Missy Mazzoli Selected as SFNM CoMission Club 2008 Composer

Youthful Composer has Already Collaborated with Many of Today’s Leading Musicians, Ensembles, and Composers

(Santa Fe, NM: January 16, 2008). SFNM is honored to announce the composer for the 2008 SFNM CoMission Club: Missy Mazzoli. Considered one of the freshest and most exciting new compositional voices in classical music, her influences range from Beethoven to Balinese Gamelan. In addition to her rising compositional status, Ms. Mazzoli was recently appointed Executive Director of New York's Music at the Anthology Festival, a showcase for young composers founded by Philip Glass.

Ms. Mazzoli writes for melodicas, out-of-tune guitars and electronics as well as orchestras and string quartets to create a truly unique sound. She has been called "gifted" by Alex Ross of The New Yorker, and was highly praised by the New York Times after the Minnesota Orchestra's performance of her work These Worlds In Us. In addition to our SFNM CoMission Club commission, she is presently finishing commissions from Eighth Blackbird and the Albany Symphony.

Expressing his delight in securing a commission with Missy, SFNM’s Artistic Director John Kennedy says, "Missy is a real talent. Some years down the road, when we look at the legacy of the SFNM CoMission club, we’ll be satisfied with our prescience in having commissioned one of her early works. I am also really thrilled to be commissioning a young woman composer with such a fresh and exhilarating voice. The SFNM CoMission Club was launched to give individuals and groups the opportunity to invest in the commissioning of a new piece of music by a major American composer. The first work, Sea Tropes by Ingram Marshall, was premiered by SFNM in October, 2007.

A short list of venues and festivals featuring Missy Mazzoli’s music this year include: Bang-on-a-Can New Music Marathon, the Cabrillo Festival of New Music, the MATA Festival, the VIM Tribeca New Music Series, and Kathy Supove's Exploding Piano series at the Flea Theater in Manhattan. Her work has recently been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, NOW Ensemble, Newspeak, Present Music, Da Capo Chamber Players, Dinosaur Annex and ALEA III. She was a featured performer at Amsterdam's Gaudeamus Festival of New Music.

In addition to her orchestral work, Ms. Mazzoli has written music for independent films, working with filmmakers Stephen Taylor, Alice Lovejoy, Joshua Dilworth and Nora Gortcheva. She is an active pianist, and music advocate: founding Free Speech Zone Productions, an organization dedicated to bringing new music to broad audiences. Missy has also worked closely with composer/performer Meredith Monk to transcribe and notate her unique musical language. A graduate of the Yale School of Music (MM 2006), the Royal Conservatory in the Hague (2004) and Boston University (BM 2002), Mazzoli has studied with David Lang, Louis Andriessen, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis and John Harbison, among others.

"Santa Fe New Music presents concerts locally and increasingly, throughout the region," explains John Kennedy, "but beyond that, our impact aims to be much broader, reaching the national and international scale. The CoMission Club is one element of that." Membership is national, with participants in the first commission, Ingram Marshall's Sea Tropes, coming from several states. Through the CoMission Club, individuals and groups can "invest" towards the commissioning of a new piece of music by a major American composer. Memberships start at $100, with opportunities to attend rehearsals, meet the composer, and play a role in assigning the commission scaled in with membership levels.