Andrea Clearfield

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 pieces are inspired by Tibetan music fieldwork that she conducted in the Nepalese Himalaya, including her opera MILA, Great Sorcerer with librettists Jean-Claude van Itallie and Lois Walden that was presented at the 2019 NYC Prototype Festival. She has been Composer-in-Residence with National Concerts at Carnegie Hall and with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. She was awarded a 2020 Pew International Residency Award, two Independence Foundation Fellowships, a 2016 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and Fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, Copland House and MacDowell among others.

Dr. Clearfield served on the Composition Faculty at The University of the Arts from 1986 – 2011 and currently serves as Visiting Composer with numerous colleges and universities in the US and abroad. As a performer, she played keyboards with the Relâche Ensemble for 25 years and had the great honor of performing with the Court of the Dalai Lama. She sits on the Boards of the Recording Academy/Grammy’s Philadelphia Chapter and Wildflower Composers, amplifying the voices of female and gender-expansive young composers. Passionate about building community around the arts, she is also founder, curator and host of the renowned Salon featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, and world music now celebrating its 36th Year Season. She is represented by Black Tea Music.

Biography taken from composer’s website.
Photo: Ryan Collerd