17 Original Solo Violin Composition written by 12 composers she/her/hers
milica paranosic • jessica meyer • gabriela lena frank • adah kaplan • valerie coleman • laurie anderson • melissa dunphy • sophie-carmen eckhardt gramatté • micheline coulombe st. marcoux • jessie montgomery • ana sokolovic • laura de rover
Available September 29th, 2022
Canadian-born violinist Lara St. John has been described as “something of a phenomenon” by The Strad and a “high-powered soloist” by The New York Times.
She has performed as soloist with most of the major orchestras on
five continents and has appeared in recital in hundreds of cities.
Lara manages her own label, Ancalagon, which she founded in 1999.
She won a Juno award for her Mozart album in 2011 and was invested with the Order of Canada in 2021.
Milica Paranosic (b. 1968)
Milica Paranosic is a Serbian-born composer, designer and interdisciplinary artist who lives in Harlem, NYC. Her music has been described as “amazing and astonishing” by The New York Times, “like liquor-filled pralines,” by the Berliner Morgenpost and she herself as a “…free-wheeling performance-art-type cat“ by the Village Voice.
Milica has an MM in composition from The Juilliard School where she began the music tech department and co-founded the international festival Beyond the Machine. She is also the founder of the Harlem-based Paracademia – a non-profit for music and multimedia. She creates aesthetic headset microphones for singers, concert headpieces for performers, miniature sculptures and jewelry.
Milica is also an avid Ashtanga practitioner.
Jessica Meyer (b. 1974)
Her playing has been described as “fierce and lyrical” and her writing as “other-worldly” by The Strad. Gramophone wrote: “Knife-edge anticipation opens on to unexpected, often ecstatic musical realms, always with a personal touch and imaginatively written for the instruments.”
New York City-born Jessica Meyer is a GRAMMY® - nominated violist and composer. The album ‘Ring Out’ of her music debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Traditional Classical chart. She has been commissioned and premiered by Roomful of Teeth, the St. Lawrence Quartet, the American Brass Quintet, PUBLIQuartet, Sybarite 5, a Far Cry and the symphonies of North Carolina, Charlotte, Vermont, the Nu Deco Ensemble & many others. Recent works include a concerto for herself & the League of Composers Orchestra, a work for the President’s Own Marine Band and for the Dorian Wind Quintet.
She can often be found giving her black cat Ninji kisses or one too many snacks. Jessica lives with her family in the Bronx.
Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972)
is a composer, pianist, and winner of a Latin Grammy. She is the composer-in-residence of the Philadelphia Orchestra from 2018-2023 and has been nominated for Grammys both as composer and pianist. Musically, she frequently draws on her multi-faceted cultural heritage and has been commissioned and performed by the orchestras of Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Cleveland as well as performers Yo Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, the King’s’ Singers and Cuarteto Latinoamerico, among many others. She holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and received the prestigious Heinz Award in 2020. She directs the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music - her own non-profit academy for emerging performers and composers.
She is also a beekeeper, chicken-mum, tortoise owner and origami creator.
Adah Kaplan (b. 2006)
Adah Kaplan is a composer and violinist. She studies composition with Melissa Dunphy and has been awarded an honorable mention from Luna Lab. Recently, Adah was selected to workshop her piece, “On Autopilot” with the JACK Quartet in the spring of 2022 and has received an honorable mention in the Senior Composition Division of the Pennsylvania MTNA competition.
She plays in Philadelphia Sinfonia, Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, and the Ben and Carol Auger String Trio, which is coached by Linda Reichert through Settlement Music School and exclusively plays contemporary music.
Adah loves fashion, photography, cooking, acting as a barista for her family, and taking long walks through her native Philadelphia.
Valerie Coleman (b. 1970)
Valerie Coleman is a Grammy nominated flutist, composer and Performance Today’s “2020 Classical Woman of the Year”. She is responsible for the creation of the iconic ensemble Imani Winds, its eponymous chamber music festival, and a wealth of wind ensemble repertoire that has become a cornerstone legacy within American chamber music. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Valerie is the first African American woman to be commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera. Her music has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the symphonies of Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Atlanta, Minnesota, Baltimore, Toronto and many others.
Valerie lives in New York City with her family where she is a fellow at the Mannes school. She loves playing chess, watching tennis, and bacon.
Laurie Anderson (b. 1947)
Laurie Anderson is an American singer, composer, songwriter, keyboardist, violinist, percussionist, sculptor, artist, film director, lecturer, author, creator of experimental instruments and performance artist.
She has been a Professor of Poetry at Harvard, NASA’s first Artist in Residence, and in 2021, she created a solo show at the Hirshhorn museum in Washington, D.C., described by The New York Times as “a sort of nonretrospective retrospective of one of America’s major, and majorly confounding, modern artists.”
