Member Spotlight: Andrea Clearfield

Creating deep emotive musical languages that build cultural and artistic bridges, the music of Andrea Clearfield is performed widely in the U.S. and abroad. She has written over 170 works for opera, chorus, orchestra, chamber ensemble, dance and multimedia collaborations, exploring subjects ranging from freedom and oppression to ancient cultures, environmental sustainability, health and healing, gender and technology. Among her works are 17 large-scale cantatas including one for The Philadelphia Orchestra in collaboration with storyteller/writer Charlotte Blake Alston. She was awarded a Pew Center International Residency Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, two Independence Foundation Fellowships, awards from the Leeway Foundation and Fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, MacDowell and Copland House among others. A number of her works are inspired by fieldwork that she conducted in the Nepalese Himalaya documenting Tibetan music. Her opera on the great Tibetan yogi Milarepa, MILA, Great Sorcerer, with librettists Jean-Claude van Itallie and Lois Walden, was presented at the acclaimed NYC Prototype Festival in 2019. She is currently at work on a cantata for drag soloist, chorus and chamber ensemble entitled “Long Live the Queen” (a her-story of drag) with librettist/drag artist Cookie Diorio. As a pianist, she played keyboards with the Relâche Ensemble for 25 years and held the honor of performing with the Court of the Dalai Lama. Clearfield has served on the Board of the Recording Academy/Grammy’s Philadelphia Chapter and currently serves on the Executive Board of Wildflower Composers, amplifying voices of young female, transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer composers. Passionate about building community around the arts, she is also founder, curator and host of the Philadelphia SALON, featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance and world music since 1986.  She is represented by Black Tea Music. More information at https://www.andreaclearfield.com/ and https://www.zalonarts.org/.