Lila Meretzky is a composer, educator, and visual artist born and raised in New York City. She works primarily in chamber, vocal, electronic, and electroacoustic mediums for concerts, dance, film, and installation.

Her work often concerns the warping of memory and language, and subjective experiences of time. It has been programmed and commissioned by leading ensembles and institutions including Contemporaneous, TAK Ensemble, the MATA Festival, Sandbox Percussion, Unheard-of//Ensemble, icarus Quartet, and percussionist Ji Hye Jung.

Meretzky’s composition Dinner will receive its world premiere at MICF, performed by Resident Ensemble Alarm Will Sound.

She recalls the composition of the piece and those that preceded it like this: “In 2017 I wrote a piece called Breakfast for voice and clarinet. I was at the start of my formal composition studies, a time of totally unselfconscious creativity and delight in the discipline of sitting down to work every day. My friend Maddy Dethloff, a wonderful percussionist, liked the piece, so in 2019 I wrote her a duo for vibraphone and marimba and called it Lunch.”

Last year, she arranged Lunch for four-hands piano. That piece will be performed at MICF by faculty pianists Curtis Pavey and Helena Hyesoo Kim. She also wrote a piece for three bassoons and two double basses, Confection I, for the Cincinnati-based new music collective New Downbeat.”

“Tragically, you can’t eat music,” Meretzky continues. “But like food, music enters your body and does real things to you physically and mentally. Whether you take its power seriously or not, music changes us as individuals and collectively on a moment-by-moment basis, the consequences of which may only become clear years later, and potentially never. On a relatively miniscule scale, making music has drastically shaped my life’s course.

“Being granted the opportunity to come to Mizzou feels like closing a circle that first opened with Breakfast. I wish I could cook something delicious for all the musicians who have generously shared their artistry and expertise with me over the years. I hope this piece, Dinner, will be nourishing for the musicians and audience in a different way. Scribbling at my desk,I tasted again that state of play that first drew me to composition. What I also think will be audible is something else I love about music, how instruments can be avatars for humans, bouncing around and bumping into each other on trains, on the internet, at the table.”  

A composer-in-residence with the aforementioned New Downbeat, Meretzky has created music for the dance companies New Dialect, X-Contemporary Dance, and the Nashville Ballet. She has taught composition and musicianship at the Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire, W.O. Smith Music School in Nashville, Tennessee, and Yale University’s Music in Schools Initiative. She has also taught composition and music technology as a teaching fellow in the music department at Yale University.

For more information about Lila and her music, visit lilameretzky.com