Gabriela Ortiz Composing Studio Showcase 2025
A critical component of the Gabriela Ortiz Composing Studio is for each fellow to write a new piece as part of their OAcademy fellowship.
In 2025, our artists-in-residency who workshopped and recorded the new solo pieces created by the Composing Cohort were bassoonist Zach Feingold (Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia), violinist Juliette Kang (First Associate Concertmaster at The Philadelphia Orchestra), and vibraphone player Clara Warnaar (International Contemporary Ensemble).
Lewis Chung is an Australian composer and pianist, based in Hong Kong. He has collaborated with renowned groups such as the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Orquestra Sinfônica da Unicamp (Brazil) and the Mivos Quartet. Recent engagements include a two pianos museum concert in Kuwait, hosted by the Kuwait National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters. He also collaborated with a leading digital artist on an installation at Art Basel (Hong Kong). The work was highlighted in seven media outlets, including The Financial Times (UK), for its innovative integration of music, art and machine learning. He is a graduate of the Wharton School (UPenn) and the Lamont School of Music (Denver).
This piece takes its title from the first riddle in Puccini’s opera, "Turandot", and the answer is “hope”. It is a work about the hope and aspirations in our dreams each night, growing and intensifying as we enter this state of fantasy. Our dreams may be joyful, yet poignant at the same time. By dawn, our aspirations may be dashed by the realities of life, leaving fleeting mirages shimmering in our memories.
Ethan Resnik is a composer and pianist currently pursuing his Master of Music Degree at Rice University. He received his Bachelor of Music Degree from the Eastman School of Music.
Ethan is the recipient of the Belle Gitelman Award, the Louis Lane Prize, and he received 1st place in the Northwest Horn Symposium Composition Contest and in the Villa Musica Call for Scores. He was awarded 3rd place in the American Prize in Composition, 2nd place in the Belvedere Festival Composition Contest, and 2nd place in the 16th Piano Composition Competition Fidelio, where he later served as a jury member for the final round. Recent festival appearances include the National Music Festival, RED NOTE New Music Festival, Penn-State New Music Festival, soundSCAPE, Bowdoin Music Festival, Brevard, and the Maine Chamber Music Seminar.
A Light-Hearted and Short-Lived Fantasy is a work that explores the bassoon in a quirky and playful manner. The piece is influenced by short, meaningful moments which seemingly end too soon. In this way, the work is a series of small memory snippets that yearn to last just a little bit longer…
Gabriel Andrés Gallegos is a composer, conductor, and orchestrator based in New York City. His music, described as elements of the avant-garde juxtaposed with a basis of classical and Mexican folk music, features eclectic instrumentation with a flair for midcentury cinematic sounds.
His compositions have been recorded by members of the New York Philharmonic, Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, Budapest Art Orchestra, and London Symphony Orchestra, at venues such as Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía and AIR Studios Lyndhurst.
Gallegos completed his Master of Music degree in Scoring for Film at Berklee Valencia with magna cum laude honors under the direction of acclaimed film composer Lucio Godoy (2007 Goya Award winner) and is a 2025 Gabriela Ortiz Composing Studio Fellow.
Fantasía metalófono chronicles two contrasting narratives by melding elements of the vibraphone’s history in jazz, sci-fi television themes, and mid-century film scores with my own experience as a Chicano composer. The piece concludes with a delicate canción ranchera, a type of traditional Mexican folk song, which often focuses on themes of love, patriotism, and experiences of rural life.
Musician/Educator/Wearer-of-Many Hats Derek J. Weagle is a Brooklyn-based artist and healer working in the medium of sound. Seeking the deepest joy in all things they are invested in the disruption of cultural barriers around music-making preserving it as a vital act of humanness. With a practice rooted in syncretism Derek’s musical and teaching styles draw from a wide breadth of experience modality and tradition. They are passionate about the fusion of these approaches as a means of authentic connection and collective healing.
Floe is a love letter to the transcendent peace and beauty that is the Arctic landscape. In a time of increasing environmental deregulation, my hope is that works such as this can help highlight how essential this region is to the planet's ecological and climatological wellness.
