Orianna Webb

"You make people realize that there exist other beauties in the world."

One lunchtime in New Haven I was surprised and delighted to find my artistic mission stated so succinctly on a fortune-cookie fortune. Different parts of the fortune seem the most important at different times: "other," "beauties" (plural), "in the world." The idiosyncratic, the strangely beautiful, the just plain beautiful, and the here-and-now; I suppose it's not the ideal but the beautifully (though usually unseen) real that interests me as a composer.

Orianna Webb

Orianna Webb's music has been described as "abound[ing] in urgent and mysterious detail"(Cleveland Plain Dealer). Her work has been recognized with honors and commissions from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Fromm Foundation, ASCAP, the American Music Center, SCI, the International Alliance for Women in Music, the New York Youth Symphony, and others. Recent premieres have included Ways the Sky Meets the Sea, winner of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize and composed in residence at the Camargo Foundation, Sustenance Variations for sax, guitar, piano, and percussion, written for the ensemble Flexible Music, The Time Being for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, commissioned by SCI and ASCAP, and an orchestral version of The Time Being premiered at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music's Conductor/Composer Program in Santa Cruz, CA. Orianna's music has recently been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra, the Yale Philharmonia, the Bowling Green Philharmonia, Flexible Music, the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra (COYO), the Prism Players, the University of Iowa Center for New Music, Vox Novus, the Mostly Modern Chamber Music Society, and heard at recitals and festivals across the country.

Orianna serves on the faculty of the Yale School of Music, and has taught composition, orchestration, music theory, and music history variously at the Cleveland Institute of Music, Case Western Reserve University, and Yale College. She is a founding faculty member of the Young Composers Program at CIM, a week-long summer program which draws composers ages 14-19 from around the US and abroad.

Born into a family of visual artists in Akron, OH, Orianna grew up playing the bassoon and the piano. In college she played orchestral and chamber music, and sang, played keyboards, and wrote for an improvisational duo and a rock band. After a brief detour studying anthropology then religion, she earned degrees in music from the University of Chicago, the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM), and the Yale School of Music. She studied composition with Martin Bresnick, Margaret Brouwer, John Eaton, Joseph Schwantner, and Roger Zahab, and also at La Schola Cantorum in Paris with Samuel Adler and Philip Lasser. She is a member of ASCAP.