Andrea Clearfield
2023 Competition Panelist
Biography
Andrea has hosted her Salon concerts monthly since 1986. Her next SZALON hybrid is on January 28, featuring jazz, classical, contemporary, world, folk and mixed genre music from Philly to Stockholm. Join us live or online! Info here. 7pm EST community welcome, 7:30 performances, 9:30 chat with the performers, reception following. To join in Philly, RSVP to clearfieldsalonconcert@gmail.com to receive instructions. To join on Zoom, click here.
Andrea is a recipient of a February, 2024 composer fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center to work on a new cantata, “LONG LIVE THE QUEEN (a her-story of drag)” with drag artist/librettist Cookie Diorio. She was awarded 2023 composer fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Visby International Centre for Composers in Sweden where she was also the recipient of a Swedish Arts Grant for intercultural exchange. November 17th was the NYC premiere of her cantata Beyond the Binary. Read the article in Broadway World here. Andrea has had 15 world premieres of her music in the past two years, including HERE I AM:I AM HERE, Standing at the Beam, When we listen, Transformed by Fire Choral Suite, Beyond the Binary, Let Us Remember Spring, Where Everything is Music, Reflections on the Dranyen, Pan with Us (world premiere arrangement from Fire and Ice cantata, begin at 0:00), Singing into Presence (begin at 16:00), Home in Me,A Brush With Our Time and Smile Thy Shores for vocal octet and cello, commissioned by The Presser Foundation. Three Songs for Violin and Bass was performed on the New Milestones series at Lincoln Center.
Andrea was commissioned to write Here I Am: I Am Here for Coro Allegro’s Letters To Our Children Project. David Hodgkins, Artistic Director of Coro Allegro, wrote: “More and more, Andrea has been tackling issues involving the LGBTQ+ communities, and her thoughtfulness and perceptiveness is just what is needed as we all embrace – and celebrate – all of the nuanced challenges that are before us these days. For the messaging to be heard, the music conveying that message must be superb, and Andrea delivers that and more. It is clear that in our current world, musical integrity and issues of social justice can intertwine to give voice to those who have been previously silenced.”
Watch a rehearsal snippet of the piece. Find out more and get your copy of the score. The cantata will have its NYC premiere with the Stonewall Chorale in NYC on March 23, 2024, and will a be a featured work at the GALA festival in Minneapolis on July 12, 2024.