J. Andrés Ballesteros is a Boston-based composer, educator, and administrator whose work chases threads of curiosity and social justice. His compositions, praised for their “versatility of style and memorable hooks” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), blend classical music with diverse genres, narrative arcs, and a collaborative approach. His compositions are often rooted in collaborations with youth and community groups that center themes of immigration, climate justice, and more.
In addition to composing, Andrés has been a leader on issues of representation, inclusion, and community work in the classical music world.
A graduate of Harvard University, Andrés holds an Artist Diploma from the OAcademy Music Conservatory’s Gabriela Ortiz Composing Studio and has been recognized as a Boston Latino 30 Under 30 honoree, invited to speak at the League of American Orchestras National Conference in 2018 and 2019, and profiled in Ana Francisca Vega’s book Corazón de Mexicanos Como Yo.
Sri Lanka Silhouettes is a series of musical “postcards,” brief moments in sound inspired by places across the island nation. Sri Lanka' s culture shares much with other South Asian nations, yet its identity is distinct, shared by its diverse communities: Sinhala, Tamils, Moors, Veddas… It is at once ancient—it has been home to civilizations for thousands of years—and wholly modern, skyscrapers arcing up from malls and carefully groomed parks. It was riven by violence for decades but now experiences peace and stability. Its golden coasts wrap around rugged mountains scored with canyons and cliffs. This piece is not intended to represent any of Sri Lanka's many musical traditions, though I encourage you to explore those.
Chris Neiner (b. 1994) is a composer-performer and entrepreneur in Cleveland, Ohio. His music has been praised for "zazzy colors, pleasant shocks, and melting cadences” (Cleveland Classical) and received recognition from the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, American Modern Ensemble, and Flute New Music Consortium. Recent commissions include Time Machine Hyperboles for NO EXIT New Music Ensemble, Tales of Euclid Beach Park for Stars in the Classics, Spiral Suite for Otterbein University, and 4 X 4 for the Ohio Music Teachers Association. Neiner is a founding musician and Associate Director of the Sunday Studio Series, chamber concerts in Cleveland’s historic Little Italy neighborhood presenting classical music as fun, welcoming, and relevant. The music of Chris Neiner has appeared on programs by the Grammy-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra, Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, Minnesota Sinfonia, Boston New Music Initiative, Copper Street Brass Quintet, North Coast Winds, and more.
A Test of Pride explores the complexity of pride—its strength, its fragility, and its role in shaping identity. The music unfolds through two contrasting ideas: a bold, persistent fanfare that suggests resilience, and an anxious, spiraling perpetual motion. Their interaction reflects an internal tension between confidence and self-doubt, especially in moments when pride feels difficult to sustain. While not overtly programmatic, the piece leans toward the experience of queer pride—how it can be both empowering and vulnerable. At its core, the work is a reflection on self-acceptance and the courage it takes to be one’s self.
Jasmine Galante is a multi-hyphenate composer, playwright, producer, and soprano based in New York. Through her creative work, Galante approaches performance as ritual for collective witnessing and catharsis. Her music and plays navigate the tensions between grief and resilience, myth and memory, paranoia and serenity. Cycles – in both narrative and sound – are a central interest in her practice, offering a framework for transformation to emerge from repetition and return.
Over the past year, I’ve become interested in the idea of timbral shifts, colors, and tremolos that create a sort of glimmering effect. To me, the word “glimmer” evokes a sense of hope, however faint and delicate.
Born in Barcelona, Telmo Sans Ruiz started his musical career at a young age, starting music lessons at the age of 3 and piano lessons at the age of 6. He decided to pursue a musical path at the age of 17, starting his composition studies in Barcelona with his mentor, Israel David Martínez. He graduated with high distinctions and began right after to receive his first commissions from private associations like the private book collection López-Triquell or Musical Innovators Association. He recently got the opportunity to participate at the 2025 Gabriela Ortiz Composing Studio by OAcademy, where he has got the chance to meet world top professionals of the composition world and the music industry. In Fall 2025 he will begin his studies in Orchestral Conducting at the prestigious Hochschule für Musik und Theater München.
Frozen images, as the title suggests, is a work that depicts a landscape of coldness and winter. It creates a calm yet sharp soundscape, presenting an extensive palette of sounds through the violin in a programmatic narrative.
