Artist Profile
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About ChelseaChelsea Komschlies (b. 1991, Appleton, WI), whose music has been said to possess an “ingratiating allure” (San Diego Story), recently completed a post-graduate Artist Diploma at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was awarded The Alfredo Casella Award for composition. At Curtis she studied with Richard Danielpour and David Ludwig. Chelsea received her Master of Music degree in composition from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she studied with Daniel Kellogg and Carter Pann and received the Thurston Manning Composition Award and Cecil Effinger Fellowship in Composition. Chelsea, who grew up creating and loving all sorts of visual art, often uses real or imagined images as inspiration for her works, and listeners frequently say her music has strong visual qualities. One of her goals is that listeners make deep, instinctual associations with her music, be they emotional, visual, or otherwise abstract.
Chelsea’s music has been performed across the United States as well as in Canada, the U.K., Finland, France, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. She has received commissions from the the Philadelphia Bach Festival, the Rock School for Dance Education, One Book, One Philadelphia, and a distinguished composition fellow commission from the Cortona Sessions for New Music. She has had performances at events such as the Ravinia Festival and the finale concert of Make Music Chicago and has been invited to study at summer programs such as the Fontainebleau School and a number of festivals in the U.S. and abroad. Her recent projects include a piece for organ, harpsichord, and orchestra, premiered by the Curtis Institute in 2018, and an extended reality collaboration with Drexel University game design and software engineer students using the Microsoft Hololens. Upcoming projects include a commissioned oratorio for the Bach Festival of Philadelphia for voices and period instruments. Chelsea plans to pursue a doctoral degree in composition this coming fall. In her spare time, Chelsea enjoys drawing, digital painting, creating hand-sculpted jewelry, and haunting her favorite local coffee shops. |
Learn More about Chelsea!
What were the circumstances around the moment you realized you wanted to be a composer? |
For me it was more of a lot of little things adding up over many years rather than one big "aha" moment, but I do remember one important turning point. As a child I loved spending hours poring over challenging puzzles. Neither of my parents have any music background, but in our living room we did have this dusty miniature digital keyboard that was probably from 1980 and several of the keys didn't work. I always liked figuring out melodies by ear but didn't have the first clue about how keys and harmonies worked. But when I was about thirteen, I'd just read and watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was obsessed, and I remember I was playing the melody from the "Concerning Hobbits" cue and figured, ok, it can't be that hard to figure out the chords, and I just slowly by trial and error figured it out one note at a time, then did the same with all the other cues from the trilogy. By that point I was finally beginning to see what a "key" meant, and that each one had a "main chord," "another main chord," a "main minor chord," "a weird chord" (the diminished vii) and so on. That sort of unlocked everything for me. Within a few years I started arranging folk music, then composing, finally had my first music theory training in college, and eventually started officially studying composition in my master's degree. Of course over time music became much more than just a puzzle - it's a medium for sculpting mystery and reaching and expressing higher revelation than I can in other ways.
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You seem to be a multifaceted artist, not just a composer. Is sight, experience and sound intertwined for you?
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Yes indeed. Everything is connected for me in a complex synesthetic web of association and meaning to some degree in daily life. For me the most powerful experiences have the strongest connections across modes - when music immediately triggers a complex mind's eye "vision," for example, without any conscious thought process intermediating. I don't know exactly what it is beyond "a really weird-ass migraine disorder" as my neurologist put it, but from reading descriptions of the hypnagogic state between waking and sleeping and from experiencing it, it feels like being in a more muted version of that state always, even when awake. One of my favorite composers is Hildegard von Bingen who was famous for her visions, which, it's now believed, may have been borne out of a complex migraine disorder, so I like to think I have this connection to her.
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WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR THE CORE OF THIS WORK, THE SETTING OF THE NUNC DIMITTIS? |
When I was composing the original smaller choral setting, two of my grandparents had recently passed away, so the work is dedicated to them, my Grams and Papa. The Nunc Dimittis story was never something I had really paid much attention to until that time - I was only familiar with it as the rather bland and emotionless major-key setting I grew up singing in church. But the passing of my grandparents really got me thinking about what it would be like to be in Simeon's position, to have lived, to know you have reached the end, and to then approach death willingly and ready. That is a great and mysterious thing that I still can't quite wrap my head around.
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What did you find inspiring about this biblical passage (or challenging) in terms of setting it to music? Is there an extra musical element here for you? |
The most interesting part of the text and setting for me was trying to get into the characters' heads and what they were feeling. There was a challenge regarding the character Anna the Prophetess; it's a bit odd in that there is a very detailed description of her age (which is actually pretty fascinating from a Biblical numerology standpoint, but I digress) followed by a statement that she spoke, but no recording of her words. I figured I had two options - either make up words for her, or give some of Simeon's words to Anna. As it happens, at the end of the famous Nunc Dimittis text, Simeon - the one who is described as a devout man but not as a prophet, suddenly gives this uncanny prophesy directly to Mary, saying a sword would pass through her soul; I gave these words to Anna. I like the image of the two women - the aged Prophetess delivering this strange message to Mary. And through all of this story, we tend to forget about Mary herself; she's had the joy of the wondrous birth of her son, but all of these foretellings are about the death of that son. So I've represented Mary's (and Jesus') coming agony strung insistently through the story with the Hertzliebster Jesu chorale.
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Which artists (musicians, poets, painters, directors) inspire you/have had an influence on you? |
Oh, so many. The nineteenth-century Symbolist painters, definitely (my study area is covered in prints of Gustave Moreau and Jean Delville). I'm a Symbolist and Idealist at heart. When it comes to contemporary art, I've found much more inspiring work on Instagram than in art museums. Some favorites - Peter Morbacher (I have two of his angels up at home), Lillian Liu, Samuel Araya, Pat Roxas, Marcin Nagraba, Roberto Ferri, @feverworm, Myriam Tillson, Andrew Jarvis, @saibotlhadneke, and too many others to name. I just finished Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation, devoured in three days. The film was stunning, but the novel is on yet another level - utterly sublime. I love Bach, Debussy, Messiaen, Feldman, Scelsi, Dufay - my favorite composers and what I'm listening to really changes with the season or my mood. Lately I've had Tame Impala's colorful and sparkly Currents on repeat, and before that the mysteriously haunting music of Talos. With contemporary composers it's about finding rare gems that really move me; recently pieces by Sophie Dupuis and Tom Morrison have left me spellbound.
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2018-2019 B A C H @ 7 S E R I E S
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2018-2019 Season Finale Concert
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