2017-18 Fellow, Joseph Sowa
Joseph Sowa grew up playing violin and listening to orchestral broadcasts on NPR. He was captivated by how music speaks to our bodies’ rhythmic layers, as captured by composers as varied as Elliott Carter, John Williams, and Stevie Wonder. Surrounded by these sounds, Joseph wanted to make more of them.
For the 2017-18 season, he has new works scheduled to be performed by Collage New Music, Ensemble Dal Niente, and a consortium of English Horn players including Carolyn Hove, principal English Horn of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
He has been commissioned by performers including the Genesis Chamber Singers, the Farallon Quintet, Douglas Bush, Carolyn Hove, Neil Thornock, and Arianna Tieghi as well as foundations including the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Laycock Endowment for Creative Collaboration in the Arts. His arrangement of “For the Beauty of the Earth” was recorded by soprano Charity Tillemann-Dick on her album American Grace, which debuted no. 1 on the Billboard® “Traditional Classical” chart.
His music has been performed in Europe by the Quartetto Indaco, Arianna Tieghi, and Douglas Bush and throughout the United States by the Awea Duo, the BYU Philharmonic and Chamber Orchestras, the Lydian String Quartet, and the Tower Duo, as well as by Ron Brough, Douglas Bush, Eric Hansen, Jaren Hinckley, Scott Holden, Jed Moss, Ray Smith, and Neil Thornock, among others.
Joseph is currently the 2017-18 Fellow for Collage New Music and a PhD candidate (ABD) in composition and theory at Brandeis University. He also holds BM and MM degrees in composition from Brigham Young University. He has also attend the Brevard, EAMA, fresh inc, and highSCORE summer music festivals. He has writtenpapers about James Tenney, Harrison Birtwistle, and the antipodean phrase “sweet as.” His research interests include musical cognition, 18th-century continuo and partimenti practice, and algorithmic composition. He has co-taught the class “Star Wars: How Long Ago? How Far Away?” and dreams of writing a piece for tuba ensemble.
To learn more about Joseph’s burgeoning and diverse career, visit his website at www.josephsowa.com.