Composer's Studio

Send us Fan Mail Much of composer Chiayu Hsu’s music revolves around the poems, myths, States to hone her craft as a composer. She has found great success in the U.S., but her music reflects a divided heart. It is a collage of imagery and mood, telling stories and painting images full of affection for the place and the people she misses at home, while exploring the kaleidoscope of cultures and cre...

Send us Fan Mail Beloved Raleigh pianist, pedagogue, and composer Lanette Lind did not set out to be a composer, but one commission led to another, and another, and another. As a masterful pianist, competent in many styles, Lanette does not subscribe to any one compositional technique or ethos--just that the music must serve the story. Whether writing for children or adults, she approaches her tas...

Send us Fan Mail Founding member of the New York based ensemble, Rhymes With Opera, composer George Tsz-Kwan Lam was born in Hong Kong, brought up in Massachusetts, and studied in some of the finest composition programs in North America. George’s music is all about exploring and documenting the musical aspects of place, whether in a tobacco factory turned performance space in Durham, North Carolin...

Send us Fan Mail Join Tarik and Anna for a great conversation with composer, Juan Pablo Contreras, a Latin GRAMMY®-nominated composer from Guadalajara, Mexico. In his music, Juan Pablo explores his joyful but complicated relationships with history, place, and his love for both Western classical and Mexican folk music, resulting in a musical journey full of joy, humor, and just a touch of violence....

Send us Fan Mail Innovative North Carolina-based composer, artist, and educator, Brittany J. Green’s work explores new ways of looking at the relationships between audience and composer, sound and movement, form and function. Join Anna and Tarik for a generative discussion of computer programming in composition, music as metaphor, the productive dichotomy between tradition and disruptive new ideas...

Send us Fan Mail “In times of crisis and peril, we have but the reliance of faith - from the profound faith in humanity, faith in love, and faith that we will persevere and get through this with dignity” -Composer Vivian Fung On Composer’s Studio this week: JUNO Award-winning Canadian composer Vivian Fung’s new work, Prayer, was composed with a young child at home 24/7, a bronchial infection, and...

Send us Fan Mail Allison Loggins-Hull is a composer and producer with roots in classical, urban art pop, hip-hop, electronic programming, and R&B.  The flute duo, Flutronix, she and collaborator Nathalie Joachim founded has been described as  “ a unique blend of classical music, hip-hop, electronic programming, and soulful vocals reminiscent of neo-R&B stars like Erykah Badu. ” Flutronix h...

Send us Fan Mail At just 19 years old, Grammy award winning Iranian American Jewish-Christian composer Richard Danielpour had a strange mystical experience that left him awed and shaken, but with new clarity in his faith and life’s purpose as a composer. His powerful and deeply spiritual music made him one of the most beloved and recorded composers of his generation, yet he still struggled to comp...

Send us Fan Mail A composer with a deep love of the English language and a secret dramatic streak, Juliana Hall is one of the most prolific Art Song composers alive today.  Juliana ventures out of her monastic studio to join Anna and Tarik for a rare conversation about the relationship between poetry and music, her habit of mining other people’s letters for material, and the real reason Lady Godiv...

Send us Fan Mail Composer Daniel Bernard Roumain doesn’t ask for permission. He is a revolutionary, changing the world of concert music and opera by creating unapologetically black music--opera, string quartets, a YouTube requiem--all for black audiences. Taking the classical music world by storm, DBR is challenging some of the most powerful names and revered institutions in the classical music wo...

Send us Fan Mail How can the act of creating transform fear and anger into courage and hope? Composer Adrienne Albert harnesses the mysterious emotional power of music to strengthen the spirit and change the heart. An artist who has had an extraordinary life in music, Adrienne started out as a singer working with  such luminaries as Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein before taking up the compos...

Send us Fan Mail What makes a life? After the early death of her younger brother, Andrew Blue, this question consumed composer Jennifer Higdon. Her beloved orchestral work, Blue Cathedral was her creative answer to that question. Blue…like the sky.  Where all possibilities soar.  Cathedrals…a place of thought, growth, spiritual expression…serving as a symbolic doorway into and out of this world. ...