New Hampshire-based composer Katie Semro writes music that is dramatic, beautiful, and melodic, but doesn’t shy away from sorrow, anger, and chaos. Her works have been performed in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Mexico, and Nova Scotia. She is currently working on a commission for the Bridge Music Collective which will premier in January 2026 in San Francisco, and a cello solo which will be performed by Daniela Herrera Garcia in Dallas in December 2025. Semro is a Gabriela Ortiz Composing Fellow 2025, and takes private instruction with composer Elena Ruehr. She lives in a cozy house along the Gridley River with her husband and two kids.
Both of my grandfathers fought for the US in World War II, and one was even at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed, so the 80th anniversaries of the war have been on my mind for the last several years. In 2024, when I was thinking about the coming anniversary of the end of the war, I thought about a story I read in elementary school. It was about a Japanese girl who was dying of leukemia, because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The story is heartrending because although she tries to make 1000 paper cranes so that her wish to live can come true, she dies. This story has stuck with me for the last 30 years and has been a reminder not only of the tragedies of those bombings but also of the social, political, and emotional fallout that accompanied the nuclear fallout. I hope this piece stands as a reminder of the fallout from all conflicts — past and present.
Nacho Gonzalez Nappa is a composer for video games and the concert stage. He’s scored popular titles like Kingdom Rush Vengeance, Legends of Kingdom Rush, Iron Marines, and Junkworld, as well as projects for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, and Exile Content. He’s released four solo albums blending jazz, tango, and contemporary classical music, collaborating with Grammy-winning artists like Terence Blanchard, John Patitucci, and Ruben Rada. In 2016, he launched ulabmusic.com with Univision, producing over 10 albums and documentaries like CUBA: Music Revolution, featured at the Madrid and Santa Barbara Film Festivals. He also produced Rise-Up, a border concert broadcast to 80 million viewers.
Previously, Nacho worked in social impact across Latin America, co-founding the U.S. branches of techo.org and socialab.com. “I write music to understand who I am,” he says. “I want my music to move you—to help you feel, reflect, and maybe even understand a little more about who you are.” He teaches music for video games at Berklee College of Music.
We’re Connected (April 2025) stages a tense, theatrical duel between a bassoonist and an AI voice assembled from the hyperbolic language of Silicon Valley’s AI discourse. Blending music, acting, and spoken word, the performer resists the AI’s attempts to control their playing, embodying a struggle between human irreducibility and machine logic. Drawing on centuries-old debates over “useless knowledge” versus “profitable” knowledge, the piece reflects on what cannot be measured—fear, love, dreams—and calls for preserving the chaotic beauty of humanity in an age that prizes efficiency, conformity, and control.
Daniel Regnier is a Canadian composer, multi-instrumentalist and philosopher. He is co-director of Flamenco Borealis. His concert music draws on flamenco and Arabic influences and explores themes in philosophy.
This piece is based on the life and thought of the Pre-Socratic Philosopher Empedocles of Akagras (c. 494 – c. 434 BC). Empedocles is closely linked with Sicily where he was born and died. According to one account, he ended his life by throwing himself into an active volcanic crater at the top of Mount Etna. This composition explores Empedocles cosmology which has the world composed of four “roots” (i.e. elements) governed by two contrary forces: “love” (philotês) and “strife” (neikos). Zach Feingold (bassoon) offers a brilliant rendering of this piece. He plays the poetic passages with extraordinary eloquence and vividly depicts the stark contrasts that juxtapose the four roots.
Xingyue Song is a Chinese emerging composer and pianist currently studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with Mason Bates. Her works have been performed by the Telegraph Quartet and the International Orange Chorale. She was named a semi-finalist for the 2024 Zemlinsky Prize and will serve as composer-in-residence with SF Choral Artists in 2025. Upcoming highlights include collaborations with Friction Quartet, a residency with Gabriela Ortiz through OAcademy, and participation in the Bahlest Eeble Readings at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music.
Music is fundamentally based on organised sound waves. With great reverb quality with pedal, the vibraphone sounds like from the future. Named with three words more often being used in electronic music, Start from scratch explored volumes, pitches, and rhythm in different pieces.
I. Oscillator
II. Reverb
III. Amplify