Dubbed a “post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out New York), GRAMMY-nominated composer Missy Mazzoli began writing music at 10. While classical composers like Beethoven were initially influential, her studies at Yale with composers like Jay Kernis, David Lang, and Louis Andriessen broadened her musical horizons. For her, music goes far beyond the notes on the page, however:
Composing is a way...of organizing the world. You take all the data of the world, and you make something that is very organized.... A piece of music has a beginning and an end, and it’s divided into all these little parts - literally, like with lines - and it’s like a way of making sense of the world, making sense of time, making sense of really complicated, abstract ideas. You’re putting it into a very concrete format. And maybe that sounds sort of dry, but to me, it was the opposite. It was a way of just understanding the world and a way of relating to the world.
Mazzoli composes instrumental music, opera, television and film music, and music for her band Victoire. Her works have been performed by ensembles around the world, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (where she completed a three-year stint as Mead Composer-in-Residence in April 2021), the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony, the Sydney Symphony, Los Angeles Opera, Scottish Opera, Opera Philadelphia, and the Kronos Quartet. In 2018, she and Jeanine Tesori became the first women to receive commissions from the Metropolitan Opera. Mazzoli has also garnered four ASCAP Young Composer Awards, the Godard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018, and the Music Critics Association of America Inaugural Award for Best Opera in 2017. In 2022, Musical America named her “Composer of the Year.”
Composed in 2014, Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and expanded in 2016 for a concert with the Boulder Philharmonic. As Mazzoli describes the piece,
Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) is music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word “sinfonia” refers to baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble turns into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.
