Brittany J. Green

Brittany J. Green’s LEAGUE COMMISSION TESTIFY! Was PREMIERED BY Jacksonville Symphony and music director Courtney Lewis on September 27 and 28, 2024.

An additional four orchestras will perform the work, part of a 30-orchestra consortium performing works commissioned by the the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation Orchestral Commissions Program for women composers, an initiative of the League of American Orchestras in partnership with the American Composers Orchestra:

Fayetteville Symphony Orchestra and conductor Dr. Daniel McCloud on February 22, 2025.

Additional orchestras to be announced.

TESTIFY! The tightly focused eight-minute work for full orchestra features delightfully buoyant rhythms and a joyful tambourine…. Following the composer’s instruction for lighthearted whoops from those on stage, the piece started up with playful clarinet licks leading to jaunty string phrases…. Taking cues from the American minimalist tradition and grounded in Green’s engagement with Black feminist theory, TESTIFY! showed the Jacksonville Symphony and its audience embracing a world centered on musical memory, maternal influence, bodily shouts and dances.

Matt Bickett, Symphony Review – review of the world premiere of Brittany J. Green’s TESTIFY!

Brittany J. Green (b. 1991) is a North Carolina-based composer, performer, and educator. Described as “a creative force of attention-seizing versatility” (The Washington Post) and “cinematic in the best sense” (Chicago Classical Review), Brittany’s music works to facilitate collaborative, intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses. The intersections between sound, video, movement, and text serves as the focal point of these musical spaces, often questioning and redefining the relationships between these three elements. Recent works engage sonification and black feminist theory as tools for sonic world-building, exploring the construction, displacement, and rupture of systems.

Brittany’s research and creative interests include contextualizing the work of Julius Eastman through the lens of queer and critical race theory. Her music has been featured at concerts and festivals worldwide including the American Composers Orchestra’s Earshot Readings, Boulanger Initiative’s WoCo Fest, New York City Electronic Music Festival, SPLICE Institute, and Experimental Sound Studio. She has presented research at the North Carolina Music Educators Association Conference, East Carolina University’s Research and Creative Arts Week, and the Darkwater Women in Music Festival. Her collaborators include the International Contemporary Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Transient Canvas, and the Emory University Symphony Orchestra. Brittany has held residencies with Copland House, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, TimeSlips, and the Young Composer’s Project. Current and upcoming projects include collaborations with Alarm Will Sound, Damselfly Trio, and Mark Stevens, Black Echoes//Brick Ripples, an audio-visual interactive installation created in collaboration with media artist Kate Alexandrite, and a residency with the Louisville Orchestra during the 2024-2025 season.

Brittany’s music has been awarded the Alarm Will Sound Matt Marks Impact Fund (2023), American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Charles Ives Scholarship (2022), ASCAP Foundation’s Morton Gould Award (2021), and New Music USA’s Creator Development Grant (2021). She holds a BM in Music Education from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and a MM in Music Composition and Theory from East Carolina University. She is currently in residence at Duke University, pursuing a Ph.D in Music Composition as a Dean’s Graduate Fellow. In her free time, Brittany enjoys learning about aviation, traveling, reading poetry, line dancing, video games, being in community with others, and spending time in front of the bonfire.

(September 2024)

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Photo Credit: Shanita Dixon