Send us Fan Mail As a guitarist, composer Andrew McKenna Lee blends virtuosic classical technique with a Rocker’s hard driving passion for rhythm and originality. As a composer, he defies categorization. A self-admitted perfectionist, Andrew’s music is not your typical two rehearsal and done type of music, a quality, he says, has not made his musical journey an easy one. Still, with accolades from...

Send us Fan Mail On CS this week, Amy is reunited with an old friend and collaborator, Emmy Award-winning composer, Steve Heitzeg. A lifelong peace and environmental activist, Steve’s music often features found instruments that reflect the theme of his work such as stones, driftwood, Joshua Tree branches, manatee and beluga whale bones, found bullets, and prosthetic limbs. A composer who believes...

Send us Fan Mail "This is where your world and my world meet." - Tashi Tsering, Royal Tibetan Court Singer in Lo Mothang, Nepal.   When composer Andrea Clearfield accepted a commission from Network for New Music to collaborate with visual artist Maureen Drdak on a new work, she didn’t know it, but her life was about to change forever. As part of the commission, Maureen invited Andrea to...

Send us Fan Mail Stephen Downing is a North Carolina based composer currently earning his PhD in music composition at Duke University. Stephen's music travels from the traditional to the absurd. Though Stephen draws from more traditional compositional sounds, he utilizes the material in modern and decidedly untraditional ways - inviting the listener to travel through a sonic world that is bot...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Composer's Studio, composer and Duke professor Anthony Kelley takes us on a tour through his musical family tree. From Ghanaian dance music to Bach, Scott Joplin to Aaron Copland, Kelley’s music is defined by a constant push and pull, a blending and a breaking apart. His piano concerto, Africamerica , begins on a slave ship and takes us on a journey punctua...

Send us Fan Mail Mark Engebretson, composer and professor out of Greensboro, NC, writes music that is driven by  a desire for fresh, engaging forms and modes of musical expression in which performers are asked to face and overcome novel technical and musical challenges. Listen as Mark explains and performs his piece The Outsid e,  live in the WHUP studio. Based on a poem by Greensboro, NC poet Bri...

Send us Fan Mail Composer Kenneth Frazelle has had work commissioned and performed by such prominent artists as Yo-Yo Ma, Jeffrey Kahane, Dawn Upshaw, jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson, and now the Triangle’s own Andrea Edith Moore. On CS this week, we are treated to a sneak preview of Ken Frazelle’s new song cycle, Through the Window, drawing inspiration from his mother’s life and the music of his n...

Send us Fan Mail Take a step into nature, into the love of a wife and mother, and the strength of a young woman. Be inpsired by the tenacity of young trees. Award winning composer Jenni Brandon’s optimistic music explores the small things–often the things that really matter. Jenni’s music appears on over 20 albums, and has been awarded the Sorel Medallion, American Prize, Paderewski Cycle, Women C...

Send us Fan Mail On the Composer’s Studio this week, Tarik and Amy take a deep dive into composer Jesse Ayers’ opera Beneath Suspicion, based on historical accounts of the friendship between two abolitionist women in Virginia during the civil war–one an emancipated slave, the other a white former slave owner. Their powerful story encourages us to have faith in the face of adversity, choose right i...

Send us Fan Mail In this powerful episode, Tarik and Amy discuss music and American history with Brent Michael Davids, composer and co-director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan. An American Indian citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation, his heritage is a major influence on his work. Brent experiments with traditional Native American singing and instruments, always pushing bo...

Send us Fan Mail Marianna Filippi, a bright young composer from Maine, is at her core, a storyteller. Composing for theater and film as well as chamber groups and solo artists, Marianna’s music is proving popular with performers and audiences alike. Beginning with improvisation to form her initial melodic and harmonic material, she lets her work evolve organically, like a good piece of prose. Rich...

Send us Fan Mail Award winning virtuoso pianist and composer Lucia Caruso’s musical journey has taken her across four continents, and through over a dozen countries with performances in such renowned landmarks as the Versailles Palace, the Louvre Museum, and Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, France. She has graced the stages of Lincoln Center, Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall,  and the Kennedy Cen...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Pedro Henriques da Silva is a Portuguese composer, multi-instrumentalist, professor, and lecturer in various fields of music, arts, and sciences; whose numerous awards include the 2015 and 2016 American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Plus Award, the 2017 International Portuguese Music Award for Best Instrumental Performance, and the Best Emerging Filmmaker Docum...