Four Composers Selected for 2025 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute

Four of the nation’s top emerging orchestral composers have been selected to participate in the Minnesota Orchestra’s 2025 Composer Institute, which culminates in a “Future Classics” concert featuring their music, conducted by Music Director Thomas Søndergård and hosted by composer Kevin Puts, on Friday, April 25, 2025, 8 p.m., at Orchestra Hall.

The selected composers are Elise Arancio, Andrew Faulkenberry, Soomin Kim and Benjamin Webster.

“These composers have such unique, disparate voices, and they write with great imagination and color. I look forward to working with them as they hear their creations played so masterfully by the Orchestra. This incarnation of the program will be somewhat different from previous years in that I will be interviewing each composer from the stage myself, pointing out certain things for the audience to listen for, with musical examples played by the Orchestra. I hope this will give our audiences more insight into the creative decisions that these young composers make,” said Kevin Puts, the Pulitzer-Prize winning composer who directs the Composer Institute and will serve as mentor to the participants. “It’s wonderful to have this program embraced by Thomas Søndergård and sustained by the Orchestra to support a new generation of composers.”

The 2025 Composer Institute has been recast to spotlight four composers (instead of up to seven in past years) to allow more time and focus in preparing and presenting their work. The Future Classics concert marks the first led by Thomas Søndergård, who began his tenure as music director last season. The 2025 program also includes a new partnership with Universal Music Publishing Classics & Screen and Ricordi New York as part of the launch of their RicordiLab US Program, designed to support the careers of young composers. Ricordi will assist with preparing scores and instrumental parts and offer mentoring support to the composers.

As part of their Composer Institute experience, Arancio, Faulkenberry, Kim and Webster will participate in a multi-day immersion into the artistic life of an orchestra, attending work sessions with Søndergård and Puts, meeting with Orchestra music library staff and Ricordi/Universal Music Publishing professionals, honing their skills in public presentation, filming with the Orchestra’s digital team, and learning more about orchestral programming cycles from artistic staff. The week will culminate in a “Future Classics” concert featuring their music, which will offer each composer the onstage spotlight to introduce themselves and theircomposition to audiences. Each work will be filmed, and the performance subsequently released by the Orchestra on its YouTube channel for free access. The roots of the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute date to 2002, with more than 140 composers participating in the pioneering program over the decades, including such alumni as Grammy Award nominees Anna Clyne, Missy Mazzoli and Zhou Tian, and Pulitzer Prize nominees Andrew Norman, Ted Hearne and Michael Gilbertson. Under Søndergård’s leadership, the program is now offered on a biennial basis in rotation with the Orchestra’s Listening Project, an initiative to program and record the music of historically underrepresented composers.

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