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Negrón’s commissions include those for Bang on a Can All-Stars, Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sō Percussion, Dallas Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Louisville Orchestra, New York Botanical Garden, Seattle Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Louisville Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic’s “Project 19,” which commissioned new works from 19 female composers in honor of the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, which granted women the right to vote. In addition to compositions for orchestra, large and small ensembles, soloists, vocalists, and a dozen films, Negrón created operatic works for lip-sync drag-queen performers and chamber ensemble for National Sawdust (Chimera, 2019) and Philadelphia Opera (The Island We Made , 2021), which explore ideas of fantasy, illusion, and the intricacies of identity.

Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado (“Intermittent Fragments of a Fractured Place”) was composed in 2023 for the 10th anniversary of Hub New Music on a commission from Arizona Friends of Chamber Music in Tucson, where the work was premiered on February 8, 2023. Negrón wrote, “Pedazos intermitentes de un lugar ya fragmentado was inspired by attempts at reconstructing memories connected to specific places and people. The piece is part of a series I’ve been writing recently that use field recordings taken from my trips to visit family and friends in Puerto Rico. It reflects on the construction of identity when attempting to create a sense of belonging in two places simultaneously, as well as in the complexities that come with it.”

Though she has long improvised and created pieces for her own shows, Meyer only began composing seriously around 2015. She has quickly developed a reputation as a composer with performances by several American orchestras and new works for the American Brass Quintet, Roomful of Teeth, St. Lawrence String Quartet, and A Far Cry, this last commissioned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which allowed her to live in the museum for a week to find inspiration for the work. Meyer was composer-in-residence at the Spoleto Festival USA in 2021, received the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Composer’s Award for a composition for the Bangor Symphony’s 2022–2023 season, and fulfilled additional commissions for GAEA, a viola concerto for herself with the League of Composers Orchestra, and a project with the Juilliard School Historical Performance Program. Jessica Meyer is also a passionate educator who was appointed to the viola faculty of the Manhattan School of Music in 2023 and conducted hundreds of workshops for schools, universities, and performance organizations around the country.

Jessica Meyer wrote of Spirits and Sinew, commissioned in 2023 for the 10th anniversary of New Orleans ensemble Hub New Music, “I have loved New Orleans since the first moment I got there. Throughout the city there resides the palpable energy of both the living and the dead. Last time I was there, I took a walking tour and discovered some pretty spooky local stories about violence, ghosts, fires, and Voodoo. I also learned about Marie Laveau and the services she provided as a dedicated practitioner of Voodoo as well as a healer, herbalist, and entrepreneur. Laveau was also known as a prominent female religious leader and community activist. My narrative for Spirits and Sinew explores a haunting, finding a way to be healed, and an ‘exorcism’ of sorts—a pattern that can be found in many stories about New Orleans. The work also serves as a metaphor for the patterns we keep subconsciously replaying in our own lives, and the hope that we can love ourselves enough to finally conquer the demons that haunt us.”

Sorey was born in 1980 in Newark, participated in the New Jersey Performing Arts Center Jazz for Teens program, and started his professional training at nearby William Paterson University as a classical trombone major before transferring to jazz studies and performance. After completing his bachelor’s degree at WPU, he earned his master’s degree in composition at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and doctorate at Columbia University. Sorey then returned to Wesleyan to teach, where he began establishing himself as a composer with commissions ranging from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, many collaborations including NEA Jazz Master Anthony Braxton (his teacher at Wesleyan), tenor Lawrence Brownlee, and the percussion ensemble Yarn/Wire, residencies with the Opera Philadelphia, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Johns Hopkins University, Mills College, and Danish Arts Foundation, and lectures on composition and improvisation at schools and institutions in Europe and across America. Among Sorey’s many honors are a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, a MacArthur (“Genius”) Fellowship in 2017, “Rising Star Producer” in Downbeat magazine’s 2023 Critics Poll Award, and Finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in music for Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), which was composed for the 50th anniversary of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, “a spiritual space, a place for solitude and gathering,” according to its website.

In a profile in The New Yorker, critic Alex Ross wrote that Sorey’s music is “unpredictable to the point of unnerving,” a situation (somewhat) explained in the composer’s University of Pennsylvania faculty bio: “Sorey’s written and spontaneously composed works can range from lyrical, expressive content to slowly unfolding, barely audible sonorities and gestures. Moreover, his music can also contain raucous, maximalist structures that are influenced by noise, death metal and fast-paced improvisations. Finally, his music also largely deals heavily in multiple streams of Black American music—including improvisation and groove-oriented vernacular musics—as well as West African, Afro-Cuban, and Asian folkloric, ritual and ceremonial traditional musics and practices.”

The title of To Alvin Singleton honors one of America’s leading Black composers (born 1940), who earned international success while smoothing the way for the current generation of Sorey and his many greatly gifted colleagues. To Alvin Singleton is a nine-minute whisper of a composition, sustained and soft almost to the point of inaudibility, with few events to disturb its meditative state. The piece may be regarded as something of a musical pendant to the Pulitzer-nominated Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), about which Sorey wrote, “My music is synonymous with meditation in that it is intended to expand one’s consciousness and fulfillment through the act of listening as well as giving the experiencer the opportunity to heighten their sense of awareness…. My music perfectly aligns with the intention of the Rothko Chapel, which has always served as a place for meditation.”

