Candace diCarlo
Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962)
Jennifer Higdon is one of today’s foremost composers and is especially noted for her concertos, having received the Pulitzer Prize for her Violin Concerto and three Grammy awards for her Percussion Concerto, Viola Concerto, and Harp Concerto. Higdon has received commissions from multiple major symphony orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony, as well as top artists such as Joshua Bell. From 1994 through 2021, she served as Professor of Composition at Curtis School of Music. Critics have praised her music as contemporary yet accessible and replete with beautiful melodies. Her tone poem, blue cathedral, was written in memory of her brother, who passed away from cancer in 1998, and remains her most popular work. It has been performed by over 400 orchestras around the world. Woman With Eyes Closed (2021), her most recent opera, explores themes of crime and family trauma through the story of a real-life art heist. Here's blue cathedral, performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra:
Jennifer Higdon: blue cathedral
Michael Tilson Thomas (b. 1944)
Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas has remained among the foremost interpreters of Mahler as well as modern American composers, including Charles Ives, John Cage, Steve Reich, and George Gershwin. In his own compositions, Tilson Thomas has created dynamic, bold music in the tradition of Copland and Bernstein—grounded in the wide-open spaces of an American harmonic palette while at the same time incorporating the sparkle of Broadway, jazz, and film music. Over the course of his career, Tilson Thomas has won a staggering 12 Grammy Awards, in addition to a Peabody Award and the National Medal of Arts, the country’s highest honor for achievement in the arts. In addition to his conducting and composition work, he has received wide acclaim for his work as an educator who has used his platform to reach a worldwide audience, appearing in shows for the BBC and PBS, and in the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts. Here Yuja Wang performs his "You Come Here Often?" which was featured on her recent Grammy award-winning album, The American Project.
Michael Tilson Thomas: You Come Here Often?
Nico Muhly (b. 1981)
Working predominantly in large-scale forms for the orchestra and opera, Nico Muhly has received commissions from The Metropolitan Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, among others. Muhly has not shied away from complex topics in his work, confronting themes of queerness and violence. His landmark opera Two Boys, commissioned and premiered by the Met in 2011, exposed the dark world of chatroom relationships. Based on a real-life criminal investigation in early-2000s Manchester, Two Boys tells the disturbing story of how a teen invented an entire universe of fake characters in an attempt to orchestrate his own murder. Sentences, a 2015 work for orchestra and countertenor, portrays vignettes from the life of Alan Turing, the renowned mathematician who devised a computer system that helped break coded Nazi communications and was also prosecuted as a homosexual under the UK’s formerly draconian laws. Here's the trailer for Nico Muhly's Two Boys from the English National Opera production in 2012:
Nico Muhly: Two Boys trailer
Matthew Aucoin (b. 1990)
Matthew Aucoin, who was the first ever Artist-in-Residence at Los Angeles Opera, has enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame as a composer and conductor, receiving a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018. He once served concurrently as Assistant Conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and the Solti Conducting Apprentice at the Chicago Symphony. Among his recent projects are Music for New Bodies, a staged song cycle bason on poetry by Jorie Graham, with whom Aucoin studied while an undergraduate at Harvard, and the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC)—in Aucoin’s own words, “an opera company, a new-music ensemble, a rock band, and a touring theater troupe, rolled into one.” His operas include Crossing (2015), an ode to Walt Whitman’s poetry, and Eurydice (2021), based on Sarah Ruhl’s version of the Orpheus myth, which retells the story from Eurydice’s perspective. Here's "This is what it is to love an artist" from Euryidice:
Matthew Aucoin: "This is what it is to love an artist"
Laura Karpman (b. 1959)
LA-based composer Laura Karpman has been nominated for an Oscar and received five Emmy awards for her work in film, television, theater, interactive media, and live performance. Her star-studded list of collaborators includes three members of the Coppola family (Francis Ford, Eleanor, and Sofia), Cord Jefferson and Steven Spielberg. Karpman also has an impressive roster of blockbuster scores, among them Guardians of Middle Earth, Everquest 2, Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom, Kung Fu Panda 2, Project Spark and Kinect Disneyland Adventures. In 2023, Karpman scored American Fiction—her first Oscar-nominated original score—in addition to The Marvels (Disney), Rock Hudson: All that Heaven Allowed (Max), and several other TV series. Her opera BALLS, recently had its world premiere in April at San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle. BALLS tells the story of the famous 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, with lyrics by Gail Collins of the New York Times. 2024 promises to be yet another wildly productive year for Karpman as she has plans to write a musical, the score for Season 3 of What If?, and two video game projects. Here's "Family Is, Monk Is" from the American Fiction soundtrack:
Laura Karpman: "Family Is, Monk Is"
Meredith Monk (b. 1942)
Composer Meredith Monk is a trailblazer in so-called “extended” vocal technique, which utilizes many other types of vocalizations beyond singing. Monk’s works often incorporate visual media and dance, creating stunning interdisciplinary works that have broadened the idea of what a soundscape can be. She began writing pieces made for specific spaces in the 1960s and was the first to create a piece for the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum (Juice, 1969), later borrowing aspects of this work for her 2009 Ascension Variations. She has also worked as a filmmaker, producing the award-winning Ellis Island (1981) and Book of Days (1988). Her work has won numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim fellowships, three “Obie” awards for off-Broadway theater, and two “Bessie” awards for Sustained Creative Achievement. Here's an excerpt from her score for Ellis Island:
Meredith Monk: Excerpt from music for "Ellis Island"
