Contemporary music ensemble Alarm Will Sound will perform music written for and premiered at the University of Missouri’s annual Mizzou International Composers Festival (MICF) as part of New York’s Times:Spans Festival at 7:30 p.m. on August 22, 2024, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music’s Mary Flagler Cary Hall. The program will include music by Claude Baker, Marcos Balter, Andrew Norman, Chelsea Komschlies, Felipe Tovar-Henao, and Kelley Sheehan.
In Mycelialore Komschlies melds her interests in the human brain and fungi to create a fantasy world of mushrooms. Mycelium is the underground root-like structure of fungus. “The mycelium can form networks between trees and other plants, and there are many ways in which these networks can function like a human brain, like neurons firing. As a composer and fantasy enthusiast, I took that idea based in real science into a fantasy realm and asked the question: if these mycelium networks kind of function like a brain, then what if they had their own folklore and their own memory? If mushrooms can remember and tell their own stories, what would they say and how would they sound?”
by Steve Arloff
Chelsea Komschlies’s Beyond Machines and Human Fear, Space which was Never Our Frontier is scored for flute, clarinet, saxophone and bassoon. It explores the notion that space, though unknown and thus frightening, also has an infinite magisterial beauty. The composer hints at clichéd sci-fi sounds to evoke the way we are used to representing space in music (ethereal sounds, sometimes from that most other-worldly, eerie theremin). The instruments here point to this, while Komschlies contrasts them with the softer, less brittle sounds of space. She portrays them as gently spiritual while she indicates the overwhelming, seemingly never-ending vastness.
League of American Orchestras, in partnership with American Composers Orchestra, has announced the formation of a second consortium, to take place from 2024 to 2026. As in the original consortium, six women composers—Brittany J. Green, Moni (Jasmine) Guo, Karena Ingram, Chelsea Komschlies, Marina López, and Meilina Tsui for this round—will receive commissions and a consortium of 30 U.S. orchestras (five orchestras paired with each composer) will perform the works. Six lead orchestras will premiere the commissioned works in the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons. Twenty-four additional orchestras will be selected over the coming months for repeat performances in 2024 through 2026. Networking, mentoring, career development, and community engagement opportunities are built into the program, and the composer cohort meets annually at the League’s National Conference, taking place in Houston, June 6-8, 2024.
A CHAMBER ENSEMBLE of Curtis Institute of Music alumni performs for science fiction fans on a Caribbean cruise called Star Trek: The Cruise VII.
Is that sentence the result of a strangely-themed Mad Libs exercise? Nope, it actually happened this past February— thanks to actor John de Lancie. Mr. de Lancie is well-known for his role as Q in the Star Trek franchise.
Building on the impact of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program’s current 30-orchestra consortium that provides opportunities for women composers, the League of American Orchestras, in partnership with American Composers Orchestra, has announced the formation of a second consortium, to take place from 2024 to 2026. As in the original consortium, six women composers—Brittany J. Green, Moni (Jasmine) Guo, Karena Ingram, Chelsea Komschlies, Marina López, and Meilina Tsui for this round—will receive commissions and a consortium of 30 U.S. orchestras (five orchestras paired with each composer) will perform the works.
Winner of the 2021-2022 Research Alive Student Prize, composer Chelsea Komschlies talks about her project, venturing outside one's field of study and finding a vibrant culture for research creation.
2021-2022 Research Alive Student Prize-winner, composer and doctoral candidate Chelsea Komschlies will give her presentation, "Crossmodal Correspondences in Composing and Listening to Music” this week. The Research Alive series aims to unveil what makes music so magical in the ears and minds of the listener through live performance and dialogue between researchers and musicians.
Crescent Duo’s Flute/Clarinet Chronicles is a potpourri of diverse literature in a two-disc set. Joanna Cowan White and Kennen White’s fourth duo album begins with Steam, a steampunk fantasy world by Chelsea Komschlies. The whimsical fourth movement “Flying Machine” is particularly attractive and exhibits both performers’ tonal warmth and masterful blending of timbres. The flowing arpeggiation and soaring melodies that interlace each other are performed with virtuosity and a lightness that captures the imagery of flight.
Penderecki’s Phantom Bell was presented at the 2021 AMS National Conference and later published on the Timbre and Orchestration Resource (TOR), a peer-reviewed open-access web platform supporting the analysis, creation and teaching of timbre and orchestration.
