Renowned for her music's "ingratiating allure" (San Diego Story), Chelsea Komschlies blends the familiar and the strange in uncanny ways. Ms. Komschlies prioritizes perception of her music by the human brain and shared experiences among listeners. Her compositions, each a distinct fantasy world, evoke vivid multisensory imagery and a range of psycho-emotional landscapes, from whimsical nostalgia and camp to eerie disquiet, and from altered states of consciousness to glittering spiritual awe.

A Ph.D. candidate in composition under Jean Lesage at McGill University, Ms. Komschlies has been honored with McGill’s Andrew Svoboda Prize for Orchestral Composition and the Research Alive Student Prize. The Fonds de Recherche du Québec further supports her thesis work on how composers can encode shared multisensory information like light, color, and texture in a science-backed way, and has recognized her as the top-ranked music research project in the province. Ms. Komschlies’ work has been acknowledged and supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, the Hermitage, Fromm, and ASCAP Foundations, the Alfred Casella Award from the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Copland House. Presenters include Alarm Will Sound, the Bozzini Quartet, the Quasar Saxophone Quartet, the Tucson, Omaha, Vermont, Pittsburgh, Steamboat, and Lima Symphonies, the TIME SPANS festival, Grant Park Music Festival, Choral Arts Philadelphia, the Fifth House Ensemble, Codes d’accèss (Montreal), Le Vivier (Montreal), the Boulanger Initiative, Make Music Chicago, and Star Trek: The Cruise. A 2023 Virginia B. Toulmin Commission recipient through the League of American Orchestras, she premiered Mycelialore for orchestra and electronics with the Tucson Symphony in 2025. She joins the Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps in 2025-26 and is expanding her work into immersive VR and AI-assisted film techniques.

Composer dates:

Born March 19, 1991, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA

Contact: chelsea@komschlies.com