violin concerto, “Seven Decisions of Gandhi,” inspired by the life of Gandhi. He has given recitals in Berlin, London, and New York, and performed with world musicians in Myanmar, China, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere. As founder and director of Cultures in Harmony, he has led more than 40 cultural diplomacy projects in 16 countries, from Pakistan to Cameroon. He has lectured at the Parliaments of the UK and Germany, worked as a consultant for the World Bank, and BN View represents him as a model.

Atlas launches the 12th edition of the Atlas Music Academy. Established in 2009, this summer academy will take place at the Fishing School of Tabarka. It aims to enrich the summer holidays of young people. It offers young professional and amateur musicians aged 16 to 30 the opportunity to receive valuable and enriching training, as a complement to their academic studies. The academy is organized in partnership with the association Cultures In Harmony (USA). The training is provided by foreign professors from prestigious music schools (USA) and internationally renowned Tunisian musicians.

The number of participants, facilitators, instructors, and counselors has grown to the point that for this session, as with the previous one, we must reserve the entire Fishing School of Tabarka from July 23 to August 1, 2025.