Obscure
Composers

Founder & President

Oana Oltean

Oana Adriana Oltean (b. 2000) is a Romanian composer and curator whose work explores music, cognitive psychology, liminal aesthetics, and contemporary poetry. Her practice explores perception, ambiguity, and unstable states of experience, with a musical language shaped by lush textures, timbre-driven writing, and multimedia.

She studied composition in Romania and is currently pursuing further studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon. Her research includes collaborative studies in cognitive psychology of music with Nicolas Fieulaine.

Oana is the founder of Obscure Composers, an international platform dedicated to discovering and critically engaging with lesser-known voices in contemporary classical music.

Her music has been performed across Romania, Lithuania, France, and Slovenia, including at Bled Contemporary Music Week and Bucharest’s International Week of New Music, as well as in historic fortified castles across Transylvania. She co-created LiminHair, an interdisciplinary mini-opera developed with CNSMD Lyon and ENSATT, and Muzică pe diafilme, a children’s audiovisual project. She won First Prize at the 2025 George Ștefănescu Competition, and Licht[core]-Dreamscape was featured in issue 512 of The Wire.

Vice-President

James Geldenhuys

Johannesburg-born composer James Geldenhuys (b. 2001) works across classical, jazz, choral, film and new music. He is completing his master's in composition at the University of Cape Town, having studied with Bongani Ndodana-Breen, Hendrik Hofmeyr, Aurélien Dumont, Grant McLachlan, Martin Watt and, at UC Berkeley, Cindy Cox.

His music has been heard across South Africa and in Lyon and Berkeley. His orchestral work Kingdom of Scars premiered with the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic alongside slam poet Xabiso Vili, and in 2024 Isiphiwo Esihle won the Jan Royce Foundation Orchestral Composition Prize. A residency at the Lyon Conservatoire (CNSMDL) culminated in the co-creation of mini-opera LiminHair, the creation of string quartet wit-ge-was-de-woor-de, and creative arrangement of the popular South African folk song, Senzeni Na? for voice, orchestra, choir, and dance. His commissions include a full Anglican Eucharist setting for St John's College and a special choral research project on postpartum effects in motherhood.

Co-founder and Vice-Chairman of the Cape Young Composers' Society, James part-time lectures at UCT's South African College of Music. His research explores African compositional methodologies, shaping a hybrid voice and a distinctly South African sound world. Currently, he is writing a new opera, Bloedbranders, with Dianne du Toit Albertze in Cape Town Opera's Staging Stories programme under the mentorship of Magdalene Minnaar and Alan Olejniczak.

• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• SoundCloud

Vice-President

Andrei Caimac

Andrei Caimac is a Romanian composer, poet and pianist, born in 2000 and based in France since 2017. He began studying the cello at the age of eight before developing a strong interest in piano and composition. He studied at the Conservatoire de Cergy and is currently in his final year of a Bachelor’s degree in composition at the CNSMD de Lyon, where he studies with David Chappuis. He is also a piano teacher at the Conservatoire de Vaujours.

As a composer and poet, Caimac’s work is centred on the relationship between poetry and sound saturation. He uses saturation as a means of expression, exploring density, distortion and excess as carriers of poetic and dramatic meaning. Influenced by death metal, spectralism and contemporary experimental practices, he develops a musical language shaped by timbral transformations, spectral interactions and powerful accumulations of sound, contrasted with moments of fragility and restraint.

His works have been performed by ensembles including Multilatérale and presented at numerous festivals and contemporary music events. He has received commissions for projects coordinated by the cities of Cergy, Lyon and Paris. He is also a co-founder of Ensemble Épigraphes, dedicated to contemporary creation.

• Instagram (cmandrei_)
• Facebook: Andrei Ionut