SoNA
Symphony of Northwest Arkansas
Celestial Visions: Symphonie Fantastique September 20, 2025 Walton Arts Center Lawrence Loh, Guest Conductor
Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) (2014) Missy Mazzoli b October 27, 1980 in Pennsylvania, USA
We tend to think of a composer’s career as proceeding along a fairly straight line. Composer studies at school X with teacher Y; composer builds reputation slowly piece by piece; composer becomes established, maybe winds up teaching composition in a major school of music. But that’s not the case with many of today’s composers, who in a fragmented and rapidly evolving profession must virtually invent their own careers from the ground up.
Missy Mazzoli’s career has been no line but an intricate webbing that originates from her encompassing interests in, well, just about everything. Some of that is intrinsic to her own nature, some of it is due to the requirements of today’s profession, and some of it relates to the challenge of being a female composer in a field that even after all this time remains mostly male. She is a composer, keyboardist, educator, advocate, and more, including having trained as a death doula in order to help people through that most critical of life’s transitions. Mazzoli tells us that her Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres), commissioned by the Los Angeles Philarmonic, is “music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within