Born: 27 October 1980, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
This bio is reproduced in full with kind permission from Wise Music Classical.
Grammy-nominated composer Missy Mazzoli was recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (The New York Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out New York). Mazzoli served as the Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from July 2018 to April 2021. Her music has been performed all over the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, pianist Emanuel Ax, Opera Philadelphia, Scottish Opera, LA Opera, Cincinnati Opera, New York City Opera, Chicago Fringe Opera, the Detroit Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, JACK Quartet, cellist Maya Beiser, violinist Jennifer Koh, pianist Kathleen Supové, Dublin’s Crash Ensemble, the Sydney Symphony, and many others. In 2018 she made history when she became one of the two first women (along with composer Jeanine Tesori) to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. That year she was also nominated for a Grammy in the category of “Best Classical Composition” for her work Vespers for Violin, recorded by violinist Olivia De Prato.
Mazzoli has received considerable acclaim for her operatic compositions. Her third opera, Proving Up, written with longtime collaborator Royce Vavrek, was commissioned by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and New York’s Miller Theatre. Based on a short story by Karen Russell, Proving Up offers a surreal and disquieting commentary on the American dream through the story of a Nebraskan family homesteading in the late 19th century. Proving Up premiered to critical acclaim in January 2018 at Washington DC’s Kennedy Center, in later in 2018 at Opera Omaha, and at Miller Theatre. The Washington Post called it “harrowing…powerful…a true opera of our time”. Mazzoli’s second opera, Breaking the Waves, with librettist Royce Vavrek commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects in 2016, was described as “among the best 21st-century operas yet” (Opera News), “savage, heartbreaking and thoroughly original” (Wall Street Journal), and “dark and daring” (The New York Times). Earlier projects include the critically acclaimed sold-out premiere of Missy’s first opera, Song from the Uproar, in a Beth Morrison production at New York venue The Kitchen in March 2012. The Wall Street Journal called this work “powerful and new” and The New York Times claimed that “in the electric surge of Ms. Mazzoli’s score you felt the joy, risk, and limitless potential of free sprits unbound.” Time Out New York named Song from the Uproar Number 3 on its list of the top ten classical music events of 2012. In October 2012, Missy’s operatic work, SALT, a re-telling of the story of Lot’s Wife written for cellist Maya Beiser and vocalist Helga Davis, premiered as part of the BAM Next Wave Festival and at UNC Chapel Hill, directed by Robert Woodruff. This work, including text by Erin Cressida-Wilson, was deemed “a dynamic amalgamation that unapologetically pushes boundaries” by Time Out New York.
Mazzoli is currently the Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra through May 2021. From 2012-2015 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. Missy 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. From 2007-2011 she was Executive Director of the MATA Festival in New York, and in 2016, Along with composer Ellen Reid and in collaboration with the Kaufman Music Center, Missy founded Luna Composition Lab, a mentorship program and support network for female-identifying composers ages 13-19.
Recent noteworthy performances include a new production of Breaking the Waves at the Edinburgh International Festival and the Adelaide Festival; a performance of Proving Up at the Aspen Music Festival, the world premiere of a Orpheus Alive, a new ballet score commissioned and premiered by the National Ballet of Canada, the US premiere of her double bass concert Dark with Excessive Bright with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and performances of her work by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Colorado Symphony and the Opera National Bordeaux, among others. Mazzoli has also curated concerts with the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Chicago Symphony.
Mazzoli is an active TV and film composer, and recently wrote and performed music for the fictional character Thomas Pembridge on the Amazon TV show Mozart in the Jungle. She also contributed music to the documentaries Detropia and Book of Conrad and the film A Woman, A Part. Her music has been recorded and released on labels including New Amsterdam, Pentatone, Cedille, Bedroom Community, 4AD and Innova. Artists who have recorded Mazzoli’s music include eighth blackbird (whose Grammy-winning 2012 CD Meanwhile opened with Missy’s work Still Life with Avalanche), the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Roomful of Teeth, violinist Jennifer Koh, violist Nadia Sirota, NOW Ensemble, Newspeak, pianist Kathleen Supove, the Jasper Quartet, and violinist Joshua Bell, who recorded Missy’s work for the Mozart in the Jungle soundtrack.
Mazzoli is an active pianist and keyboardist, and often performs with Victoire, a band she founded in 2008 dedicated to her own compositions. Their debut full-length CD, Cathedral City, was named one of 2010′s best classical albums by Time Out New York, NPR, The New Yorker and The New York Times, and was followed by the critically acclaimed Vespers for a New Dark Age, a collaboration with percussionist Glenn Kotche. Vespers was released in 2015 on New Amsterdam Records along with Missy’s own remixes of the work and a remix of her piece A Thousand Tongues by longtime collaborator Lorna Dune. The New York Times called Vespers for a New Dark Age “ravishing and unsettling”, and the album was praised on NPR’s First Listen, All Things Considered and Pitchfork. In the past decade they have played in venues all over the world including Carnegie Hall, the M.A.D.E. Festival in Sweden, the C3 Festival in Berlin and Millennium Park in Chicago. Victoire returned to Carnegie Hall in 2015 as part of the “Meredith Monk and Friends” concert, performing Missy’s arrangements of Monk’s work.
Missy is the recipient of the Musical America 2022 Composer of the Year honor, a 2019 Grammy nomination, the 2017 Music Critics Association of America Inaugural Award for Best Opera, the 2018 Godard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 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.
Missy 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.
Her music is published exclusively by G. Schirmer.
— October 2021
The following is republished from the National Endowment for the Arts. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Missy Mazzoli is a composer with eclectic and fascinating interests. For example, her opera Song from the Uproar: The Lives & Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, which had its world premiere in 2012 with NEA support, tells the story of this Swiss explorer, writer, and cultural rebel of the early 20th century, while Breaking the Waves follows Lars von Trier’s 1996 film about a young woman torn between love, faith, and obedience. Her third major opera, Proving Up, is based on a short story about homesteaders in mid-19th century Nebraska. The opera had its world premiere in Washington, DC, in January 2018, and will premiere at Opera Omaha in April 2018 with NEA support.
This attraction to fierce subjects is perhaps not surprising given the tenacity required to garner acclaim in a field dominated by male composers. Mazzoli is an outspoken advocate for women in composition, and in 2016, along with composer Ellen Reid and in partnership with the Kaufman Music Center, she helped launch Luna Composition Lab, a development program for young women aspiring to realize their dreams as composers. We spoke to Mazzoli as the dress rehearsal was about to begin for Proving Up’s premiere as part of Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative.
GETTING STARTED
I started writing [music] when I was about ten and immediately felt that that was what I wanted to do. I fell in love with classical piano and with [classical] composers. I thought, “Whatever they do, that’s what I want to do.” Even at a young age, I had so many different interests: visual arts, theater and drama, collaboration. I wanted to put on shows. Composing allows you to do everything whereas performing felt much more limited to me. It wasn’t until I was in college that I met a living composer, and it was a few years later that I met a living female composer. Early on, Meredith Monk was a big inspiration for me, and continues to be one of my primary mentors. And then people like Julia Woolfe, who I discovered in college, and Jennifer Higdon.
A lot of my music, especially in opera, comes from my own experience and my own relationships with people. It’s always very personal. It took me a long time to realize that my vulnerability was actually my strength. People connected to what they described as honesty and vulnerability in my music and in the way that I talked about it.
Opera in America is having a golden age, or second or third golden age right now, because people are creating stories about their lives, and as a way to understand their lives, and what we’re going through as a country. I just found myself in the right place at the right time.
COMPOSING AS A WOMAN
There are very few women in positions of power in the composition world. That’s slowly changing, but growing up as a young female composer, you don’t have many role models. I went through my whole college education, eight years of college, including two years abroad in the Netherlands, and never had a female teacher once in those eight years.
People decide to be composers at the same age they decide to be instrumentalists, sometimes a little later, but generally it’s a decision you make in your teens. What I’ve seen over the years is a lack of encouragement for teenage girls to enter this eld. Couple that with a lack of visible role models, and why would you do this as a woman?
ADDRESSING THE GENDER IMBALANCE
Opera is a huge endeavor, and you’re always taking a risk with an artist. Even if they’ve written 20 operas before that have all been hits, there’s no guarantee that this next one will be a hit. Every opera is its own world. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of men, very talented composers, who have never written an opera. They’re given a chance, because they have the potential. But I see tons of women who also have that potential, who are never given that chance. I can’t really name a woman under 27 who has been given a chance to write an opera, and I can name lots of men. These men deserve it; they’re very talented. But it’s lopsided.
I won’t say that it’s everyone’s responsibility to address this issue. For some composers, just getting up and making a life as an artist is a big enough job. That said, the world would be nicer if more people were making an effort—particularly men because they are often the ones in positions of power. They have the potential to change things, even though a move towards equality may feel like discrimination against them at first.
TELLING ALL OUR STORIES
I think that audiences now, particularly younger audiences, want to see themselves represented in the art of [a performing company’s] programs, and in the stories that are being told.
The simple answer is to hire more women, more people of color. If you have to look harder for those people, then you should do that. Women are not taught to promote themselves as aggressively as men. Being called ambitious as a woman is a bad word, but being called ambitious as a man is a good word. We’re caught in this very tricky position.
If one out of every six commissions is for a woman, that seems little to ask. It seems very possible. At institutions that have only programmed white men for their entire existence, for hundreds of years—I can’t accept that it’s that hard for them to change. By cutting out 51 percent of the population, there’s a huge section of opera that is yet to be explored.
NURTURING THE NEXT GENERATION
We need to address our efforts on early education, getting more women who are 16, 17, 18, or early in their college careers, to express themselves through music—to feel the freedom to do that. There are certainly just as many young women as men at that stage who want to be composers, but the women are weeded out. Because again, they don’t see role models, they don’t have support. Teenage girls are the most vulnerable people on the planet. They need a little bit of extra help at that time to get started. That is the point of the Luna Lab program.
I’d wanted [to start Luna Composition Lab] for years. I partnered with composer Ellen Reid who creates amazing opera, installations, and works for film and theater. Together we approached the Kaufman Music Center in New York, and they came on as a partner.
Through Luna Lab, we’re connecting young women ages 13 to 19 with a prominent female mentor. They meet once every two weeks via Skype for lessons. At the end of the season, all their works are performed in a concert in New York and recorded. They can use that recording and their mentor as a resource when they’re applying for college or competitions, or [when they have] a question of what to do next with their composing life.
The idea is that the mentees maintain a relationship with their mentor. Mentors are so important in our field. Because one’s teachers are often male, it sometimes can be difficult to establish a close relationship with them. The idea is that the Luna Lab mentors are mentors for life.
I see so much of myself in these young women. It’s an experience that all the mentors have. It is interesting how little time it takes for things to move into a personal realm.
The result has been tremendous, even in two years. Our budget and the number of students we support have more than doubled. We are adding partners almost every day, partners like National Sawdust, a venue in Brooklyn; New Amsterdam Records; and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I think that larger institutions were wondering what to do to address gender inequality, and partnering with us is an easy way to do that. It’s not a substitute for programming more women themselves. But it’s a start.