Call for Commissioned Composer
Nominations are now open for PMTA’s 2026 Commissioned Composer. Preference will be given to composers who are either a resident of or employed professionally in Pennsylvania. These are anonymous nominations so please do not indicate to the composer that they have been nominated.
Please submit the composer’s name, bio, website and/or any musical examples to Henry Wong Doe hwongdoe@iup.edu by March 15, 2025.
2025
Ke-Chia Chen’s compositions have been performed by leading orchestras, chamber ensembles, and soloists throughout the world. She has fused her inspirations from Western and Asian classical traditions into a unique personal voice that speaks directly to listeners of either heritage.
Her music has been programmed by presenters and organizations including Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, Florida’s Naples Philharmonic, the Taiwan Philharmonic, Copland House Ensemble, the Harlem Chamber Players, Philadelphia’s WHYY radio, and the Delaware Symphony Orchestra’s Miles of Manuscript music series.
Among those commissioning works from Chen are the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Washington Performing Arts, the Taiwan Philharmonic, the Taipei Wind Orchestra, the Delaware County Youth Orchestra, Taiwan International Festival of Arts, Curtis Institute of Music, Network for New Music, New Asia Chamber Music Society, and Taipei Percussion.
Collaborating with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra on several projects, Chen orchestrated the music for their 2015 Papal Mass and 69th UN General Assembly session performances. Other notable collaborators include Teddy Abrams, music director of the Louisville Orchestra; Joshua Gersen, former assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic and music director of the New York Youth Symphony; Lio Kuokman, resident conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, and Radu Paponiu, associate conductor of the Naples Philharmonic.
The Philadelphia Inquirer described a recent performance of Chen’s viola concerto, The Desires, as “lyrical expressions of longing launched into a fearless sense of confession… Even where Chen includes a delicate folk-like melody, anguish was never far off.” Chen’s Broken Crystal, a winner of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s prestigious Marilyn K. Glick Young Composer Award, was hailed by the Indianapolis Star as a work “orchestrated with lavish self-confidence and resourcefulness” which “made a coherent whole out of its pattern of abrupt contrasts, crowned by a broad, stunningly accented ‘maestoso’ episode.” Chen’s The Silent Flame was awarded first prize in the 2016 International Horn Society Composition Contest.
Chen has been engaged as Artist-in-Residence with the Copland House Residency Award, Ucross Foundation, Ensemble 212, Concerts on the Slope, Colorado College Summer Music Festival, Music at Angel Fire Chamber Music Festival, and has held composer fellowships at the Aspen, Pacific, and Bowdoin Music Festivals.
Ke-Chia Chen is on the Musical Studies faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. She holds degrees from Curtis and Manhattan School of Music, and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
2024
Jan Krzywicki (b. 1948) is active as a composer, conductor and educator. As a composer, he has been commissioned by prestigious performers, and organizations such as the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Chestnut Brass Company, Network for New Music, and performed across the United States by ensembles such as the Colorado Quartet, Network for New Music, Pennsylvania Ballet, Portland Symphony Orchestra, Alea III, and others.
His works have been heard at conferences of the College Music Society, the Society of Composers, and on national public radio. He has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP, Meet the Composer, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Krzywicki has been a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio, Italy), at the Bogliasco Foundation (Bogliasco, Italy), and has been a Fellow at the MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts colonies.
