School of Music Visiting Artist
Andrea will be discussing her work as a composer and the creative process for several commissions inspired by Tibetan music fieldwork in the Nepalese Himalayas. The presentation will include audio and video from the fieldwork. Time permitting, she will also discuss her Salon concert series featuring classical, chamber, world, electronic, contemporary music and multimedia collaborations, now celebrating its 35th season, and present ideas for alternate formats and spaces to foster collaboration, bridge community around the arts and create new audiences for contemporary music.
Andrea Clearfield is an award-winning composer of music for opera, orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, dance and multimedia collaborations. Clearfield creates deep, emotive musical languages that build cultural and artistic bridges. She has been praised by the New York Times for her “graceful tracery and lively, rhythmically vital writing”, the Philadelphia Inquirer for her “compositional wizardry” and “mastery with large choral and instrumental forces”, the L.A. Times for her “fluid and glistening orchestration” and by Opera News for her “vivid and galvanizing” music of “timeless beauty”. Her catalog of over 160 works includes fifteen large-scale cantatas including one for The Philadelphia Orchestra. Recent works are inspired by Tibetan music fieldwork that she conducted in the Nepalese Himalaya, including her opera, MILA, Great Sorcerer on the life of the Tibetan saint, Milarepa with librettists Jean-Claude van Itallie and Lois Walden. She was appointed 2020-2023 Composer-in-Residence with National Concerts at Carnegie Hall and 2018-19 Steven R. Gerber Composer-in-Residence with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. Clearfield has received numerous fellowships and awards including a 2021 Pew Center for Arts & Heritage International Residency Award. As a pianist, Clearfield performed in the Relâche new music ensemble for 25 years and held the great honor of performing with the Court of the Dalai Lama. Passionate about building community around the arts, she is the founder and host of the renowned Salon featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, and world music, now celebrating its 35th Year. She sits on the Grammy Board of Directors, Philadelphia Chapter, the Executive Board of Wildflower Composers and the advisory board for the Women’s Sacred Music Project.
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