Andrea Clearfield (born 1960)
Andrea Clearfield was born into an artistic family in Philadelphia that encouraged her early education in music. She played piano, flute, and tympani, and at an early age began arranging pop songs from the radio for different instruments. She earned a master’s in music in piano from the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, and a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition from Temple University. She is founder and host of the Salon concert series in Philadelphia.
Andrea Clearfield has composed over 160 works for orchestra, chorus, and chamber ensembles. In recent years, she has done fieldwork in Nepal studying Tibetan music. This has influenced her own music, including her 2019 opera MILA, Great Sorcerer about the life of the Tibetan yogi, Milarepa.
This is a performance of her 2016 cantata Rabsong Shar for soprano, chamber orchestra, and digital audio based on her Nepal fieldwork. The video takes some time to get started: The musicians don’t enter until about the 1-minute mark. At about the 2.5-minute mark, Andrea Clearfield discusses the composition a bit. The music begins at about 7:20.
This is Women of Cyprus, a 2002 composition for string quintet: