“Missy Mazzoli, one of the country’s hot, up-and-coming composers, is to be composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, effective July 1,” reports Susan Elliott in Wednesday’s (6/27) MusicalAmerica.com (subscription required). “Appointed by Music Director Riccardo Muti, she will oversee the orchestra’s contemporary music activities, including commissions, its four-concert MusicNOW new-music series, and generally advise on keeping the programming up to date. She will also write a piece for the CSO during her two-year term, set to premiere in 2019-20. Mazzoli succeeds Samuel Adams and Elizabeth Ogonek, composer-in-residence for the past two seasons. Among her better-known works are Proving Up, premiered by the Washington National Opera this year, and Breaking the Waves, premiered in 2016 by Opera Philadelphia, of which she is a former composer-in-residence. Orchestral commissions include the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony, and others. Recipient of a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, four ASCAP Young Composer Awards, and a Fulbright Grant, she attended the Yale School of Music, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and Boston University … As co-founder of the Luna Composers Lab, an organization that supports and mentors women composers, Mazzoli was a 2016 Musical America Innovator of the Year.”
Posted June 28, 2018