Penderecki has created a fascinating aural illusion in the fourth movement of his massive, powerful oratorio for Orthodox Easter Eve, Utrenja, Part I: The Entombment of Christ. In the opening seconds we hear the unmistakable sound of the resonance of a great dystonic cathedral bell. However, a look at the score tells us that there is no bell present at this moment. I will give an in-depth look at bell acoustics using Hibbert, Taherzadeh, and Sharp's work in bell pitch perception (2017 p. 55, 62) and show how Penderecki's timbral illusion not only models a bell, but a giant, imaginary Russian-style cathedral bell, as opposed to a European bell.
Congratulations to Chelsea Komschlies (current PhD), winner of the 2020-2021 recipient of the Andrew Svoboda Prize for Orchestral Composition! We asked Chelsea a few questions to get to know more about her and the compositions she creates. Discover how she uses crossmodal correspondences in her work, where some of her references might originate, as well as some prime advice for budding composers.
We hear many of those stories from the students writing to us, thanking the donors who made their scholarships possible. One shining example is composer and Appleton native Chelsea Komschlies, who is making good on her Miller Family Music Education Scholarship, a fund within the Community Foundation.
The Hermitage Artist Retreat and the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) have announced that Chelsea Komschlies, a composition student at the Susan and Ford Schumann Center for Composition Studies at the AMFS, has been awarded the 2019 Hermitage Prize. She receives a six-week residency at the Hermitage, along with a $1,000 stipend for travel and food expenses. Komschlies was selected by a jury that included Alan Fletcher, AMFS president and CEO of the AMFS; Robert Spano, music director at the AMFS and the Atlanta Symphony; and Chris Theofanidis, a composition faculty member at AMFS. All three are Hermitage fellows. First awarded in 2013, the Hermitage Prize is given to a promising composer who is enrolled as a composition student at AMFS. The residency is the only one the Hermitage grants to an artist who is just embarking on his or her career.
First awarded in 2013, the Hermitage Prize is given to a promising composer who is enrolled as a composition student at AMFS. Bruce Rodgers, executive director of the Hermitage, said the residency is the only one the Hermitage grants to an artist who is just embarking on his or her career. “These students are already on their way to impressive careers with a multitude of recognized work under their belts,” he said, and added that, as “as the first female composer to be awarded the Hermitage Prize in Aspen, we look forward to having Chelsea on our campus and sharing her in a public program with our community.”
The Hermitage Artist Retreat and the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) announce that Chelsea Komschlies, a composition student at the Susan and Ford Schumann Center for Composition Studies at the AMFS, has been awarded the 2019 Hermitage Prize. Komschlies was selected by a jury that included Alan Fletcher, AMFS president and CEO of the AMFS; Robert Spano, music director at the AMFS and the Atlanta Symphony; and Chris Theofanidis, a composition faculty member at AMFS.
The daughter of an artist, Komschlies grew up in Appleton, WI creating and loving all sorts of visual art, and still enjoys drawing, digital painting, and creating hand-sculpted jewelry. She often uses real or imagined images as inspiration for her works, hoping that listeners will “make deep, instinctual associations with her music, be they emotional, visual, or otherwise abstract.”
BY AARON HAY
“Thanks for joining me this evening, I’m Aaron Hay. You’re listening to Mizzou New Music on Classical 90.5 FM. This week we’re continuing our look at the resident composers for this year’s Mizzou International Composers Festival. Joining me by phone is Chelsea Komschlies. Chelsea, thanks for joining us.”
As a child I loved spending hours poring over challenging puzzles. When I was about thirteen, I'd just read and watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was obsessed, and I remember I was playing the melody from the "Concerning Hobbits" cue and figured, ok, it can't be that hard to figure out the chords, and I just slowly by trial and error figured it out one note at a time, then did the same with all the other cues from the trilogy.
Cortlandt Manor, NY – Copland House has announced the six Fellows selected to participate in CULTIVATE 2019, its acclaimed, annual emerging composers institute. The composers chosen are Flannery Cunningham 27 (New York, NY); Chelsea Komschlies , 27 (Calgary, Alberta); Charles Peck , 31 (Philadelphia, PA); Igor Santos , 33 (Chicago, IL); Nina Shekar , 23 (Los Angeles, CA); and Sam Yulsman , 28 (New York, NY). Will Healy , 28 (New York, NY) was selected as an Alternate.
BY KEN HERMAN
I admired the many engaging flourishes and rigorously imaginative duo writing in Komschlies’s “Steam,” a four-movement suite for clarinet and flute performed with crisp discipline by Beth Ross Buckley and Renk. The composer displayed the wit and drive of J. S. Bach’s two-part inventions without depending on the easy cliches of any of the ubiquitous neo-Baroque styles of the last century. If only Paul Hindemith’s numerous dry-as-dust instrumental sonatas exhibited Komschlies’s ingratiating allure.
