Chelsea Komschlies

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

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.

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)

More from Chelsea

Photo Credit: Kyle Benjamin Turn