Muhly was born in 1981 into an artistic family that split their time during his childhood between an 18th-century farmhouse in rural Vermont and a home in Providence, Rhode Island; his mother, Bunny Harvey, is a well-known painter who taught at Wellesley College for 40 years; his father, Frank Muhly, is a documentary filmmaker. Nico began playing piano when he was eight and organ two years later, and joined a church choir soon thereafter. “I found myself immediately at home in the choir musically,” he said. “I was really entranced by early music [Byrd, Taverner, Weelkes, Orlando Gibbons] and how the lines worked. It felt so much more emotional than the Romantic stuff I was playing as a pianist—Chopin, or Schumann, or Tchaikovsky, which always felt sort of Hallmarky.” He wrote his first piece around that time—a choral setting of the Kyrie text from the Roman Catholic Mass.

During high school in Providence, Muhly studied composition with David Rakowski, a professor at Brandeis, and attended the summer program at Tanglewood. He enrolled in a joint program at Columbia, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 2003, and Juilliard, where he studied with Christopher Rouse and John Corigliano and got his master’s degree in 2004. From his sophomore year until 2008, Muhly worked for Philip Glass as editor, MIDI programmer, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects; he conducted excerpts from Glass’ epochal Einstein on the Beach for a new ballet by Benjamin Millepied at the Opéra de Paris in November 2006.

In addition to composing orchestral and chamber works, vocal and choral pieces, dance and concert scores, and music for TV and films (including The Reader [2008], an Oscar Best Picture nominee), Muhly has also been involved with what one critic called “a genre-busting mix of indie rock, folktronica and Steve Reich-flavored ‘serious’ composition.” He has performed, arranged and conducted, for example, for the Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk (Medúlla, Drawing Restraint 9, Volta), folk-country singer Bonnie “Prince” Billy (The Letting Go), and Antony Hegarty of the experimental rock band Antony and the Johnsons.

Drown was composed in 2023 for the 10th anniversary of Hub New Music on their joint commission with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where the work was premiered on November 30, 2023. “Drown,” Muhly explained, “takes its title from an unusual object in the museum’s permanent collection carved by James Drown, about whom little information exists, who spent around five months on the remote island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic in the early 19th century. Drown, to mark time, carved a notch in the stick for each day he was there, along with the year and the place-name ‘Providence, Rhode Island.’ A sailor found the stick a few years after it was carved, brought it back to Providence, and presented it to Drown’s family, who hadn’t heard from him in years. A decade later, Drown appeared in Providence; there are no records detailing his reunion with his family.

“Drown is a piece about the marking of time, indicated by sharp, jagged notes always on the pitch D. The jagged notes appear as anchor-points through a series of variations—some quite peaceful, some angular and difficult, others frenzied and desperate. The piece ends in a state of oceanic suspension, a nod to the unknown and unknowable arc of this carved object’s journey across the globe.”

Carlos Simon, born in Atlanta in 1986, grew up playing organ at his father’s church, immersed himself in music in high school, earned degrees from Georgia State University and Morehouse College, and completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Evan Chambers and Grammy^®-winning composer Michael Daugherty. Simon also studied in Baden, Austria and at the Hollywood Music Workshop and New York University’s Film Scoring Summer Workshop. He taught at Spelman College and Morehouse College in Atlanta before being appointed in 2019 to the faculty of Georgetown University, which also commissioned him to compose Requiem for the Enslaved, a multi-genre tribute to commemorate the 272 enslaved men, women, and children sold by the University in 1838. Requiem for the Enslaved was nominated for a Grammy Award^® for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for its 2022 recording on Decca.

In addition to his recent opera, Simon has composed works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo voice, chorus, concert band, and film, several of them on commissions from such noted organizations as the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, and Philadelphia Orchestra; the gospel-influenced Amen! (2017) was commissioned by the University of Michigan Band in celebration of the university’s 200th anniversary. He has also performed as keyboardist with the Boston Pops, Jackson Symphony, and St. Louis Symphony, toured Japan in 2018 under the sponsorship of the United States Embassy in Tokyo and US/Japan Foundation performing in some of the country’s most sacred temples and important concert venues, served as music director and keyboardist for Grammy Award^®–winner Jennifer Holliday, and appeared internationally with Grammy^®-nominated soul artist Angie Stone. Simon received the 2021 Medal of Excellence of the Sphinx Organization, which is dedicated to promoting and recognizing Black and Latinx classical music and musicians. His additional honors include the Marvin Hamlisch Film Scoring Award, Theodore Presser Foundation Award, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Award, fellowships from the Sundance Institute and Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music, and a residency at the 2021 Ojai Festival.

Simon composed Requiem for the Enslaved in 2020 on a commission from Georgetown University with support from the President’s Office and the committee for Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation with support from the Department of Performing Arts. The work was premiered virtually on November 21, 2021 at the Library of Congress by Hub New Music, rapper Marco Pavé, trumpeter MK Zulu, and the composer as pianist.

Simon prefaced his note for the premiere with a quotation from Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise: “Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the hope and dream of a slave.”

“Almost an entire year has passed,” Simon wrote in 2020, “since I first set foot on the Georgetown University campus as a candidate for professorship in the Performing Arts Department—a hope and dream of my ancestors. Since being hired as an assistant professor, I have grown to love the Georgetown University community and culture, which is steeped in a tradition of excellence and a rich history. In learning of the university’s involvement in slavery, I am deeply grateful for the collective efforts taken to understand and attempt to reconcile its tainted past. Now, as a member of the Georgetown University community, I wish to join in the journey of expanding the discussion. This musical piece honors the men, women and children owned and sold by the University.

“Requiem for the Enslaved, which features music that evokes the spirit of those in captivity, is scored for piano, flute/piccolo/alto flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin, cello, trumpet, and rapper and spoken word artist Marco Pavé (Georgetown’s first Hip Hop artist-in-residence). Using the musical structure of a liturgical mass, Requiem for the Enslaved explores the sacred and historical ideology of the sale of those enslaved people by Jesuits by infusing of the music of the Catholic Church and African-American spirituals into an original composition.”