Future Classics: Meet the Composers
The future of symphonic music—nurturing the creation of emerging compositions and the composers at their helm—has always been core to the Minnesota Orchestra’s mission. This has taken many forms throughout the years: in 1996, the Perfect Pitch program was launched in collaboration with the American Composers Forum, at first for Minnesota composers only. Perfect Pitch was reformulated in 2001 as the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, as the program’s focus broadened and national participation was invited. In 2006 the Orchestra added a public concert of the composers’ new works conducted by then-Music Director Osmo Vänskä.
Today, our Composer Institute is a semi-annual program led by composer Kevin Puts—it culminates in our Future Classics concert, which falls on April 25 this year and is conducted by Thomas Søndergård for the first time. When we say Future Classics, we mean it. Talents like Texu Kim, Henry Dorn and Missy Mazzoli, whose music can be heard programmed regularly by the likes of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Atlanta Symphony, are all alumni of the program.
Elise Arancio, Andrew Faulkenberry, Soomin Kim and Benjamin Webster comprise the 2025 Composer Institute—and the emerging voices you’ll be hearing in the years to come. Get to know them ahead of their Future Classics debuts April 25.
Elise Arancio
Born: September 16, 2000
Tucker, Georgia
Bite Your Tongue for Orchestra and Tape
Elise Arancio’s musical language is driven by conversation. She is a lover of words, and much of her music draws inspiration from poetry and literature. Her orchestral and chamber works have been performed across the country and internationally by ensembles including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Curtis Symphony Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra of the USA and PRISM saxophone quartet, and in 2024 she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Scholarship. She graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music, and she is currently pursuing her master’s degree at the Juilliard School as a recipient of a Kovner Fellowship.
Composer’s Note
Bite Your Tongue illustrates an individual being silenced by both internal and external forces. Broken syllables and the fragments of the beginnings of words are projected in the pre-recorded track, which interrupts the orchestra’s material that represents the collection of thoughts that are trying to break free. This piece attempts to illustrate the struggle that takes place as a voice attempts to articulate messages in the face of its suppression. The only words formed in the piece are “shudder” which forms into “shut her” as the orchestra aligns with the speaker in a final expression of urgency and frustration.
This poem “for we who keep our lives in our mouths” by Nayyirah Waheed serves as an epitaph.
my whole life
i have
ate my tongue.
ate my tongue.
ate my tongue.
i am so full of my tongue
you would think speaking is easy. but it is not
—for we who keep our lives in our mouths.
Although this performance of Bite Your Tongue is the first in a live concert setting, the music was first heard in its entirety in spring 2021—at a time when large audiences could not gather safely due to the COVID-19 pandemic—as part of an online documentary recorded by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with Jerry Hou conducting.
Andrew Faulkenberry
Born: 1999
New Brunswick, New Jersey
portrait through a prism
New Jersey native Andrew Faulkenberry is a composer of emotionally evocative works that pose questions about the human experience. His music addresses topics such as philosophy, politics, religion and art itself. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom offered praise for his music’s “mature tone...[and] considerable spiritual depth.”
Faulkenberry’s pieces have been performed and recorded by artists including the Albany Symphony Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Parker Quartet, Brevard Music Center Orchestra, Peabody Symphony Orchestra and Rutgers Wind Ensemble. His works have also been read by groups such as the Albany Symphony and the JACK Quartet. Faulkenberry received a bachelor of music degree in composition from Rutgers University in 2021, where he studied with Robert Livingston Aldridge and graduated summa cum laude. He then earned a master’s in composition from Peabody Conservatory in 2023, where he studied with Kevin Puts. Currently, he teaches private lessons in Baltimore, Maryland, and works with the publisher Just a Theory Press.
Composer’s Note
My piece portrait through a prism is inspired by the image of light through a prism—how the original image is destroyed, but in the process is transfigured into a beautiful kaleidoscope of color. We are much like that light—impermanent, bound to be destroyed. This fact inspires many contradictory emotions in me: powerlessness, fear, awe, reverence, transcendence. portrait through a prism is my meditation on these feelings.
The Peabody Symphony Orchestra performed the world premiere of portrait through a prism on October 19, 2022, under the direction of Chi-Yuan Lin.
Soomin Kim
Born: August 24, 1995
Anyang, South Korea
star / ghost / mouth / sea
Composer and singer Soomin Kim has garnered numerous major awards and opportunities in recent years. She received Morton Gould Young Composer Awards from the ASCAP Foundation in 2019, 2020 and 2022. In 2024 she won the University of Florida call for scores by women composers. During the 2023-24 season, she was a Sounding Ground composer in residence with the Minnesota-based new music ensemble Zeitgeist. In 2023 she was the guest artist at the annual Art Festival at NLCS Jeju in Seogwipo, South Korea. In 2022 her orchestration of Helen Hagan’s Piano Concerto in C minor was premiered by pianist and musicologist Samantha Ege and the Yale Philharmonia under direction of Peter Oundjian. In 2018 she was selected to write for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony as part of their Young & Emerging Composers Project.
Kim’s music has been featured at the Ravinia Festival, Sydney Festival, Liquid Music, Aspen Music Festival, Bowdoin International Music Festival and Norfolk New Music Workshop, among many other institutions. She is currently a visiting assistant professor of composition at her alma mater, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Born in 1995 in Anyang, South Korea, she grew up in Uljeongbu, South Korea.
Composer’s Note
In the beginning of Franny Choi’s book of poetry Soft Science, the author lists four keywords—star, ghost, mouth and sea—that she uses repeatedly throughout her work, in which she explores the themes of identity, technology, gender and violence, among others. These keywords are used not literally, but metaphorically; “star,” for example, stands for “bright, ancient wound I follow home”; “sea” means “cold ancestor; bloodless womb.”
star / ghost / mouth / sea is a set of four miniatures for orchestra that explore these four metaphors. The miniatures are not literal translations, but my interpretation of Franny’s words. Her poems not only inspired me but comforted me in times when I struggled to make sense of what it means to look like me, to sound like me, and to be me in this world, in this country.
The premiere of star / ghost / mouth / sea was given on December 9, 2021, by the Yale Philharmonia in New Haven, Connecticut, with Ryan Tani conducting.
Benjamin Webster
Born: March 3, 1997
Wrentham, Massachusetts
Autumn Movement
Benjamin Webster’s music explores the beauty and fragility of sound and gesture. His works construct large-scale musical narratives from simple materials, themselves often emergent from instrumental timbre and performance technique.
Webster’s music has been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Lyris Quartet, Yale Philharmonia, Indiana University Jacob’s School Chamber Orchestra, Transient Canvas and Passepartout Duo, among others. It has been heard at the Bowdoin Music Festival, Yale School of Music’s Norfolk New Music Workshop, Alba Music Festival, Oregon Bach Festival and Ciclo de Música Contemporánea de Oviedo. He holds degrees from the University of Miami and the University of Southern California, and he is currently a doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Music studying with Katherine Balch—who is a 2017 alumnus of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute.
Composer’s Note
While not specifically about the season of the work’s namesake, Autumn Movement is a piece that does ask questions about the concept of change. Personal change, natural change and societal change were all subjects that I was thinking about as I developed this piece. While it does not address any one of these directly, the materials and form of the work were shaped by my emotional reactions to a season of both internal (personal) and external (social and political) transformation. Trees and their longevity are an additional important image in the music, as I see the double bass and its prominent role throughout the work as being a sort of musical “trunk” out of which the materials of the piece branch off.
Autumn Movement received its world premiere performance on December 8, 2022, by the Yale Philharmonia in New Haven, Connecticut, with Samuel Hollister conducting.
Kevin Puts, Composer Institute director
Born: January 3, 1972
St. Louis, Missouri
Heartland
Although Kevin Puts hails from St. Louis, Missouri, the Twin Cities have loomed large in his award-winning career. Puts won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his opera Silent Night, which was commissioned and premiered by Minnesota Opera, and in 2014 he was named director of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. The Orchestra commissioned his 2006 work Sinfonia concertante and has played seven of his orchestral pieces to date. This week bring the eighth: the world premiere of Heartland—a retooled version of Puts’ work Heartland Canons, which was commissioned by the Des Moines Symphony and premiered by that ensemble on September 24, 2022.
Heartland is actually the third link in a chain of pieces that began with Millennium Canons, composed by Puts for the Boston Pops in 2001. “In both works, I adopt the ages-old practice of contrapuntal imitation to create active textures that dance along the top of broad, hymn-like melodies,” he explains about Heartland Canons, which he connects to his childhood experiences in Missouri and Michigan. “I live on the East Coast now, but the Midwest is still in my blood and very much a part of who I am. I believe this is reflected quite unmistakably in both the harmonic flavor of Heartland Canons and in its expansive phraseology.” The new iteration of the music is now titled simply Heartland.
Future Classics is the place to see the brightest emerging talent of the composition world—catch a program full of new and innovative music from these rising stars Friday, April 25.
