Missy Mazzoli (born 1980)
Missy Mazzoli was born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. She attended Boston University of Fine Arts (receiving a bachelor’s degree), the Yale School of Music (a master’s degree), and the Royal Conservatory of the Hague.
Missy Mazzoli has composed three full-length operas including the highly acclaimed Breaking the Waves (2016) based on the Lars von Trier movie. She has composed and performed music for the fictional character Thomas Pembridge in the TV series Mozart in the Jungle, and she founded the electro-acoustic band Victoire to perform her music.
In this performance of Vespers for Violin (2014) for amplified violin and electronics, Jennifer Koh is on the violin and Missy Mazzoli handles the electronics:
Here’s a 2015 string quartet entitled Quartet for Queen Mab:
About the Quartet for Queeen Mab, the composer has written:
Queen Mab is an elusive creature from folklore and literature, a tiny fairy who drives her chariot into the nose of sleeping people. She enters their brain, eliciting dreams of his or her heart’s desire. This quartet embraces the wildness of Queen Mab’s journey and the dreams that result; Baroque ornaments twist around long legato lines and melodies ricochet between players. The music follows a sort of intuitive dream logic but returns again and again to the opening material, resulting in a sort of insistent, insane ritornello.
One of Missy Mazzoli’s most popular pieces of orchestral music is Sinfornia (for Orbiting Spheres), originally composed for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a chamber version in 2014 and revised for full orchestra for the Boulder Philharmonic in 2016:
Two percussionists play a vibraphone, marimba, suspended cymbal, opera gong, lion’s roar, glockenspiel, melodica, snare drum, spring coil, and boom box. A pianist also plays a synthesizer, and some of the musicians also play harmonicas.
Missy Mazzoli writes:
Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) is music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word “sinfonia” refers to baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble turns into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.