Meet the Composer

Season Two is just around the corner, but we need your help to make it happen. Learn about our next five featured composers and support Meet the Composer today on Kickstarter.

Building on a long-standing collaborative relationship, Marcos Balter wrote Intercepting a Shivery Light for the Anubis Quartet, a saxophone ensemble, in 2012. The piece's title is an anagram for Everything in its Right Place, a Radiohead song, which Marcos admits is an important song for him "and many members of [his] generation."

For Marcos Balter, stellar composition requires the dedicated, daily practice of an athlete. He doesn't think it possible to unearth and hone brilliant musical ideas without slogging through a whole bunch of failures along the way, nor does he believe that the compositional demigods we revere so highly – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart – birthed only masterpieces. He worries too many creatives get tongue-tied attempting consistent genius, and that their work suffers for it...

In 2012, the Grammy award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus commissioned the the future Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw to write a new work for their upcoming Benjamin Britten centenary celebration concert at Carnegie Hall. The result, "Its Motion Keeps," is a swirling piece for SSA choir and viola that employs at once the familiar (repetitive, calming ostinati) with the strange (extended techniques, clashing dissonance).

Caroline Shaw began her love affair with music at the age of two, when her mom started teaching her violin. Throughout her childhood, Caroline had a lesson every Wednesday afternoon, and sang and played in school and at music camps, falling for chamber music by Mozart and Clara Schumann. Caroline always made things; when she was bowled over by a Brahms sonata, she'd try and figure out how to construct her own sonatas...

In 1844, Asenath Nicholson, a school teacher, reformer and proprietor of an all-vegetarian boarding house in New York City, travelled to Ireland to "personally investigate the condition of the Irish poor." Upon her arrival, she saw the beginnings of the Great Famine, a seven-year period of mass starvation and disease in which it is estimated over one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland...

Donnacha Dennehy is an Irish composer who thought he was going to study with spectral icon Gérard Grisey in Paris. When he showed up, however, it was apparent that Grisey had accepted him into his study under the mistaken notion that he was not, in fact, a gentleman but a lady...

Composer Andrew Norman wrote a series of nine miniatures for string trio called The Companion Guide to Rome each inspired by a different Roman church. Download the movement "Sabina."

Andrew Norman was a well-feted kid composer, a precocious pre-adolescent who wrote works with grand, filmic gestures for his middle school orchestra and had the local newspapers filling their style sections with profiles invoking Mozart. Then he went to college. All of a sudden, Norman's musical world exponentially widened; he was exposed to styles and practices so far outside of his previous experience that he stopped composing altogether...

Gordon Wright, the Alaskan composer, conductor, professor and environmentalist, was John Luther Adams's best friend. When he died suddenly in 2007, Adams wrote three pieces for solo violin titled Three High Places, vignettes representing moments Adams and Wright shared while camping. These pieces eventually led Adams to write his first string quartet, at age 59, called The Wind in High Places...