Amrakhova Anna is D.A. Graduated from the Uzeyir Hajibeyov State Conservatory of Azerbaijan. Chief Editor of the Music Theory Society's Magazine. Member of Russia's Union of Composers. Author of two published monographs (2004 & 2009), as well as of several dozens of articles and interviews with some leading composers and musicologists.

Ханнанов Ильдар Дамир-улы - доктор теории музыки, профессор университета Джона Хопкинса (США)

Sándor Szabó - guitar artist, composer, musicologist was born in 1956 in Törökszentmiklós, Hungary, he started his studies with a private teacher of classical guitar. After trying different styles in the mid-seventies, he began to focus on jazz and improvisation. His career started in 1980. He was the first to play solo acoustic guitar music in Hungary. In the beginning of the eighties, he continued his studies in Budapest with the jazz faculty of Béla Bartók Music Conservatory. At that time he already felt that he should approach improvisation not by one certain style, but rather by utilizing his sensitivity and openness, and making a synthesis of all the musical influences he had ever experienced. Immersing himself in Far Eastern music was an ideal breeding-ground to achieve this. By his deep interest and magnetism for the Oriental musics, one part of his compositions sound like modern western contemporary pieces with a hint of Oriental influence and the other part of his pieces are closer to the Central-Asian maqams and other FarEastern instrumental musics.

His playing techniques of different stringed instruments, his modern pieces, and deep spirituality earned him credits, though mainly abroad. His records have been released in England, Italy, USA, Venezuela, Norway, Germany and Hungary. In the last decade, Sándor Szabó has regularly collected music and written articles about the Central-Asian and Far-Eastern instrumental music to study its similarities, as well as historical and geographical connection with Hungarian folk music. As a result of this long-term research, he launched a new website devoted to the Modern Hungarian Maqam to recall and recreate a possible form of that ancient Hungarian classical instrumental music. The website offers some articles and essays about the history and structure of the theorized Hungarian Maqam; as well as some musical samples. His researches and activity in Oriental music was received with accolades by some Central-Asian and Far-Eastern musicologists, and as a result, in 2013 Sándor Szabó was invited to the Shark Taronalari international music festival as a musicologist and also as a musician to introduce and share his research and his modern Oriental music at the conference in Samarkand/Uzbekistan. His first book called The Metaphysics of The Music was published in 2010 by the Püski Kiadó press.