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Amy Brandon is one of eight Resident Composers selected to participate in the 2025 Mizzou International Composers Festival. MICF Resident Ensemble Alarm Will Sound will perform her composition Incipit at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 26, at Columbia’s Missouri Theatre. The concert is free and open to the public.
JUNO-nominated composer Amy Brandon’s pieces have been described as “gut-wrenching and horrific” [Critipeg], “otherworldly, a clashing of bleakness with beauty” [Minor Seventh], and “arresting, riveting music, highly original and individual” [Simon Cummings, 5:4]. Recent works include a NextGen commission for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra [qililliil, 2025], and works for cellist Jeffrey Zeigler [Simulacra, 2022], Orbit Ensemble [Caeli Nullius, 2024], and Ensemble ArtChoral [Dust of the Water, 2023]. Her installations and acoustic works have been presented at the ISCM World New Music Days, the Gaudeamus Festival, Trinity College [Dublin], and the Winnipeg New Music Festival. She has received Canadian and international composition awards including the Leo Brouwer Guitar Composition Competition [Grand Prize 2019, adjudicated by Leo Brouwer] and was a 2020 JACK Quartet Studio Artist. She teaches composition at Dalhousie University at the Fountain School of Performing Arts in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick.
We recently chatted with her via email.
What is your musical background? When and how did you begin composing?
I am a lapsed guitarist. My undergrad was in jazz guitar and I was a freelance guitarist for 10 years after I completed my BMus. A combination of factors including a shoulder injury during COVID meant that I no longer perform, but fortunately still have the opportunity to write for the guitar! My first pieces were for classical guitar, and I was fortunate that these pieces allowed me to take a master’s in composition, and since then, I have only been composing.
How did you hear about MICF?
I have heard of the Festival here and there throughout the years and I applied once before, in 2022. I am excited to be attending this year and am looking forward to coming to Columbia!
Tell us about your piece that will be performed at MICF. What should we listen for?
The piece is called Incipit which means “beginning.” Incipits are also small music fragments which can form the basis for imitative counterpoint or canon. In this work there are close repetition of phrases, but the effect is intended to be a blurring of the melodic content rather than anything approaching true counterpoint. I also use a lot of very close voicings between the ensemble members – sometimes within a quarter-tone – inspired by Scelsi’s Quattro Piezzi and Tiensuu’s Oire, to aid in this timbral blurring. The form of the piece itself is fairly abstracted, composed of a series of beginnings, each ending with another beginning, forming a series of “incipits.”
What does it mean for you to work with an ensemble like Alarm Will Sound?
I was and am very excited to work with Alarm Will Sound, as they are of course one of the best and most creative chamber ensembles currently active. I was even more excited when I found out how many Canadians were members. I truly had no idea we had infiltrated this far.
What do you hope to learn from your MICF experience?
I am really interested to hear my colleagues work. I am always inspired by what other composers are doing and it’s great to connect with people in the field like this. It’s a wonderful opportunity, and I’m very thankful for it.
For more information on Amy Brandon, visit her website.