Musiqa Announces New Commission Winners

Every year, Musiqa commissions new works from emerging talent in Houston and beyond. This year we're proud to welcome Alexis Lamb and Jiaying (Katy) Li to our roster of new voices on our upcoming 2025-2026 season. Lamb and Li will compose new works for wind quintet, to be performed next season in a collaborative performance with WindSync.

Musiqa Emeging Composer Commission winner Alexis C. Lamb (b. 1993) is a composer, percussionist, and educator whose work seeks to cultivate a connectedness to natural, historical, and societal relationships. Her music incorporates various mediums, such as oral histories, field recordings, improvisation, and community input. Her recent commissions and collaborations include Third Coast Percussion, Albany (NY) Symphony, Aizuri Quartet, and Opera Omaha, among many others. As a percussionist, Lamb finds joy in improvising in nature, exploring the sonic relationships between human-made music and music of the natural world. Lamb was also a performer from 2013-2020 with Projeto Arcomusical. As an educator, Lamb has experience with curriculum development and classroom teaching from the elementary to collegiate level, and she is actively sought out for workshops and clinics. She is a recipient of the 2022 Presser Foundation Graduate Music Award and the 2021 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Lamb is a doctoral candidate in composition and Rackham Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. She previously earned degrees from Yale School of Music and Northern Illinois University. Her works are self-published and available at www.alexislamb.com.

Musiqa Catalyst Commission winner Jiaying (Katy) Li is a Chinese-born composer, pianist, and educator whose music mainly focuses on amplifying the microscopic sound of the instrument itself, and combines electronic music with her cross-cultural background to create a poetic vocabulary and multi-sensory enjoyment. Katy's music is widely involved in solo, percussion, chamber music, symphony, electronic music, arrangement, and film scoring. In addition, her music has been embraced by renowned ensembles globally, including Mivos Quartet, JACK Quartet, MAMMOTH trio, Austin Wulliman, and Alex Sopp, and has been performed in Carnegie Hall, Norfolk Music Festival, New Music on the Point Music Festival. She is pursuing her master's degree in composition at Rice University. Prior to her current pursuits, she completed her bachelor's degree at Mannes School of Music where she was the recipient of the “Martinu Composition Prize” for her orchestral piece in 2022.