2025 First Commission Award Presented to Sophia Kunxu Dou

World premiere on 01.29.2024 at the 2025 Composers Now Festival Opening Event

@ National Sawdust, 7:30 pm

Sophia Kunxu Dou is a composer who aspires to write music that shares her emotions and moves others, the same way that she is moved by music. With colorful and folksong-driven melodies, her music brings the audience on an emotional journey. Creating a sound world both beautiful and bizarre, and full of action. She is often inspired by visual art and poetry, and blends together music of different genres and cultures.

Sophia currently studies at Juilliard pre-college with Dr. Daniel Felsenfeld. She is a winner of 2023 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, The American Prize in Composition--Orchestra, high school division 2024, and a finalist for 2023 National Young Composers Challenge, The American Prize in Composition--Instrumental Chamber, high school division 2024 and From the Top’s Fellowship 2024.

Sophia is a member of New York Youth Symphony since 2022 and the recipient of honorable mentions from Luna Composition Lab 2022-2023 and 2023-2024. She participated in 2024 Boston University Tanglewood Institute Young Artists Composition Program.

Besides being performed in Juilliard concerts, Sophia’s works have been recognized and performed by Grammy Award-Winning conductor David Miller with Little Orchestra Society in eight concerts, Avec Quartet at 14th Busan Maru International Music Festival, New York Youth Symphony, BUTI Young Artist Orchestra; received readings from The International Contemporary Ensemble, Aizuri Quartet, Emily Levin, Coriolis Duo, etc. Her new piece will be premiered at the Kennedy Center as part of the Sounds of US Festival. She also aspires to be a film composer and wrote electronic music for 7.78M subscribed YouTube-Channel. She has received awards in Piano, Violin, Vocal, Visual Arts, Poetry and Mathematics.

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composer mentor: Eve Beglarian

According to the Los Angeles Times, Eve Beglarian "is a humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” Her current projects include a solo piano piece about Emily Dickinson responding to Ives’ Concord Sonata for the pianist Donald Berman, a piece about water issues on the Colorado River for the Moab Music Festival, a queer exploration of 14th century composer Guillaume de Machaut’s multimedia love story, Le Voir Dit, with singer/performer Lukas Papenfusscline, a performance project around poetry by James Tate called What Are the Chances, and a piece for 24 basses in a grove of trees, composed for Robert Black and friends. Roomful of Teeth’s recording of her Whitman setting None More than You with Eve guesting in won a 2024 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Performance. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days: "a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress...an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times)

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