His work is published by Alphonse Leduc & Cie, Theodore Presser Co., Tenuto Publications, Lyra Music Company, and Heilman Music, and can be heard on Capstone Records, Albany Records, North-South Recordings and De Haske Records. As a conductor he has led chamber and orchestral groups in literature from the middle ages to the present, including a large number of premieres. Since 1990 he has been conductor of the contemporary ensemble Network for New Music. Krzywicki is a professor of music theory at Temple University, where he teaches music theory, composition, and conducts the New Music Ensemble. https://jankrzywicki.com/biography/
2023
Amy Williams, professor at the University of Pittsburgh: http://amywilliamsmusic.com/
Amy Williams was born in Buffalo, NY in 1969, the daughter of Diane, now retired violist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and Jan, percussionist and Professor Emeritus at the University at Buffalo. She started playing the piano at the age of four and took up the flute a few years later (her first teacher was the legendary Robert Dick, so she could soon play “Chopsticks” in multiphonics…). She grew up in the heyday of the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, hearing all the latest contemporary music and meeting composers who would later become influential to her: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Lukas Foss, Elliott Carter, Julius Eastman and many others. She went to Bennington College and, while there, decided to devote her life to performing and composing contemporary music. After a fellowship year in Denmark, she returned to Buffalo to complete her Master’s degree in piano performance at the University at Buffalo with pianist-composer Yvar Mikhashoff and her Ph.D. in composition, working with David Felder, Charles Wuorinen and Nils Vigeland. She returned to Bennington in 1998 as a member of the music faculty and she then moved on to a faculty position at Northwestern University in 2000. Since 2005, she has been teaching composition and theory at the University of Pittsburgh, where she is a Full Professor. She was a 2017-2018 Fulbright Scholar at the University College Cork, Ireland and a Visiting Professor of Composition at the University of Pennsylvania in spring 2019.
Amy’s compositions have been presented at renowned contemporary music venues in the United States, Asia, Australia, and Europe, including Ars Musica (Belgium), Gaudeamus Music Week (Netherlands), Dresden New Music Days (Germany), Festival Aspekte (Austria), Festival Musica Nova (Brazil), Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), Thailand International Composition Festival, Music Gallery (Canada), LA County Museum of Art, Piano Spheres (Los Angeles), Lincoln Center, Roulette, Bargemusic (NYC) and Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. Her works have been performed by leading soloists and ensembles, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Orpheus, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Ensemble Surplus, Dal Niente, Wet Ink, Talujon, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), H2 Saxophone Quartet, Bent Frequency, Grossman Ensemble, pianist Ursula Oppens and bassist Robert Black. Amy’s pieces appear on the Parma, VDM (Italy), Centaur, Blue Griffin, New Focus and New Ariel labels, in addition to two portrait CDs of solo and chamber works on Albany Records: “Crossings: Music for Piano and Strings” (2013) and “Cineshape and Duos” (2017).
Amy formed the Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo with Helena Bugallo, while both were graduate students at the University at Buffalo. The Duo has been featured at important contemporary music festivals and series throughout Europe and the Americas, including the Ojai Festival, CAL Performances (California), Miller Theatre (New York), Ciclo de Música Contemporánea (Buenos Aires), Festival Attacca (Stuttgart), Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City), Warsaw Autumn Festival, Cologne Triennale, and Wittener Täge für Neue Kammermusik. The Duo’s debut CD of Conlon Nancarrow’s complete music for solo piano and piano duet (Wergo, 2004) garnered much critical acclaim. Subsequent Duo CDs on Wergo include, Stravinsky transcriptions (2007), Morton Feldman/Edgard Varèse (2009), György Kurtág (2015) and a second volume of Stravinsky transcriptions (2018), as well as the original version of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in a recently published facsimile. Amy has performed John Cage’s masterpiece, The Sonatas and Interludes, all over the country and often includes new interludes written for her by over a dozen composers.
Amy has received fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Goddard Lieberson Fellowship), American-Scandinavian Foundation, Howard Foundation, John S. Guggenheim Foundation and MacDowell. She received a Fromm Music Foundation Commission to write Richter Textures for the JACK Quartet and a Koussevitsky Foundation commission for soprano Tony Arnold and the JACK Quartet. An avid proponent of contemporary music, she served as Assistant Director of June In Buffalo, Director of New Music Northwestern, and is currently on the artistic boards of the Pittsburgh-based concert series, Music on the Edge, the Amphion Foundation and the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music. She has been the Artistic Director of the New Music On The Point festival in Vermont since 2015.
She recently completed a piano trio for the Junction Trio, a co-commission from the Denver Friends of Chamber Music, the Celebrity Series (Boston) and Chamber Music | OC (Orange County).