Amelia S. Kaplan

Amelia Kaplan is a composer whose work is primarily gesture driven, privileging pitch, timbre, and shape equally. She embraces current sensibilities of form and rhetoric while continuing to draw on the classical tradition. She claims no specific aesthetic or camp of composition, but instead draws on sounds and gestures from everything in the world around, creating meaning by filtering and recontextualizing both the ordinary and the extraordinary.             

Ms. Kaplan's work has been presented at festivals and venues in the US, Europe, and Asia, including the Mise-En Festival, the Thailand International New Music Festival, SICPP, Wellesley Composers Conference, Gaudeamus, Darmstadt, June in Buffalo, The International 21C Guitar Conference, the International Alliance of Women in Music conference, as well as numerous Society of Composers Conferences, among others. 

She is the recipient of a 2020 Copland House residency, and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Ms. Kaplan is currently Associate Professor and Head of Theory & Composition at Ball State University, where she teaches composition, theory, and directs the New Music Ensemble. She previously taught at Oberlin Conservatory, the University of Iowa, and Roosevelt University.

She completed her A.B. in Physics at Princeton University, and her A.M. and Ph.D. in Music at the University of Chicago as a Century Fellow, where her primary teachers were Shulamit Ran and Ralph Shapey. She worked with Azio Corghi at the Milan Conservatory on a Whiting Fellowship, and received a Diploma of Merit from the Accademia Musicale Chigiana while studying with Franco Donatoni, and a Diploma from the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau.             

In 2013 her work Insolence was a runner up in the Forecast Call for Scores. Recordings can be heard on Albany, NAVONA, Centaur, and ABLAZE. Her double-reed works are published by TrevCo Music.

“…riveting…”
Anthony Aibel

SOUNDCLOUD

WEBSITE