1534 Mound Street Sarasota
FL 34236
“Sofía Rocha: Making Musical Waves”
Featuring the winner of the 2022 Hermitage Prize in Composition presented at the Aspen Music Festival and School, Sofía Rocha
Presented in partnership with The Venice Symphony and The Pops Orchestra
with SCENE Magazine as Media Partner
Thursday, March 16 at 6:30pm
Marie Selby Botanical Gardens (1534 Mound Street Sarasota, FL 34236)
Register here.
Registration is required. $5 per person.
Now in its tenth year, the Hermitage Prize in Composition is presented annually in collaboration with the Aspen Music Festival and School. This distinguished honor awards the gift of time, space, and support to an exceptional student in Aspen’s world renowned composition program. This year’s winner, Sofía Rocha, has deep ties to the Gulf Coast of Florida, having grown up in Naples, and writes music of uncompromising emotional intensity. Join us for a “Hermitage Sunsets @ Selby Gardens” to hear from this inventive next-generation composer as she contextualizes selections of her work being performed by the Pops Orchestra of Bradenton and Sarasota.
Sofía Rocha, originally from Boulder, Colorado and having grown up in Naples, Florida, is the 2022 recipient of the Hermitage Prize in Composition at the Aspen Music Festival and School. Rocha writes music of uncompromising emotional intensity while exploring cognition, randomness, rhythm, and counterpoint within post-tonal frameworks. She writes for all manner of performing forces: instrumental, vocal, and electronic. Upcoming projects include newly commissioned works for the 2022 Aspen Music Festival as a Composition Fellow, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Fifth House Ensemble as a Fromm Foundation Fellow at the 2020 Fresh Inc. Festival. Rocha’s first orchestral work, Replier, was chosen as the winner of the 2020 New England Philharmonic annual call-for-scores and will be premiered in May of 2022. Rocha has also received honors from ASCAP, OM/NI Composition Competition, and Tenebrae New Music Ensemble. She has worked with numerous ensembles including the Arditti Quartet, JACK Quartet, DeCoda, loadbang, Brentano String Quartet, Castle of our Skins, Transient Canvas, Hypercube, arx duo, and Duo Entre-Nous, as well as numerous solo performers. Rocha received her master’s degree in composition from the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory as a Chancellor’s Scholar and recipient of Elsberry & Gonder Family and Conservatory Scholarships. There, she studied with Chen Yi, Yotam Haber, Paul Rudy and Zhou Long. Rocha was also the 2019 Composer-in-Residence for the Graduate Fellowship String Quartet. She completed her undergraduate work at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College in 2019, receiving a BA in Music with Honors as a Wagnild Scholar and studying composition with Avner Dorman. She has attended June in Buffalo, Fresh Inc. Festival, the Atlantic Music Festival, Divergent Studio, and the Hypercube Composition Lab as a composer, studying and taking master classes with composers such as Augusta Read Thomas, Hannah Lash, Hilda Paredes, Jeffrey Mumford, Alex Temple, Richard Danielpour, Aaron Helgeson, Amy Beth Kirsten, and David Serkin Ludwig, among others. Besides composing, Rocha is also an avid trombonist and conductor, having performed with numerous symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, and jazz groups. SofiaRochaMusic.com