|
About the Composers
Elise Arancio, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, is pursuing her master’s at the Juilliard School
of Music. With her music often drawing inspiration from poetry and literature, Arancio received
an American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Scholarship in 2024 and has had her
music performed by the symphony orchestras of Atlanta and New Jersey. Her composition Bite
Your Tongue depicts an individual being silenced by both internal and external forces.
A native of Spotswood, New Jersey, Andrew Faulkenberry received his master’s from the
Peabody Conservatory in 2023. His music has been performed by the Albany Symphony,
International Contemporary Ensemble and Parker Quartet, and praised by composer William
Bolcom as having “mature tone. . . and considerable spiritual depth.” The Minnesota Orchestra
will perform his portrait through a prism, a work inspired by the kaleidoscopic refraction of
light through a prism. Soomin Kim recently served as a Sounding Ground composer in residence with Zeitgeist, and her music has been performed at festivals ranging from Ravinia and Liquid Music to Aspen. Originally from South Korea, Kim is a visiting assistant professor of composition at her alma mater, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Her work star/ghost/mouth/sea is a set of four miniatures for orchestra that explore metaphors found in poet Franny Choi’s Soft Science.
Born in Wrentham, Massachusetts, Benjamin Webster is currently a doctoral candidate at
the Yale School of Music, whose music explores the beauty and fragility of sound and gesture.
His works have been performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Lyris
Quartet and Yale Philharmonia, as well as heard at the Oregon Bach Festival. His Autumn
Movement explores questions around the concept of personal, natural and societal changes.
About Kevin Puts
A Grammy and Pulitzer Prize winner, Kevin Puts is one of America’s leading composers, receiving commissions and performances from the Metropolitan Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra and Carnegie Hall, and collaborating with artists such as Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, Yannick Nezet-Seguin and Marin Alsop. His opera The Hours was such a triumph when it premiered at the Met in 2022 that the company revived it in the next season. His breakthrough opera Silent Night—for which he won a 2012 Pulitzer Prize—was premiered in 2011 by the Minnesota Opera.
A member of the composition faculty at the Peabody Institute, Puts is serving as distinguished
visiting composer at the Juilliard School in the current academic year. His collaboration with the
Minnesota Orchestra on the Composer Institute began in 2015. For the first time, this year’s
Future Classics concert will include a work by Puts, Heartland.
| 
