Chelsea Komschlies

Chelsea Komschlies’s LEAGUE COMMISSION Mycelialore Was PREMIERED BY Tucson Symphony Orchestra and music director José Luis Gomez on February 1 and 2, 2025.

Additional Performances:

• Grant Park Music Festival and artistic director Giancarlo Guerrero on August 13, 2025.
• Lima Symphony Orchestra and music director Andrew Crust on October 11, 2025.
• Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra date TBD.
• Vermont Symphony Orchestra and music director Andrew Crust on October 25, 2025.

Komschlies creates a naturalistic atmosphere in the opening bars with rainstick and chirpy string glissandos sounding over bardic harp chords, and ultimately the feeling of an otherworldly courtly dance emerges with the uncanny sound of an electronic harpsichord. Mycelialore features a prominent electronic track … with hissed voices, guttural spoken words, and menacing sprechstimme sounding throughout…. Komschlies … was on hand Wednesday to receive the audience’s appreciation of her vivid storytelling.

Tim Sawyier, Chicago Classical Review – review of the Grant Park Music Festival’s performance of Chelsea Komschlies’s Mycelialore

With quiet, squeaky violin sounds backed up by harp and electronica … a trombone and woodwinds joining, the effect that Komschlies created of mushrooms talking to each other was startling…. With Mycelialore, Chelsea Komschlies was very effective in setting nature to music.

Louis Harris, Third Coast Review – review of the Grant Park Music Festival’s performance of Chelsea Komschlies’s Mycelialore

Chelsea Komschlies’ music, said to possess an “ingratiating allure” (San Diego Story), is known for the way it blends the familiar and the strange to evoke vivid multisensory imagery in her listeners. Ms. Komschlies is a Ph.D. candidate in composition under Jean Lesage at McGill University, where she was awarded the Andrew Svoboda Prize for Orchestral Composition as well as the Research Alive Student Prize for her thesis research in the scientific basis of cognitive crossmodal musical meaning. Her research and composition work is also supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec.

Recent works include The Sunken Cathedral for the McGill Symphony Orchestra and Hypnofloria for the Bozzini Quartet, both inspired by the composer’s synesthesia and by crossmodal correspondences. Ms. Komschlies’s work has been recognized by the ASCAP Foundation, the Alfred Casella Award from the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Hermitage Foundation, and she has received fellowships from the Fromm Foundation, the National Orchestral Institute, the Aspen Music Festival, the Fontainebleau School where Nadia Boulanger once taught, the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, and Copland House’s CULTIVATE Institute. Ms. Komschlies has been programmed by Alarm Will Sound, the Omaha Symphony, the Tucson Symphony, Choral Arts Philadelphia, and the Fifth House Ensemble, and by presenters such as Codes d’accèss (Montreal), Le Vivier (Montreal), CAMARADA (San Diego), the Philadelphia Bach Festival, the Boulanger Initiative, and Make Music Chicago.

(December 2023)

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Photo Credit: Kyle Benjamin Turn