She enjoys occasional lunches at Russ and Daughters, NYC, and throws birthday parties for her dog.
Melissa Dunphy (b. 1980)
Australian-born composer Melissa Dunphy specializes in vocal, political, and theatrical music. She first came to national attention when Rachel Maddow described her large-scale work The Gonzales Cantata as “the coolest thing you’ve ever seen on this show.” Commissions include works for VOCES8, Cantus, the Museum of the American Revolution, and the Mendelssohn Chorus; as well as Alice Tierney, an opera for Oberlin Conservatory supported by an Opera America Discovery Grant. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and is on faculty at Rutgers University. Melissa and her husband Matt are hosts of The Boghouse, a podcast they began after they bought a foreclosed magic theater from a pedophile and discovered treasure buried underneath. They are active in Philadelphia as citizen archaeologists, excavating privies and other colonial features in their neighborhood. The Dunphys are developing the former magic theater into a new performing arts venue, the Hannah Callowhill Stage.
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Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt Gramatté (1899-1974)
Eckhardt Gramatté (1899-1974) Composer, violinist and pianist Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté was described by the Winnipeg Free Press as “friendly, volatile, restless, quick-witted, quick-tempered and altogether alive….
Born in Moscow in 1899, she lived in Russia, England, France, Germany, Spain, and Austria, before finally settling down in Winnipeg, Canada in 1953. By the age of 11 she was concertizing throughout Europe on both violin and piano, and during WW1 she earned a living for her family by playing in Berlin cafés. Though her orchestral works were carefully conceived, her violin caprices were sketched from a momentary idea and mostly improvised – written out only as an afterthought.
She wrote over 175 compositions in her lifetime.
Micheline Coulombe St. Marcoux (1938-1985)
Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux grew up in the region of Lac Saint-Jean, Québec. Singing was an integral part of her youth. In 1958, she moved to Montreal to pursue music, already determined to become a composer. She attended the Conservatoire de Montréal and graduated in 1967 with a first prize for “Modulaire,” a work for Ondes Martenot and orchestra, and was awarded a Prix d’Europe by the Académie de Musique de Québec, the first to be given to a woman.
Xenakis encouraged her to go to Europe, then she returned to Montreal in 1971 and joined the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal where she taught until her premature death from a brain tumour in 1985. She was an important part of the global development of electro-acoustic music.
As the only female professor in composition in Canada during the 1970s, she often spoke about gender in her profession and became an inspiration for the younger generation.
Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981)
Jessie Montgomery is a composer, violinist, and educator. She is the recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, and in May 2021 she began her three year tenure as the Mead composer-in-residence with the Chicago Symphony. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness. Her works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).
She has been commissioned and premiered by the chamber orchestras of Orpheus, St. Paul, Los Angeles, the Chicago Sinfonietta and the Orlando Symphony, and, Banner – commissioned by the Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation, had its UK premiere at the BBC Proms in 2021.ssie was born & raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She holds degrees from Juilliard, NYU, is a current PhD candidate at Princeton, was a founding member of PUBLIQuartet, and is a professor of violin and composition at The New School in New York City.
Ana Sokolović (b. 1968)
internationally through her imaginative, rhythm-driven music that ranges from critically acclaimed operas and orchestral works to powerful chamber and solo pieces.
Sokolović writes music infused with Balkan rhythms influenced by theatre and dance. Her operas have been performed at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, San Francisco Opera, and Festival d’Aix-en-Provence among many others, and her 2010 opera Svadba won the Dora Mavor Moore Award for “Outstanding New Opera.” She has won the Juno award for Composition of the Year twice, in 2019 and 2020 for her orchestral works.In 2020, Boosey & Hawkes added the works of Ana Sokolović to its catalogue. From 2020 to 2023, she is the composer-in-residence with the Montreal Symphony. She also teaches composition at the Université de Montréal.
Laura De Rover (b. 1992)
Laura De Rover is a composer, songwriter, performer, producer, and audio engineer. Born in a small town in the Netherlands, she was trained on piano from a young age and soon became interested in playing on and writing for multiple instruments. She often combines sounds pulled from a wide range of acoustic instruments and other sources, shaping them into new electro-acoustic compositions and sonic experimentation, including dark and mellow soundscapes and heavy vocal layering.
Laura moved to New York City in 2015 and is active in audio engineering both in studio and on location, as well as mixing and mastering. She also does live sound, including at the Jazz Standard, Manhattan School and many others. She toured North America in early 2020 with her solo electronic live show.
s a B.M. in composition and music production from the Prince Claus Conservatory in Groningen, the Netherlands, and a M.M. in music production from Purchase College in New York.