Missy Mazzoli
Biography
Missy Mazzoli (b. 27 October 1980, Pennsylvania) is an American composer, educator and pianist.
Ms. Mazzoli attended the Yale School of Music, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and Boston University. She has studied with (in no particular order) David Lang, Louis Andriessen, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, John Harbison, Charles Fussell, Martin Amlin, Marco Stroppa, Ladislav Kubik, Louis DeLise and Richard Cornell.
Ms. Mazzoli's music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, pianist Emanuel Ax,and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Her second opera, Breaking the Waves premiered in Philadelphia in September 2016 and as part of New York’s Prototype Festival in January 2017.
From 2012 to 2015 she was composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia, Gotham Chamber Opera and Music Theatre-Group, and in 2011/12 was composer/educator in residence with the Albany Symphony. She was a visiting professor of music at New York University in 2013, and later that year joined the composition faculty at the Mannes College of Music, a division of the New School.
Ms. Mazzoli recently created orchestral arrangements for the Icelandic band Sigur Rós, which premiered as part of the LA Philharmonic’s Iceland Festival in April 2017, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. She also wrote and performed several pieces for the hit Amazon TV series Mozart in the Jungle. She also recently created new works commissioned and premiered by the LA Philharmonic, the Young People’s Chorus of New York, ETHEL, Roomful of Teeth and pianist Emanuel Ax, who has performed Missy’s Brahms-inspired Bolts of Loving Thunder on tour around the country.
Ms. Mazzoli is an active pianist and keyboardist, and often performs with Victoire, a band she founded in 2008 dedicated to her own compositions.
Ms. Mazzoli is the recipient of a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, four ASCAP Young Composer Awards, a Fulbright Grant to The Netherlands, the Detroit Symphony’s Elaine Lebenbom Award, and grants from the Jerome Foundation, American Music Center, and the Barlow Endowment. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ucross, VCCA, the Blue Mountain Center and the Hermitage. She is also active as an educator and a mentor to young composers; in 2006 she taught composition in the music department of Yale University, and from 2007-2010 was executive director of the MATA Festival in New York City, an organization dedicated to promoting the work of young composers.
Works for Winds
- Magic with Everyday Objects (2007)
- Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) (tr. Cheever) (2014/2020)
- The Sound of the Light (2008)
- A Thousand Tongues (tr. Lewis) (2011/2023)
Resources
- Missy Mazzoli website Accessed 9 April 2019