Photo: Kyle Benjamin Turner
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.
Photo: Kyle Benjamin Turner
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. Ms. Komschlies continues her collaboration with the Tucson Symphony and other consortium orchestras under the auspices of the Virginia B. Toulmin Commissions program through the American League of Orchestras, crafting a new work set to premiere in 2025. Ms. Komschlies’ future musical goals include leveraging immersive VR and AI-assisted film techniques in her works to further transport her listeners.
Composer dates:
Born 1991, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA
Contact: chelsea@komschlies.com